Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

PENKOVSKY, OLEG• 415

versity of Wisconsin until 1946 and then had spent four years at Yale,

under Gregory Breit, and had established a reputation as a Commu-

nist. According to his passport application, Brown had acknowledged

having joined the U.S. Communist party at Yale in January 1948, and

while in Birmingham had associated withCommunist Party of

Great Britainmembers.

The FBI reported that in 1951 Peierls was vice president of the

Council of the Association of Atomic Scientists, then considered to

be a Communist front (although MI5 denied this), and in August

1947 had petitioned the home secretary for the release ofAllan

Nunn May. The FBI’s inquiries culminated in a permanent removal

of Peierls’s security clearance by MI5 in 1957 and soon afterward

Peierls resigned his consultancy post at the Atomic Energy Research

Establishment at Harwell, but neither setback prevented him from re-

ceiving a knighthood in 1968.

PENINSULA WAR.During his 1808 Peninsula campaign theDuke of
Wellingtonrelied heavily upon his Corps of Guides, which fulfilled
both intelligence and police functions and liaised with the Spanish
irregulars. Headed by Colquohoun Grant of the 11th Foot Regiment,
the Guides were skilled linguists and horsemen and rode deep into
French-occupied territory to report on the enemy. Grant was later ap-
pointed Wellington’s head of intelligence and was the head of his In-
telligence Department at Waterloo.

PENKOVSKY, OLEG.Married and with a daughter, Colonel Oleg
Penkovsky was a much-decorated, well-connected seniorGRUoffi-
cer, with an apartment overlooking the Moscow River, who was des-
tined for further promotion, but he was constantly troubled by an
offense he had committed many years earlier. He had concealed the
fact that his father had fought with the White Russians in the civil
war, and he was convinced that if his father’s record was ever discov-
ered, his career would be ruined.
Perhaps motivated by this guilty secret, Penkovsky made two di-
rect approaches to Americans in Moscow, and another through a Ca-
nadian businessman, which were rejected by the Central
Intelligence Agency(CIA) as rather crude provocations orchestrated
by theKGB. However, theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) proved