416 • PENKOVSKY, OLEG
more receptive and in December 1960 Penkovsky made an offer to
Greville Wynne, an SIS asset who frequently visited the Soviet Bloc
as an entrepreneur seeking business deals for British engineering
companies. Penkovsky’s role as the GRU liaison officer with the
State Committee for Scientific Coordination gave him an authentic
reason to continue to meet Wynne and to travel abroad. While in
London in April 1961, Penkovsky underwent a lengthy debriefing by
SIS case officerHarold Shergold, in the presence of two CIA offi-
cers dispatched for the purpose, George Kisevalter and Joe Bulik.
Penkovsky made a second trip to London in July 1961 and later in
the year flew to Paris, where more sessions were held with his CIA
and SIS contacts. Upon his return to Moscow, his communications
relied upon supposedly chance encounters in a park with Janet Chis-
holm, the wife of the local SIS station commander,Riari Chisholm,
and then through a complicated system of signals and dead drops.
This arrangement appeared to work well until October 1962, when
an American diplomat was arrested by the KGB at the site of one of
the dead drops in the act of retrieving a message from Penkovsky.
Ten days later, early in November, Wynne was taken into custody
by the Hungarian security police while in Budapest and sent to Mos-
cow, where he was charged with espionage and tried in May 1963
alongside Penkovsky. Both men pleaded guilty to treason and the
trial lasted four days, at the end of which Penkovsky was sentenced
to death by firing squad and Wynne received eight years’ imprison-
ment in a labor camp. Eleven months later, Wynne was swapped in
Berlin for the KGB illegalrezidentKonon Molody, alias ‘‘Gordon
Lonsdale,’’ who had been in prison in England.
It was only after Wynne was freed that a book purporting to be
Penkovsky’s autobiography,The Penkovsky Papers, was released.
Edited bydefectorPiotr Deriabin andTimejournalist Frank Gibney,
who had previously collaborated onThe Secret World(1959), the
book struck many intelligence professionals as odd. After all, what
spy with any sense of self-preservation would leave reams of incrimi-
nating material in his apartment where they might be found at any
time, not least by his family who had no knowledge of his duplicity?
In fact, Deriabin and Gibney had been directed to reconstruct the au-
tobiography from the transcripts of taped information that Penkovsky
had provided over the 18 months he operated as a source. There were