The Case of Oleg Penkovsky
IN their own highly bizarre fashion, these two books represent what seems to be the first public encounter, via the literary confrontation of its agents, between the Soviet KGB and the Ameri- can CIA: the British, as spies and the spied-upon, occupy a hazy middle ground. This for the spy masters is an exercise in public relations in the most generous sense of the phrase, when 'Gordon Lonsdale' is permitted—even positively en- couraged—to write his memoirs and to publish them abroad,' an activity which has not been hitherto a Conspicuous part of the life of a Soviet 'intelligence agent; the very fact of com- pilation and publication is some evidence of the propagandist function for which these memoirs were fashioned.
Not to be outdone, 'the opposition' presents the Penkovsky 'papers,' which put the case for `our' spies as opposed to 'theirs.' The common ground between them both is Mr. Greville Wynne, for whom Lonsdale was exchanged and with whom Penkovsky worked. Both books are stage-managed by their editors, who vouch for general authenticity and particular veracities; both Lonsdale and Penkovsky, in so far as one can peer into these men through these pages which must have been stripped of much by zealous intelligence officers, appear and confess themselves clearly unbalanced, and it is a pity, • particularly in the case of Lonsdale, that the lack of depth makes a realistic analyiis highly diffi- cult. For once, it might have been possible to put a modern 'spy' on the social and political dissecting table; all we have here are one- dimensional, editorialised, security-sanitised men.
Colonel Penkovsky's 'papers,' his diary or 'testament,' which was supposedly smuggled out of the Soviet Union, is much the more substantial and technical work, to which Frank Gibney adds a general introduction meant to explain Penkovsky and all that he stands for, while intro- ductory passages to each chapter trace his career as a Western agent, thus providing some chronological coherence to the whole set of papers. Penkovsky himself writes that he is pre- senting 'the biography of a system. A bad system,' though he opens with a short auto- biographical account which is of high interest in its own right, for here is a Soviet officer evaluating himself : I feel contempt for myself, because I am part of this system and I live a lie. . . . I know the Army and there are many of us in the officer corps who feel the same way.
One source of this demoralisation Penkovsky traces to the ubiquitous intelligence activity con- ducted within and by the Soviet state—'we are all spies'; his account of 'Soviet military intelli- gence,' based on his '500 pages of notes and over 700 names,' must be the most comprehensive and detailed survey publicly available, and is even expanded in Penkovsky's later description of his own duties and institutional affiliations.
While he has no love for the party, Penkovsky launches himself with downright savagery against Khrushchev, and his account of the struggles over Khrushchev's strategic 'new look,' the develop- ment of the Soviet ideas of nuclear blitzkrieg, the deficiencies in the Soviet missile programme (and as a qualified missile expert, Penkovsky evi- dently knows what to look for): he discloses, or rather he confirms, that the 'aeroplane acci- dent' which killed Marshal Nedelin and many more officers in 1960 was the explosion on test of 'a missile engine powered by nuclear energy.' In forcing his technologists along, Khrushchev had forced the pace too rashly that time. His birthday present, for this is what the new missile was intended to be, quite literally blew up in his face. Penkovsky also supplies a figure for the cost of a Soviet missile—an R-11 (with con- ventional warhead)—which ran to 800,000 roubles, rising to five to ten times that sum, de- pending on the type of nuclear warhead fitted; a labourer's monthly wage was sixty to eighty roubles.
In these passages, but more particularly in his quite detailed treatment of Soviet military doc- trine (quoting the Military Thought : Voennaya Mysl, 'Special Collection of Articles'), Penkovsky gets poor service from hit editor, who has done only the very minimum of his duty when some judicious footnotes would have vastly increased the cogency and point of these elaborations—a case in point is Colonel-General Gastilovich as contributor to the 'Special Collection.' Or is this book meant to have no other real impact than a sueees de scandale? Its technical content needs better handling than this. On the other hand, . Penkovsky's chapter 'The Soviet Elite' is worth anyone's money, and his 'fragmentary notes' on senior Soviet officers contains one hint that Greohko might be the next Defence Minister of the Soviet, Union, although Marshal Biryuzov (killed in a genuine air crash in October 1964) considered him 'narrow-minded.'
The specialist is obviously going to quarry Penkovsky for some time to come and add all his own footnotes, In Lonsdale's tale of a spy, he will find almost nothing of substance. Apart from a very swift survey of Lonsdale's activity with the Soviet partisans and intelligence during the war, nothing of Lonsdale's service career is allowed to emerge He is also at great pains to dispose of the idea of 'mass' in Soviet intelli- gence work, though, in view of Penkovsky's fan- tastically elaborate cataloguing, this rings a little false. The propaganda is thereafter dished out at the reader in great lumps—'ex-Nazis found haven at Porton,' the sinister influence of 'resurgent militarist elements in West Germany' upon the Americans, the baleful activity of Gehlen.
His espionage activity in Great Britain Lons- dale represents as more or less saving us from ourselves, a service which he was pleased to carry out, or at least attempt. Though he cannot be specific about what he was actually doing, we may be fully assured on that score. It was impudent and heartless of the British 'Establish- ment' not to accept Lonsdale's assertion that his friends the Krogcrs (Morris and Lena Cohen) were just his friends, upon whom he happened —in the line of duty—to foist a radio trans- mitter. While Penkovsky takes the Soviet 'Estab- lishment' apart, Lonsdale goes for the British-- police, security forces, judiciary, from high official to gun-toting goon. Of all this the British public remains in alarming ignorance; Lonsdale pursues his social and political duties in en- lightening us. Hot under the collar about the 'incompetence of MI 5,' Lonsdale asserts that he was in fact betrayed, not caught—'Without that they would never have got me.' And with that, plus a threatening aside to 'the traitor,' the great British public whose better interests Loris- dale has so assiduously served must either take it or leave it.
Although this looks too much like a prefer- ence for 'our' spies as opposed to 'theirs,'• on the grounds of a straight statistical count, by sheer content, context and scope the Penkbvsky 'papers' alone belong to the serious literature not only of espionage in general, but the wider field of Soviet internal and external policies. With respect to Khrushchev's plans and capa- bilities and the Berlin and Cuban crises, Pen- kovsky appears to have been the Sorge of the 1960s. Quite where Lonsdale ranks in this world /
league of agents is impossible to determine, for anything relevant to it Lonsdale refuses to dis-
close or help the reader to find out; except that it is declaredly written by 'a top Soviet agent,' Spy has no relevance to espionage as such and is really an exercise in psychological warfare.
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