The Atlantic | April 1966 | My Spy Can Lick Your Spy

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The Atlantic Monthly | April 1966

My Spy Can Lick Your Spy

Born in Germany, raised in New York, and educated at Columbia, Max Frankel was New York Times correspondent in Moscow for three years, has worked in Eastern Europe and Cuba as a newsman, and is now the Times's diplomatic correspondent in Washington.

by Max Frankel

.....

his cold war of ours may yet turn out to be fun. Well, grisly intellectual fun, anyway. In less than a decade a good part of the war has already been transformed from an incendiary to a literary contest. Sublimation of this sort can do much to cure indignation.

The occasion for this premature celebration is the appearance of the "memoirs" of two Soviet spies, one theirs, one ours. The books are tedious but fascinating. The authors are unconvincing but certainly intriguing. "Books," in fact, is a little generous for what are really tirades of tantalizing tidbits. And "authors" is probably not the word for the spooky committees that mischievously compiled these collections of fact and fancy. Still, as literary experience, this new genre must be reckoned with. Plots more simple than Old Westerns have been infused with meanings more obscure than the New Poetry. The result leaves heroes, villains, authors, and readers alike to wonder who has done what unto whom.

Espionage is threatened today, as never before, by technology. The human spy, menaced like all artisans by obsolescence, must find new domains for research and new outlets for his reportorial talents. What could be better than books that simultaneously sublimate the old adventure, glorify the old vocation, and still confound the adversary?

This exchange of literary missiles can be traced directly to the Berlin swap of a certain Gordon Lonsdale for one Greville Wynne in 1964. Obviously, the partly public trials of each in Moscow and London had failed to satisfy the new promotion requirements of their respective intelligence services and the outsized egos of the principal plotters.

Lonsdale, whose credentials from birth forward are still in dispute, had been the central figure in a ring spying upon British naval research. Six months after his return to Soviet custody, he made himself available to a British publisher and spy adventure writer in East Berlin to dictate a memoir of sorts. Four months later, as a version of this memoir headed for newspaper publication, he demanded that the draft be changed, especially to remove some passages boasting of his successes as a lover. The protest was ignored, so Lonsdale now signaled a desire to publish a book whose contents he alone would control. When finally delivered in Moscow, this manuscript omitted the love scenes and 25,000 other words that Lonsdale is said to have composed, but it contained some entirely new sections, in an apparently new style, about alleged adventures in the United States. The result is called Spy—Twenty Years in Soviet Secret Service—The Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale; it was published in Britain by Neville Spearman and in the United States by Hawthorne Books with, alas, an incredibly stingy and incoherent account of how it all came to be.

In the meantime, Greville Wynne, an itinerant British "businessman" who was tried in Moscow together with his Soviet contact, a "scientific worker" named Oleg Penkovskiy, rushed home to begin his memoir. But he was scooped by his executed associate; as soon as Wynne had been set free, there appeared through some mysterious channel the raw materials for a volume now published by Doubleday as The Penkovskiy Papers. Frank Gibney, the editor and rather liberal annotator of the book, is no more satisfying than the Lonsdale crew in relating the origin of his manuscript.

It seems that Penkovskiy, who was portrayed at his trial as a rank-and-file Soviet official whose acquaintances did not extend beyond a limited circle of "restaurant habitués, drunkards and philanderers," had conveniently composed a hasty but lengthy memoir refuting this insult to Western intelligence by telling who he really was: a colonel of Soviet intelligence merely posing as a bureaucratic contact with Western scientists and businessmen, the son-in-law, great-nephew, and confidant of three different Soviet generals, including the chief of the tactical missile forces, a pal to the chief of military intelligence in Moscow, the occasional guest at parties of Kremlin dignitaries, and the possessor of a good number of awards and secrets.

Miraculously, just at the time of his arrest in 1962, this memorable bundle is said to have been smuggled "in highly anonymous circumstances" to an Eastern European country and thence to Peter Deriabin, a defector from the Soviet security forces still living in hiding somewhere near New York. Mr. Gibney reports that Deriabin, in turn, "undertook the long preliminary work of translation and selection" before delivering the results to him as editor. The CIA has admitted checking the final product for "security" though not "accuracy"; Mr. Gibney "assumes" that the agency deleted some material. Britain's MI-6, the joint possessor of Penkovskiy while he lived and of the dead records of the case, must have had at least an equal interest in this literary project but has shrewdly evaded all connection with it thus far.

n our ignorance, we can deal only with the persons of Penkovskiy and Lonsdale as here revealed, with the techniques of subversion by memoir as here devised, and with the consequences of such shameless attempts to foist a viperous and internecine warfare upon an innocent reading public. The dissembling assemblers of their memoirs may even have some sort of right to try anything that serves their sinister purposes. The publishers of this stuff can be excused only if their purpose was to furnish us with entertainment; a serious presentation without critical annotation is unacceptable.

Whatever ghostly fingers may have kneaded these manuscripts, residual traces of Penkovskiy and Lonsdale remain. I believe that Lonsdale composed a good portion of his book, and that Penkovskiy at least spoke a good deal of what is now attributed to his memoir during three lengthy encounters with Western agents in London and Paris. Lonsdale was a carefully groomed spy, while Penkovskiy was only briefly a double agent, a disaffected defector who spied for the West for only sixteen months before his arrest. But among the traces of them as human beings, there is one striking resemblance: their insufferable arrogance.

Each is confident that his espionage is single-handedly saving mankind from nuclear war. Each is delivering the secrets of a duped and suffering people to a disinterested and noble government bearing mankind's last hope of salvation. Each contends unconvincingly that the sheer fun of the game, the duplicity, adultery, and open-end expense accounts were incidental rewards and relaxations instead of part of the attraction to treachery.

Their self-revelations, now paraded before all the world by their partners in mischief, raise the uncomfortable thought that all too many members of this spy-and-counterspy fraternity are obsessed with a similarly self-serving and self-deceiving certainty that their lofty cause exempts them from most of the restraints imposed on ordinary men. In enjoying these books, it may be well to keep in mind that their purpose was to persuade us that our heroes' arrogance is the highest form of patriotism and that the crime of one spy and the treason of the other are in every way admirable.

Oleg Penkovskiy spent the first forty-two years of his life climbing to the upper level of the Soviet New Class, military and intelligence division. That is how he obtained a riverfront Moscow apartment, appointments to prestigious career academies, the chance to woo the daughters of generals and to consort with the wives of others, solid connections to obtain the privilege of every moment, from country homes to automobiles, and ultimately, the supreme gift of travel to the West to see what life can still promise and to load up on records, perfumes, fountain pens, wallets, and cognacs that could be shrewdly invested to rise yet another notch.

Then, in his last two years, Penkovskiy rebelled. An almost filial association since World War II with General, then Marshal, Sergey Varentsov had smoothed his path in a career that finally led to military espionage. Vain, social, intense, well-mannered, Penkovskiy enjoyed all the perquisites possible but never the freedom from petty bureaucracy and intramural warfare that he really desired. He was trapped in conflicts between the military (G.R.U.) and civilian (K.G.B.) intelligence services. He was trapped between army and Communist Party. Gradually he came to resent many of his immediate superiors, and then their superiors near the top of the hierarchy, and above all, the apparently coarse and spasmodic Nikita Khrushchev. Somewhere here lay the seed of treason.

In his testimony to the West, of course, the seed has sprouted a weeping willow. Every contingency plan in the files of the military and intelligence services was a Khrushchevian plot for military adventure that was certain to end in a sudden, presumably preventive nuclear war. Everything in Moscow was sordid. Every Communist official was a debaucher. Penkovskiy had decided to save the Russian masses by working for the Western classes.

In this melodramatic year, Penkovskiy actually had three jobs. Besides working so assiduously for us, he remained a colonel in Soviet intelligence, nominally trying to recruit traveling salesmen like Wynne into spying for him, and he worked at his "cover" job in the foreign department of the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, which involved steering Western visitors to innocent sights while stealing from them such industrial secrets as the formula for the glue by which Canadian firms affixed artificial fur to its cloth backing. It is hard to believe that a man so occupied and harried would take the time and the risk of composing a memoir that could only duplicate the information already given to Western agents.

Penkovskiy's spying is said to have started in April, 1961. By July 4, 1962, he was under surveillance, though he tried to pretend with Wynne that their relationship was tainted at worst by black-marketeering. He was arrested in October, and Nynne was seized in Budapest in November. They were tried in May, 1963, Wynne drawing a sentence of eight years but serving only one before he was traded for Lonsdale. Penkovskiy was said to have been shot almost immediately, but Wynne now contends that he died some other way later.

About Penkovskiy's importance as a spy, the Soviet prosecution granted virtually nothing, while perpetrators of his memoir claim much too much. From his good fairy, Marshal Varentsov, from the secret military libraries in Moscow, from his own experiences, and even from his casual acquaintances, Penkovskiy unquestionably gathered interesting information about weapons development, particularly about some missiles. He compromised a large number of Soviet agents (300 military attachés are said to have been recalled after his trial, and Marshal Varentsov was demoted with a reprimand for his misplaced trust and indiscretions). The gossip and rumors, especially about subsequently verified incidents of popular unrest and rioting, were usually interesting and sometimes helpful Above all, the Western spooks must have prized the stuff about Eastern spooks, which, what- ever its value to our diplomats and policy makers, must have been potent ammunition indeed for their private little war.

Independent sources suggest that Penkovskiy's information, much of it quite technical, was very good for about a year but then went sour in the last months, probably because he had been discovered. But the facile and boastful claims on his behalf demonstrate that we are dealing here not only with rival documents of subterfuge but with a coincidental conspiracy of East and West to prove that the fate of all of us rides on their labors.

There is no point in bemoaning the necessity of spying, or celebrating the utility of it. Whenever five men band together for anything useful, one of them will sooner or later wonder why and desert, while a sixth one outside will begin to pry and encroach. As long as another five have banded together elsewhere, the value of both the spy and the traitor is beyond question. What gives pause in these memoirs is the evidence of the alacrity with which these giant modern intelligence agencies can equate their own interests with those of a nation, or even all humanity.

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