The Great Western Spy Net

Neither of the men who glared at each other across the prisoner's dock in a crowded Moscow courtroom looked very much like a spy. Dapper Greville Maynard Wynne, 44, was a salesman who lived quietly in London's fashionable Chelsea section with his wife and young son when he was not on the road selling electrical machinery in Russia and Eastern Europe. Slender Oleg Penkovsky, 44, was a much-decorated Russian war hero who recently had held the delicate job of arranging East-West scientific exchanges for a Soviet state committee. But last week the incongruous pair went on trial for espionage before a military panel of three Soviet Supreme Court generals. While klieg lights glared and some 300 perspiring spectators sat on the edge of their seats for five days, the most bizarre spy circus in postwar Soviet history unfolded before their eyes. If the two men's confessions could be believed, the West had pulled off a spectacular coup in the cold war struggle for intelligence secrets. For 18 straight months, from April 1961 until last October, Penkovsky had funneled to Wynne and other couriers a stream of nearly 5,000 photographs of secret Soviet data on missile developments, troop movements, economic and political inside stuff from the Communist Party Central Committee itself. Just a Chauffeur. It began in November 1960. when Penkovsky got fed up with his Moscow job. Seeking "the easy life," Penkovsky said he sent a letter to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, offering his services to the U.S. According to Penkovsky, officials in Washington ignored the offer, fearing a trap. But Penkovsky was determined to work for the West. His chance came at last when he struck up a conversation with Wynne the following month at a Moscow reception for visiting British technicians. Wynne was happy to meet the Russian, he said, because Soviet contacts were useful for his machinery business. Thus, when Penkovsky showed up next April in London, supposedly to set up an exchange with British scientists, Wynne went out to the airport to meet him and show him around town. Were you merely a chauffeur? asked the prosecutor. That's it, Wynne replied. Exploded Penkovsky to the court: "This is a child's tale. Believe me, citizen judges, I cannot understand why Wynne tries to minimize his role. I didn't need a chauffeur. I could have taken a taxi." Truth was, said Penkovsky, he was already relaying film to British intelligence, and now was in touch with the Americans as well. In London he delivered two bulky packages of state secrets to Wynne, tried on British and U.S. colonels' uniforms just in case he decided to defect, even discussed a possible escape from Russia by submarine if things got hot. He recalled more relaxed moments pub-crawling and nightclubbing. Box of Chocolates. After London, there was Paris. Wynne gaily showed the Russian around Fontainebleau, Versailles, the Lido and the Moulin Rouge--and willingly picked up the tab. Penkovsky handed over 15 more rolls of film and had five sessions with Western intelligence agents. On occasions when Wynne came to Moscow on a business trip, Penkovsky usually passed his information to him concealed in a box of chocolates, which Wynne allegedly gave to Mrs. Janet Chisholm, wife of a second secretary of the British embassy, for relay to London. When Mrs. Chisholm suspected she was being followed, she suggested that Wynne give the "chocolates" to her children. On his flights out of Moscow, Wynne carried book-size packages of secrets wrapped in plain brown paper. Penkovsky said that when he did not have Wynne around to act as courier, he used his code name, "Young," and dealt directly with U.S. and British embassy employees through an elaborate set of signals. It all worked fine until last fall when the Soviet police swooped down on Penkovsky, extracting the confession that implicated Wynne. A few days later, Russia's agents located Wynne in Budapest and hustled him back to Moscow. Learning from Experience. Through it all, Wynne doggedly maintained that he was only a businessman who had been snared in the coils of British intelligence. At first, he said, he had no idea what the brown packages or boxes of chocolates really contained. After it dawned on him that he was a spy, he demanded no part of the "dirty business." but his superiors threatened to wreck his commercial affairs, and so he kept at it. "My answers might seem naive to you professional gentlemen here," he said, to the laughter of the courtroom, "but I had no idea how intelligence operated. I now know." Even before the prosecutor finished his summation at the end of the trial, the government newspaper Izvestia appeared in the courtroom reporting his demand for punishment: a death sentence for Penkovsky and ten years in jail for Wynne. The military tribunal retired to confer, then passed judgment. Penkovsky's mouth dropped open in shock when the verdict was announced. He would be shot; Wynne would do eight years in jail.

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