The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Tim Weiner

KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets' deepest secrets. So bow did the CIA lose him?

The Central Intelligence Agency knew little of value about the Soviet Union in the summer of 1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was terrifying voters with the fraudulent but powerful image of a missile gap. The fear of Soviet nuclear superiority was founded in ignorance. In 1960, there was no CIA station chief in Moscow and no station to speak of, no CIA officer who spoke Russian, no way to penetrate the steely Soviet shield no one, in short, to listen when Oleg Penkovsky, a deeply disgruntled colonel in Soviet military intelligence who knew the truth about Soviet missilery, tried to deliver himself unto America.

In the first of Penkovsky's four attempts, he surreptitiously handed off a package to two wary American students. They took the goods to the embassy in Moscow and received a stem lecture from a security officer. The package made its way to Washington via a diplomatic pouch. Penkovsky waited. Nothing. He approached two British businessmen who delivered Penkovsky's business card and home telephone number to M16. The British foreign intelligence service passed on the number to its American cousin. Penkovsky stared at his phone for months. Nothing. He gave a large envelope containing drawings of Soviet ballistic missiles to a Canadian diplomat and begged him to take it to the CIA. Nothing.

At CIA headquarters, the agency's best Soviet officers read through the contents of Penkovsky's first package with the ardor of Keats looking into Chapman's Homer-"like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken." It was like nothing they had ever seen: actual inside information from an active-duty Soviet intelligence officer. Unfortunately, the CIA sent an incompetent to Moscow to make contact with Penkovsky-an inexperienced, alcoholic officer code-named COMPASS. Drunk, the CIA man called the Soviet officer an hour past the appointed time and babbled senselessly to him in broken Russian.

In the meantime, Penkovsky had been assigned to the State Committee on Science and Technology, limiting his freedom to travel abroad. Eight months after he first tried to contact the CIA, he met Greville Wynne, a British businessman in Moscow who worked for M16, and turned over yet another packet of secrets. An assignation was set. On April 20, the day Fidel Castro declared victory at the Bay of Pigs, Penkovsky landed in London as the head of a trade delegation. That evening, he met with American and British intelligence officers in a smoke-filled hotel room and began his new life. An official record of the CIA written in 1976 deemed Penkovsky "the single most valuable agent in CIA history."

This book has something of the air of an official history, which should come as no surprise given that one author is a journalist and former White House spokesman and the other a KGB defector who served as a consultant to the CIA for 30 years. But the authors go beyond even the agency's glowing appraisal to anoint Penkovsky savior of the world, the spy whose intelligence kept the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis from exploding into nuclear war.

The transcripts of Penkovsky's debriefings were generously bequeathed to the authors by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. (They were published in 1965, albeit in sanitized, souped-up, and somewhat fictionalized form, with the CIAs editorial assistance, as a purported spy's diary, The Penkovsky Papers. The current book's co-author, Peter Deriabin, translated the edited transcripts of the original CIA bestseller.) Lengthy excerpts of the conversations between Penkovsky and the CIA over the months in which they communed form the basic text of this book. They show-as The Penkovsky Papers did not -that this most valuable agent revealed that the Soviets were playing a game of liar's poker with their nuclear weapons.

U.S. strategic doctrine of the day called for the destruction of the Soviet Union and all its satellites with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Everything of strategic value from Poland to the Pacific would have been reduced, as a U.S. naval officer who saw the war plan of the late fifties observed, to "a smoking, radiating ruin" within two hours. The plan was developed after the U.S. Air Force invented the "missile gap" by creating and leaking estimates during the late fifties that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs and soon would have thousands.

Penkovsky divulged that the Soviets had a mere handful of ICBMs, whose electronics and fuel systems were dubious. Fans of Le Carre will see in Penkovsky the basis for Dante, the physicist in The Russia House who reveals Soviet rocketry to be as efficient as Soviet econometrics.

In their first meeting, Penkovsky told the CIA that "the Soviet Union is definitely not prepared at this time for war... Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets." There was no Soviet ICBM force worth the name, though the Soviets were struggling furiously to catch up with the U.S.-a goal they would not achieve for nearly 20 years.