Arrangements in Moscow were even more extraordinary. MI6 arranged for Penkovsky to hand over exposed films to Mrs. Chisholm, the wife of a local MI6 officer, Rory Chisholm, in a Moscow park. This procedure was followed more than a dozen times, long after both Penkovsky and Mrs. Chisholm had detected KGB surveillance of their movements. By the time I read the Penkovsky files, we also knew from George Blake's prison debriefings that Chisholm's identity as an MI6 officer was well known to the Russians. I was certain of one thing: even MI5, with our slender resources, and the restrictions placed on us by custom and the law, could not have failed to detect the Penkovsky operation, had the Russians run it in London the same way MI6 ran it in Moscow.
When I circulated my Penkovsky paper it was greeted with howls of outrage. The operation was marked with great courage and daring, and seemed, on the face of it, such a triumph, that people simply became overemotional when criticisms were voiced. Harry Shergold, Penkovsky's case officer, practically went for me at a meeting in MI6 one day.
"What the hell do you know about running agents?" he snarled, "You come in here and insult a brave man's memory, and expect us to believe this?"
The question remains, of course, why should the Russians have sent Penkovsky as a disinformation agent, if such he was? The answer, I think, lies in the politics of Cuba, and the politics of arms control. The Russians had two major strategic ambitions in the early 1960s - to preserve Castro in Cuba, at a time when the Americans were doing all in their power to remove him, by either coup or assassination, and to enhance and develop the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability without arousing suspicions in the West. This was the era of the "missile gap." The fear that Russia was moving ahead in the production of nuclear weapons was a major plank in John Kennedy's 1960 presidential election campaign, and he committed his administration to closing the gap. The Soviets were desperate to convince the West that the missile gap was an illusion, and that, if anything, the Soviets lagged behind the West.
Part of the reason for the fears about Soviet missile capability was the fact that, intelligence-wise, the West was blind at this time, because the U2 surveillance flights were cancelled after Gary Powers was shot down in May 1960, and photoreconnaissance over the Soviet Union did not become available again until the launch of the first satellite toward the end of 1962. During that time the only intelligence available to the West was the interception of telemetry signals and radio communications from the rocket-testing ranges in Soviet Asia, and, of course, Penkovsky.
The essence of Penkovsky's information was that the Soviet rocket program was nowhere near as well advanced as the West had thus far suspected, and that they had no ICBM capability, only intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs. Armed with that knowledge, Kennedy was able to call the Soviet bluff when the Americans detected IRBM facilities under construction in Cuba. The fact that the Russians were seen to be installing what, according to Penkovsky, were their state-of-the-art rockets in Cuba tended to confirm to the Americans the validity of Penkovsky's message that the Russians had no ICBM capability. Khrushchev was forced to withdraw, but achieved his major aim - an eventual acceptance from the USA that Cuba would remain unscathed.
Penkovsky's message was later confirmed by the two defectors from the Soviet delegation to the UN who contacted the FBI in the early 1960s, Top Hat and Fedora, the latter of whom, like Penkovsky, was allegedly a scientific and technical officer. Both agents, but especially Fedora, gave intelligence which supported Penkovsky's message that Soviet rocketry was markedly inferior to the West's. Fedora gave immensely detailed intelligence about weaknesses in Soviet rocket accelerometers.
The confidence which Penkovsky's intelligence, and that of Fedora and Top Hat, gave to the Americans was a crucial factor in creating the climate which gave rise to the SALT I arms control negotiations, and the era of detente, and that, I believe, was his purpose. He helped to lull suspicions in the West for more than a decade, and misled us as to the true state of Soviet missile development.
In the mid-1970s the climate began to change, and doubts began to emerge. Satellite photoreconnaissance was dramatically improved, and when the accuracy of Soviet ICBMs was analyzed using sophisticated measurements of the impact craters, the missiles were found to be much more accurate than had been detected by telemetry and radio intercepts. The only explanation was that a bias had been introduced into Russian signals, with the intention of misleading American detection systems.
While Penkovsky retained his status as MI6's finest postwar achievement, Fedora and Top Hat, for reasons which are too lengthy to detail here, were officially recognized by all sections of the U.S. intelligence community as provocations. Fedora's information about the accelerometers was found to be wrong, and there was even some evidence that the Russians had introduced a fake third gyro on their missiles to make them appear less accurate than they in fact were.
Findings like these cast doubt on the validity of previous arms control agreements, and fears about the ability of the USA to accurately assess Soviet missile capabilities in the end sounded the death knell for the SALT talks in the late 1970s. There was a growing realization in the U.S. defense community that on-site inspections were vital in any future negotiations, a concession which the Soviets have resolutely refused to concede. Today a consensus is beginning to emerge among Western defense strategists that the West was indeed overconfident in its assessment of Soviet missile strength in the 1960s, and that the Soviet used the era of detente as the cover for a massive military expansion. The idea that Penkovsky played some role in that is not now as farfetched as it once sounded.
When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me:
"You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's and Gongs riding high on the back of Penkovsky," he said, referring to the honors heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation.
Perhaps not such a long row today.
By the beginning of 1964 both Arthur and I were convinced that Hollis, rather than Mitchell, was the most likely suspect for the spy we were certain had been active inside MI5 at a high level. Only this hypothesis could explain the incongruities in the Mitchell investigation. Hollis' long-standing refusal to entertain any possibility of a penetration of the Service, his unwillingness to authorize technical facilities during the Mitchell case, his refusal to sanction the interrogation, or brief the Americans until his hand was forced, all seemed to us to point in one direction.