The Spy Who Saved The World

A clandestine meeting at the Mount Royal Hotel

The Thistle Hotel Marble Arch on Oxford Street is a fine example of 1930s Modernist architecture.  In 1961, however, it was called the Mount Royal Hotel and was the location of a pivotal meeting in the story of Cold War espionage, as Westminster Guide Mark Lubienski reports…

At 9.50pm on 20th April 1961 GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, dressed in pressed white shirt, tie and slacks, settled into an armchair in the unremarkable surroundings of Room 360 of the Mount Royal Hotel on the corner of Oxford Street and Old Quebec Street.  Sitting around the coffee table in front of him were two Britons and two Americans; the four-man joint MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service) and CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) team were running Penkovsky as a source-in-place (a double agent) inside the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.  It was their first face-to-face meeting.

Penkovsky, codename Agent HERO, has been called the greatest spy of the Cold War and is even known as “The Spy Who Saved The World”. Why? For the vital intelligence that he passed to the West regarding the launch-readiness of Soviet SS-4 medium range ballistic nuclear missiles, just days ahead of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.  Penkovsky was, and remains, the second highest-ranking Soviet military official known to have spied for the West, after Major General Dimitri Polyakov.

Penkovsky was visiting London in the trusted position as head of an official 45-man Soviet trade delegation.  He had insisted that the meeting with his handlers at the Mount Royal Hotel should not take more than two hours; any longer and his absence might be noticed. MI6, through an intermediary, had assigned rooms to six members of the trade delegation on the quieter inner well of the Mount Royal, and they deliberately put Penkovsky in a room round the corner from his five colleagues, at least one of whom would be a KGB officer tasked with keeping an eye on him. From his room he could walk to a stairwell without passing by his colleagues’ rooms.

From the stairwell, Penkovsky quickly made his way down the stairs and to a room in which two senior intelligence officers were patiently waiting for him: Harold Shergold of MI6 and Joe Bulik of the CIA. Once they had established that the coast was clear and that Penkovsky was the man they were expecting, Shergold and Bulik escorted him to Room 360, a large end-of corridor room where he was introduced to Mike Stokes of MI6 and George Kisevalter of the CIA.  The British had also taken the adjacent Room 361 in which they had installed the necessary recording equipment. All four Western intelligence officers were using pseudonyms and spoke Russian, three fluently, with the Russian-born Kisevalter taking the lead in the ensuing conversation which was conducted in Russian at Penkovsky’s request. That first meeting at the Mount Royal Hotel ended at 1.03am, after more than three hours of intensive debriefing.

Penkovsky would make two further overseas trips; once again to London in July 1961 and to Paris in September 1961, where he would meet the same MI6 / CIA team as he had in his first visit and would also receive training in the tradecraft that the British and Americans needed him to use. He would meet his handlers a total of forty-two times on those three trips to the West, while in Moscow he routinely passed material to members of the MI6 station at the embassy. Penkovsky was, however, a supreme risk taker and it was by taking one risk too many that he was picked up and arrested by the KGB in Moscow in October 1962, put on trial, and is believed to have been executed in May 1963.

Mark Lubienski is a Westminster Guide from the Class of 2014.  He researches, writes and gives occasional talks on the secret world of intelligence and espionage (marklubienski@gmail.com).