Oleg Penkovsky

The GRU colonel whose reporting on Soviet missiles aided the Cuban Missile Crisis

Overview

Oleg Penkovsky volunteered to the United States and Britain in 1960 and passed thousands of pages on Soviet rockets and missiles through meetings in Moscow. His material on the R-5 and R-12 systems helped Washington judge the deployments in Cuba accurately during the October 1962 crisis, the highest stakes a walk-in ever informed. Arrested after the crisis, he was convicted of treason and executed in 1963. His documents were among the most valuable Western hauls of the Cold War. He met his handlers at brief encounters in Moscow hotels and passed film in ordinary packages.