Directed by Dominic Cooke
THE cold war was about to get messy and two people were in the thick of it. Ironbark, the gripping story of Greville Wynne, a UK businessman recruited by MI6, and Soviet intelligence officer Oleg Penkovsky, premiered at the Sundance film festival last month.
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Taking its title from the codename used by Penkovsky, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Wynne, Merab Ninidze as Penkovsky and Rachel Brosnahan as CIA agent Emily Donovan. It tells how Penkovsky, via contact with Wynne, shared nuclear secrets with the West prior to the Cuban missile crisis – intelligence that the film’s PR calls “crucial”.
But what was Soviet nuclear capability really like? And did Penkovsky’s espionage, feted by the US, matter?
The CIA describes Penkovksy as “one of the most valuable assets” in its history and credits him with helping to prevent a nuclear war. It also claims intelligence gleaned via Penkovsky was vital during the stand-off over Cuba in 1962, when the USSR deployed nuclear weapons there, within striking distance of much of the US. As the CIA says on its website: “Because of Penkovksy, [US president] Kennedy knew that he had three days before the Soviet missiles were fully functional to negotiate a diplomatic solution.”
However, this narrative of the spy standing between two closely matched superpowers on a collision course isn’t quite right: there are important facts to remember as you watch.
For one thing, by 1962 Soviet nuclear weaponry was far from equal to that of the US. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, the Soviet Union had been chasing Western weapons. Spies had funnelled information to Moscow from the Manhattan Project in the US, which built the first atomic bomb. The first successful Soviet device, detonated in 1949, ended up being a copy of the one that Allied scientists had demonstrated in 1945 in the Trinity test.
“By the early 1960s, the US remained far ahead of the Soviet Union in terms of nuclear weapons”
Soviet bomb makers had to be resourceful. They needed uranium but at first had no idea where to mine it in the Soviet Union. But they had been able to retrieve some 300 tonnes of the stuff taken from Nazi research sites at the end of the second world war. Nazi rocket science also influenced the Soviets, leading to the 1957 test of the R-7 – the first intercontinental ballistic missile and the rocket that put Sputnik into orbit.
In the 1950s, Austrian and German scientists working for the Soviets developed a brilliant way to enrich uranium that was better than the methods used in the West. And, in 1961, the Soviets carried out the largest ever nuclear detonation, the Tsar Bomba test.
Despite all this, by the early 1960s the US remained far ahead, with thousands more bombs and warheads, hundreds more military vehicles capable of carrying nuclear weapons and a geographical advantage in terms of launch sites.
Penkovsky helped show the US how the Soviets lagged in areas such as missile guidance and weapon sophistication. The US was trying to hold on to that advantage, while the USSR was playing catch-up, says Alexei Kojevnikov at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
When tensions rose during the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly flaunted his nation’s nuclear readiness. In private, his feelings were different. As early as the mid-1950s, he reportedly said he couldn’t sleep for several days until he became convinced that he could never actually give the order to use the weapons.
Did Penkovsky, executed in 1963 by the Soviets as a spy, alter the course of the Cuba crisis as the CIA claims? It isn’t clear. What is clear is ironic: greater easing of tensions came when the nuclear arsenals of both sides were better matched – and diplomacy was unavoidable.
