G. M. Wynne; Spy Jailed by the Soviets

Greville Maynard Wynne, the British spy who was the first Westerner to learn of Soviet missiles being shipped into Cuba and who spent 18 months in a Moscow prison after being captured, has died of throat cancer, hospital officials said Thursday. He was 71.

Wynne died at London’s Cromwell Hospital on Wednesday, a British domestic news agency reported, quoting unidentified close friends.

The wealthy businessman, who described his exploits in two celebrated memoirs--”The Man From Moscow” and “The Man From Odessa”--worked for Britain’s MI6 intelligence service. He said he acted as the intermediary for Soviet double agent Col. Oleg Penkovsky, a senior military intelligence officer who passed Moscow secrets to both MI6 and the CIA.

Opposition Labor Party legislator Ted Leadbitter said of Wynne in a statement: “How many secrets has this man taken to his grave?”

In 1950 Wynne had set up his own business as an exporter of industrial engineering products. It involved a lot of foreign travel, including trips to Soviet Bloc countries and thus provided ideal cover for spying. He said he was motivated by patriotism and a dislike of the Soviet system.

For a dozen years he carried information to his MI6 and CIA contacts before being arrested during a business trip to Budapest, Hungary, in November, 1962. He was taken to the Soviet Union where he was put on trial in Moscow on May, 1963, for spying. He pleaded “guilty with certain reservations” and was sentenced to eight years imprisonment.

Penkovsky, who was tried with him, was sentenced to death for treason. But he reportedly committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp.

Wynne served 18 months in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. He was freed in 1964 in exchange for Soviet spy Conon Molodyl (or Gordon Lonsdale as he called himself in Britain).

In another book, “Contact on Gorky Street,” published in 1967, Wynne said he had first joined the British security service in 1938 and worked for it during World War II. In 1960 he made contact with a politically disillusioned Penkovsky.

Wynne was assigned to court Penkovsky at about the same time the Soviets approached him to spy for them. He spurned that offer, he wrote, but was able to forge a trust with Penkovsky, who he described as possibly the West’s most valuable agent. He said Penkovsky provided him the names and photographs of about 300 East Bloc intelligence agents, details of Soviet missile sites, and an analysis of Soviet military manpower and weapons production.

He said the double agent also told him Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev had allowed important guidance equipment to be sent with Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba.

The affair developed into the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev later backed off and ordered the missiles returned to the Soviet Union after President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of Cuba.