OH, CIA, CAN YOU SEE?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-01193A000400170063-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 6, 2001
• Sequence Number: 63
• Publication Date: January 30, 1966
• Content Type: NSPR

,.,lam AeJeatse 2001/11/22: CIA-RDP80-01193A0D?40017?0J3-5
r " e accoun o the Penkovs,,
' i
y trial,
oh, CIA, can
you see?
---- --- -----------------------
By Dick Schaap
Wynne check over the manuscript.
"Wynne made some corrections in the
introduction," C C. said, "but there
are probably stir some mistakes."
Gibney took the manuscript first to
Harper & Row, then to New American
Library, but neither publisher was eager
? ,tomeet the asking price, a $50,000 ad-
Did Oleg Penkovskiy have a spoo or cards. He likes to tell Gibe's children
a ghost?
Did a CIA man-a "sk" -write dories about the_siege at gtalingrad. Yet
poo Gibney maintains that he does not know
The Penkovskiy Papers? Or are the Deriabin's phone number nor where he
Papers, now listed among the best-selling livesr--and does not want to know. "It's
books, actually the personal observations
of Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, a Red Army
officer who spied for the West and, as
a result of his moonlighting, was tried
and executed by the Soviet Union?
of the Iron Curtain. Such knowledge-
Doubts:have,been expressed about the
viable Westerners as John Le Carre and
production. Pravda, less subtly, said the
Stewart Alsop have argued that the
Papers, while substantially accurate, are,
if not a CIA creation, at least a CIA
f Papers are "a crude fabrication."
Peter Deriabin, the former Russian se-
cret agent who is given credit-by Dou-
,.position to defend the Papers. Nor is
Penkovskiy himself, obviously, is in no
I- bleday, if not by Pravda-for translating
{ United States roughly a decade ago and
-chooses, for reasons of health, to change
of the public spotlight. The CIA, of lifk ~' -
R ,. , ,, e. worker who had passed secret Ru s-
tvia ersonal publicity,
t behind J. D. Salinger.
This leaves Frank Gibney.
the CIA ranks
.. ," sources. Gibney and Deriabin went to a
strictly one-way traffic," Gibney said.
"Peter gets in touch with me."
In November, 1962, Deriabin got in
touch with Gibney and told him that he
had obtained microfilms of the personal
papers of Oleg Penkovskiy,-a Russian
who had been spying for the West with
great effectiveness. Deriabin said the
microfilms had been smuggled to the
West. Gibney says he doesn't know 'ex-
actly how they were brought out-
although he imagines they followed Pas-
ternak's Dr. Zhivago route-and he
doesn't want to know that, either. "I.
didn't know who the hell the guy was,"
Gibney said. "I had never heard of Pen-
kovskiy. I took Peter's word for every-
thing. If Peter said he was a Russian and
he was an agent, I believed it."
On December 11, 1962, in support of
Deriabin's story, the Soviet Union an-
pounced it had arrested a man named
lawyer named Herb Jacoby, a specialist
in copyright law, and got Jacoby to set up
a trust fund in Penkovskiy's name. The
authors intended to put aside for Pen-
kovskiy the bulk of any profits resulting
from publication of the Papers. "We
thought Penkovskiy might somehow get
out at some time," Gibney said. "Peter,
particularly, didn't want to be accused
of profiteering."
Through 1963, while Penkovskiy and
his British contact, businessman Greville
Wynne, were tried and found guilty,
Gibney and Deriabin kept the Papers
quiet. Not until April, 1964, after Pen-
kovskiy had been executed and Wynne
had been traded to the West for Soviet
spy Gordon Lonsdale, did Gibney go
to work on the book in earnest. Gibney,
who has a working knowledge of-Rus-
sian but has never been to the Soviet
Union, went away to Maine for two
months and spent most of his time
working on the introduction, using, be-
tides the Papers themselves, the official
:for? the authenticity of the Papers. e
wrote an introduction to them, plusa
commentary on each section, and, in
effect, edited the book. Gibney insists
with The Penkovskiy Papers until he had
finished assembling and annotating the
manuscript. "Then it was sent to the CIA
for checking," Gibney said the other day
at his Manhattan home. "Sure they took
some things out. I don't deny that."
Gibney is a candid man-he is willing
~''1'fo`' admit, for instance, that he has
worked, as reporter, editor and speech-
writer, for Henry Luce, Vincent Astor,
Hugh Hefner, Huntington Hartford and
Lyndon Johnson-but the problem is
that the Papers could be a CIA produc-
tion without his knowledge.
.:A,._1-year=old, short, pleasant man,
once the champion high school debater
of New York City, Gibney's involvement
with the Papers grew out of a term he
served as a staff writer on Life. "In
1958,"' Gibney said, "Life learned there
was a defector, surfaced and cleared,
who wac avnilnhle for stories. He was
Peter Deriabin. We did a series together
for Life, and the series later became a
book, The Secret World." (Gibney, who
was assigned to the Office of Naval In-
telligence during World War II, has also
written books about Japan, Poland and
white-collar crime in the United States.)
Out of the Life series and The Secret
World came a friendship between Gibney
and Deriabin. Gibney, through the late
Congressman Francis Walters, helped
Deriabin obtain American citizenship.
Deriabin often visits Gibney's home, tele-
phones him and sends him 'Christmas
Page 6
V F er, Gibney flew to England and had
vance. Finally, Doubleday, which had
published The Secret World, bought the
Papers.
The book surfaced in November, 1965,
exactly three years after Deriabin
brought Gibney the Papers, and quickly
climbed onto the best-seller lists.
One of the criticisms leveled against
the book is that, while there are several
photographs of Penkovskiy's family, his
military documents and his calling cards,
there are none of the original manu-
script. This absence has fed the suspicion
that the Papers are not authentic.
Gibney has photostats of dozens of the
original Penkovskiy pages in his home.
"And Peter has all the rest," he said.
"We should have used some in the
book, but Doubleday was in a rush to
get it out, and the . art director had
gotten up layouts without the photo-
stats. I didn't push. I never thought the
authenticity would be questioned."
To the criticism that Penkovskiy
would never simply hide the Papers in
his desk, as the book says he did-Le
Carre phrased the suspicion best: "Pen-
kovskiy concealed the Papers, with Rus-
sian cunning, in his desk"-Gibney of-
fers another rebuttal. "Guys talk," he
said, "as if Penkovskiy was just sitting
there waiting for a literary agent to
show up. He did travel to the West a
dew times. He didn't keep a big manu-
portance of Penkovskiy is exaggerated.
In his introduction to the Papers,
Gibney flatly states, "Their (the Papers']
authenticity is beyond question."
He has backed up only slightly since
then. "Certainly it's possible that the
CIA fed the material to Deriabin before
I became involved," Gibney said. "It's
3. Qne of many theoretical possibilities. But
I find it difficult to believe it could have
c scri t just lying around."
The charge has also been made, more
Soviet critics than by Westerners,
-that Penkovskiy simply was not so im-
portant a spy as the Papers claim.
Greville Wynne, in a New York press
conference plugging the Papers, said,
"Penkovskiy saved a war, in my
opinion." Gibney will go almost as far.
"I think he was the key to the Cuban
situation," Gibney said. "We may have
weathered the crisis without him, but I
hate to think about it."
Neither , Theodore Sorensen nor
Arthur Sc ilesinger jr., in their JFK
books, mentions Penkovskiy's role in
Cuba, but Sorensen, questioned about it
on television, would say only that he was
glad the United States had intelligence
successes once in a while. And Schlesing-
er, who worked for Gibney (as a Show
magazine movie critic) at the same time
he worked' for President Kennedy, has
never suggested to Gibney that the im-
been fixed without my knowledge."
Pravda has announced that Gibney, in
defending the Papers, is "like a tired
fighter, swinging his gloves wildly .. .
defending the CIA fabrications." Prav-
da's attack may be Gibney's best de-
fense. .4
BOOK WEEK January 30, 1966
I
Approved For Release 2001/11/22 : CIA-RDP80-01193A000400170063-5