Gentleman, spy, fantasist? The strange post-Courier life of Greville Wynne

In November 1962, the KGB grabbed Greville Wynne in Budapest and bundled him into a car. The game was up for Wynne, an engineer, salesman and bagman for British intelligence. Over the previous 18 months, he had passed MI6 and the CIA some 10,000 microfilmed documents from Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Union’s military intelligence service). While Penkovsky was executed by firing squad, Wynne was slung into a Moscow prison. He would only be freed and returned to Britain 18 months later – exchanged for a captured KGB spy.

Their story now features in The Courier, in cinemas as of Friday, with Benedict Cumberbatch donning a pork-pie hat and pencil moustache to play Wynne. But the film– written by Tom O’Connor and directed by Dominic Cooke – has the rare distinction of being “based on a true story” yet needing to tone down its creative licence.

In the years after his release, Wynne became a regular fixture in the press – wheeled out for comment on all things spy-related – and told his side of the story in two books, The Man From Moscow, published in 1967, and The Man From Odessa, published in 1981. The BBC adapted Wynne’s account into a serial, Wynne and Penkovsky, in 1985. (Wynne was played by David Calder, seen most recently as the doddery granddad in Motherland, and father to Sean Bean in prison drama Time.)

But Wynne’s account – much like his post-spy life – was bizarre, filled with exaggerations and bald-faced nonsense, from helping exfiltrate a Soviet defector to a secret meeting with President John F Kennedy.

Originally from Ystrad Mynach in south Wales, Wynne was a foreign trade negotiator. He was recruited by Sir Arthur Franks, future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (popularly known as MI6), to act as a courier in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Franks was in fact a sleeping partner in Wynne’s firm, which produced England’s longest articulated lorry – all paid for by MI6. This gave Wynne a believable cover for visiting trade fairs.

After making contact with Penkovsky – who first approached Wynne in a restaurant and offered to trade secrets – information passed via Wynne included details on Soviet missile capabilities, which played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After his arrest and a show trial in May 1963, Wynne was sentenced to eight years – including five years’ hard labour – in Moscow’s once-notorious Lubyanka prison (later turned into a cafeteria for KGB staffers). The British authorities would maintain his cover: he just was an innocent businessman ensnared by the KGB. Wynne was returned to the West at a Berlin Wall checkpoint in April 1964, exchanged for KGB agent Konon Molody, who had been sentenced to 25 years in Britain.

But the brutal prison conditions and treatment had proved devastating. As described by Robert Latona, the ghostwriter of Wynne’s second book, Wynne came out of prison 50lbs lighter and with his teeth loose in their sockets:

Divorced and estranged from his son, Wynne plunged into alcoholism and – according to Nigel West, a long-time author on intelligence and a critic of Wynne’s claims – he became a nuisance to the intelligence community.

“He was regarded as a pest by SIS and, to a lesser extent, by the CIA, which twice tried to accommodate him on visits to America,” wrote West. “On neither occasion did Wynne take any interest in the business leads he was offered, but instead concentrated on drinking.”

Wynne continued with the pretence that he was an innocent businessman until he learned about The Penkovsky Papers, a CIA-approved version of Oleg Penkovsky’s story, published in 1965. Wynne was upset that he wasn’t credited for his role and insisted that he write a foreword. His own book, The Man from Moscow – ghost-written by his own brother-in-law – was published two years later.

“Certain passages,” commented the Foreign Office about the book, “would almost surely have been objectionable on security grounds had they been true.”

Wynne moved from Malta to the Canary Islands to Palma de Mallorca, working on business ventures that included selling holiday apartments to exporting flowers. He also remarried, this time to a Dutch woman named Herma Van Buren. The marriage ultimately ended because of his “drunken rages”. The alcohol, Van Buren told the Daily Express, “changed his personality”.

Part of a heavy-drinking expat community in Mallorca, he was an all-day drinker. “When playing liar’s poker, he would sometimes drop the dice into his gin-and-tonic instead of the dice cup,” wrote Robert Latona. “Once he went off to the gents and lingered so long that he didn’t get let out until the cleaning lady turned up the next morning – and swore he hadn’t passed out.”

When Wynne did return to London, he drank in a backstreet bar frequented by ex-spies and used a fabricated army rank to get into the Naval and Military Club, also known as “the In and Out”.

Robert Latona admitted he was an unusual choice to ghost-write Wynne’s second book, The Man From Odessa. He was a young, inexperienced American writer with little knowledge of Wynne’s background. “That he could and did get me cheap probably had a great deal to do with my landing the job,” Latona later said.

Wynne was unable to write the books himself, being severely dyslexic. As Latona added: “He could scan and decipher newspaper headlines for no more than a few minutes at a time, while writing was a slow-motion ordeal (I’m tempted to add, especially when it came to signing cheques).”

Latona believes that Wynn wanted to tell his story again in The Man From Odessa because of hurt feelings – he was always portrayed as a useless mule, not a dutiful agent who took life-threatening risks. Nigel West, however, blasted The Man From Odessa as “a fraud on the book-buying public” and “a literary swindle”.

Across his various accounts, Wynne’s claims included him being promoted to an army major under the table, with a nudge and wink rather than any actual paperwork; that he discovered a Nazi spy working in a Nottingham factory; a supposed reunion of twenty-plus Soviet defectors on British soil; and his role in helping exfiltrate a Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov, who likely never existed.

Most fanciful was a story in which he was flown to Washington DC to meet President Kennedy in an 18-hour round-trip – a physical impossibility at the time. It would have also gone against the standard espionage policy of keeping heads of state at a distance from any intelligence chicanery.

Wynne’s stories were first challenged by Nigel West (actually a pseudonym for former Tory MP Rupert Allason) in his 1988 book, The Friends: Britain’s Post-War Secret Intelligence Operations. Wynne reacted with libel proceedings against West. As West later wrote, Wynne became “increasingly litigious”, bringing cases – or threatening to – against the BBC, The Sunday Telegraph, and Sir Fitzroy Maclean. Wynne would drop cases before they went to court. He dropped the case against West two days before it was due in London’s High Court.

“This last- moment withdrawal, without payment of the damages demanded, his costs or even a face-saving apology, was eloquent proof that Wynne had no intention of being exposed publicly as a Walter Mitty character,” wrote West.

Greville Wynne died in 1990, aged 70, from throat cancer. In 2016, Robert Latona wrote an article defending Wynne and suggested that not everything was pure fantasy – even the White House trip, he speculated, may have had some truth to it (though for Penkovsky, not Wynne).

It’s curious – admirable, even – that Latona would stick up for Wynne: Wynne stiffed Latona for £2,500, half of his fee for writing The Man From Odessa. Wynne was due to receive the money to pay Latona from an exclusive deal with The Sunday Telegraph. But the deal didn’t happen – Latona knew he’d never see the money.

“I never became Greville’s friend,” wrote Latona. “I was too young, too American (he didn’t care much for Americans), too put off by his outrageousness, his grievances and prejudices. ‘No-one ever asked me if I wanted to live in a multi-cultural Britain.’ I must have heard that a hundred times, with the accent on ‘me’. He wasn’t a particularly nice man, perhaps not even a very good man – but he was a courageous one.”

West, writing a rebuttal to Latona’s defence, was less forgiving. “Wynne was not some loveable rogue or bar-room scoundrel who deserved a little generosity of spirit. We now know that he was indeed a fantasist incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction who peddled an entirely bogus tale of self-importance, and on the way short-changed his co-author. He was also an alcoholic bully who beat up his second wife, Hermione.”

Greville Wynne’s story remains fascinating – even without his spin.

The Courier is in cinemas now