Books: Notes from a Soviet Prison

Notes from a Sovient Prison CONTACT ON GORKY STREET by Greville Wynne. 222 pages. Afheneum. $4.95.

From 1960 until his arrest by the KGB in 1962, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of Soviet military intelligence funneled out to the West a steady stream of Moscow’s most vital secrets. His side of the story was recounted in The Penkovsky Papers, published in 1965. Contact on Gorky Street is the autobiographical account of the British businessman, recruited by British intelligence, who befriended Penkovsky in Moscow and became his conduit to the West. The book is far more chilling than any of the fictional adventures of James Bond or Harry Palmer.

Wynne’s business, selling machines and goods to Communist countries, provided ideal cover and a frequent excuse to travel to Moscow. London’s MI-6 spent five years preparing Wynne for his spy role before he ever met Colonel Penkovsky. Part of the training was a routine initiation into the ar cane arts of a courier: how to conceal film, where to hide messages, what to do if the Soviets plant a girl in his hotel room. But one part consisted of a brutal simulation of what Wynne could expect in a Soviet prison if he was captured, and as it happened, he needed it all.

The story of his ugly ordeal behind Soviet bars for 18 months is as harrowing as anything in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, despite the fact that it was not Stalin’s grim regime but Khrushchev’s that punished Wynne. Though he was sometimes beaten, the primary torture was calculated degradation aimed at reducing Wynne to a broken, pliable animal. He never had adequate clothes or blankets for the harsh Rus sian winters. He was forced to live amid the stench of his own excrement.

He was made to stand naked before jeering female warders.

He was also systematically starved (“The fish soup is bitter and floating with eyes. I swallow the soup, eyes and all”), but he was not allowed to die because his jailers persisted in the hope of extracting a confession from him “so that we may be sure you have learned to respect the Soviet Union.” Wynne never gave them that satisfaction, and was finally exchanged for a Soviet spy in British hands. A tale such as his resounds far louder than the hosannas of the Soviets’ 50th-anniversary celebrations.