The Unbelievable True Story Behind The Courier, Explained

The 2020 historical spy film The Courier is based on the true story of Greville Wynne, a real-life British businessman who was recruited by the British intelligence service MI6 in 1960 to serve as an intermediary in the transfer of information between Oleg Penkovsky, a Russian intelligence officer turned spy, and the CIA. The action primarily focuses on the unlikely friendship that Wynne, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, forges with Penkovsky, who agrees to provide top-secret Russian military and nuclear information to the CIA through Wynne, to help diffuse the emerging Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Russia and the United States nearly started World War III.

While The Courier is faithful to Wynne’s story, in terms of the verifiable elements of Wynne’s role as a spy between 1960 and 1962, the movie is nonetheless more speculative than most biographical films due to the various inaccuracies that exist in Wynne’s own recounting of his story. Accordingly, The Courier is a rare example of a based-on-a-true-story film that’s more credible and honest than its source material.

Benedict Cumberbatch Plays a Businessman Turned Cold War British Spy

As The Courier makes clear, the story of Greville Wynne is, within the context of Wynne’s Cold War spying activities, the story of a nobody figure who unexpectedly became a somebody and was left alternately terrified and thrilled by this sudden transformation. While Wynne initially agrees to become a spy for the stated purpose of averting a nuclear war between Russia and the United States, he also has fun in this role — until he’s captured.

Indeed, just as Wynne’s Russian contact, Oleg Penkovsky, played by Merab Ninidze, is partly motivated to share Russian secrets with the CIA by a desire to achieve a better life for himself and his family through defection, the role of spy gives Wynne a sense of purpose and vitality that transcends his mild-mannered persona. For the real Wynne, this accounts for the long list of fabrications that Wynne attached to his story in his later years.

Regardless, Wynne made an enormous sacrifice for his country and paid a heavy price for being a spy. On October 29, 1962, shortly after Russia withdrew from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne was abducted by Russian agents and flown to Moscow while visiting Russian-occupied Budapest under the guise of a business trip. From there, Wynne was imprisoned and tried for espionage alongside Penkovsky, who was arrested one week before Wynne arrived in Budapest.

While The Courier shows Wynne dealing with his imprisonment with courage and defiance, Wynne, in real life, completely collapsed under this pressure. Wynne turned on MI6, whom Wynne accused, obviously under duress, of exploiting Wynne. In the film, Wynne maintains his innocence and refuses to turn on Penkovsky, whom Wynne visits in prison, where they embrace and praise their shared sacrifice.

Greville Wynne Teamed With a Russian Spy to Prevent Nuclear War

As was the case in real life, the friendship and partnership that exists between Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky in The Courier is grounded in the terrifying dynamic that surrounds their relationship, in which Wynne and Penkovsky must trust each other to avoid capture. While visiting each other in England and Russia, Wynne and Penkovsky spend an increasing amount of time with each other under the cover of business. However, these interactions become increasingly perilous, as Penkovsky’s increasingly aggressive acquisition of sensitive Russian materials eventually attracts the attention of the KGB.

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Among the various pieces of material that Penkovsky gave to Wynne were copies of plans for the construction of missile-launching sites in Cuba and documents that detailed Russia’s arsenal of missiles. This enabled the United States to gain a much clearer assessment of Russia’s military capabilities, which turned out to be much weaker than the West previously believed.

Following their sham trials, Penkovsky and Wynne both pleaded guilty to espionage on May 7, 1963. However, while Wynne, who was sentenced to eight years in prison, was eventually freed through a prison swap, Penkovsky was executed via a firing squad on May 16, 1963.

Wynne Was a Very Unreliable Narrator

While The Courier contains the least disputed elements of Greville Wynne’s story, in which Wynne unquestionably smuggled countless top-secret Russian materials through his relationship with Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky, the rest of Wynne’s Cold War story, as told by Wynne, is full of fabrications and open to pure conjecture.

One of the biggest fabrications told by Wynne, who wrote two memoirs, is that Wynne and Penkovsky traveled together in a military jet from the United Kingdom to the White House, where they were greeted by President John F. Kennedy. Wynne said that he and Penkovsky returned to the United Kingdom 18 hours later. However, given the limitations of jet travel at the time, this story, which was denied by both the CIA and Kennedy’s staff, is clearly false.

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In terms of why Wynne felt the need to embellish his already amazing story, historians have suggested that Wynne, whose business career collapsed amid his spy activities, was left emotionally and physically damaged by his imprisonment in Russia and was subsequently desperate to translate his fleeting notoriety into a second career. Wynne was also later ravaged by alcoholism, which was attributed to the shame that Wynne carried over having turned on MI6 during his trial.

Wynne’s memoirs also reveal the extent to which Wynne, who died in 1990 at the age of 1970, was haunted by the death of Penkovsky. While The Courier embraces the official story that Penkovsky was executed via firing squad in 1963, Wynne’s memoirs claim, without evidence, that Penkovsky actually committed suicide.