Janet Chisholm
British spy (1929-2004)
Janet Chisholm (6 May 1929 – 23 July 2004), born Janet Anne Deane, was a British MI6 agent during the Cold War.
Early life
She was born in Kasauli, India to a Royal Engineers officer. She was educated Queen Anne's School, Caversham, in Berkshire, where she learnt Russian. She then studied French at Grenoble University. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. There she met her future husband, Ruari Chisholm, and began working for British Intelligence.
Her husband was a spy who headed the MI6 station in Moscow but worked under the guise of a visa officer. When Oleg Penkovsky offered Soviet military secrets to MI6, she became the go-between. Outwardly, Janet was an ordinary mother of four children. She would meet Penkovsky in a local park and he would offer what was said to be vitamin c supplements for the children, but were actually disguised documents containing military secrets about the Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Janet Chisholm” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.