January 1962 - January 19, 1962 (Friday)

January 19, 1962 (Friday)

• KGB agents identified Colonel Oleg Penkovsky as the man who was secretly meeting British national Janet Chisholm in Moscow. The agents, who had been shadowing Mrs. Chisholm, had first seen the two together on December 30, and followed Penkovsky to his apartment. Surveillance determined that Colonel Penkovsky, a high clearance official with the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU, had been bringing home classified material relating to ballistic missiles, photographing it, and giving the film to the British intelligence agency MI-6. Penkovsky, whose information alerted the United States to the placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, would be arrested on October 22, when the Cuban Missile Crisis began, and would be executed on May 16, 1963 for treason.
• Died: John Beals Chandler, 74, former Lord Mayor of Brisbane; Onn Jaafar, 66, Malay politician; and Snub Pollard, 72, American silent film comedian