09-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Illegals' Review: Agents in the Deepest Cover
The Russian 'illegals,' or deep-cover spies, landed on our front pages in 2010, when the FBI unleashed a made-for-television roundup of 10 sleeper agents in the U.S. One was Anna Chapman, a real-estate agent who plied her trade in the upper reaches of Manhattan's cafe society. Two others were the Cambridge, Mass., couple 'Don Heathfield' and 'Ann Foley'—real names Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova—who had journeyed far since their student days at Tomsk State University in remote Siberia.
Mr. Bezrukov and Ms. Vavilova resembled the fictional couple they inspired in the hit FX television series 'The Americans.' Their children attended local schools, apparently unaware of their parents' secret allegiance to the motherland. 'Don,' supposedly Canadian, had a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School. The couple spoke only English at home and never ate Russian food. The Russian spy agencies always paid meticulous attention to detail: Before one veteran agent was dispatched to Israel, he was sent to a clinic in northern Moscow to be circumcised.
In 'The Illegals,' Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian, relates these real-life spy stories with breathtaking aplomb. Luckily for him, the Russian spies aren't lurking under the radar any more. Several of the illegals were available for interviews, including Ms. Vavilova, who co-wrote a spy novel based on her exploits, 'A Woman Who Can Keep Secrets,' after she was traded back to Russia.
Mr. Walker's story has a perfect frame, as the illegals program had a beginning, a middle and an apparent end. After the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, the militantly anticapitalist Soviet Union was a global pariah. When the U.S.S.R. realized it could not plant spies in conventional billets such as embassies and trade missions, it became more creative.
