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Wall Street Journal
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.
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Illegals by Shaun Walker: The Russian agent who couldn't get Irish people to shut up, and other spy stories
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West Author : Shaun Walker ISBN-13 : 978-1788167772 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £22 Spare a thought for Tim and Alex Foley. It was Tim's 20th birthday when, on June 27th, 2010, the FBI pushed their way into the family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and snapped the cuffs on their parents, Don and Ann. Turns out their parents, who had never even hinted it to their sons, were actually Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, KGB 'illegal' agents. The brothers found this hard to believe but the truth sunk in once their Canadian citizenship was stripped and they found themselves in Moscow , 'expected to start a new life in a country they had never previously set foot in'. If this sounds like the plot of streaming spy caper The Americans, then Shaun Walker's history of 'illegals' – as opposed to 'legal' intelligence officers stationed in embassies – that stretches all the way back to Lenin and Trotsky hiding in London from the Tsar, proves fact a lot more clandestine than fiction. Once the Bolsheviks were in power, 'Moscow's illegals roamed Europe at will' long before the United States even had a dedicated foreign intelligence service. The adventures of Dmitri Bystrolyotov deserve a book on their own. He seduced secretaries in Nazi Germany, lived with Tuareg tribes, and 'at other times he took on the guise of a Yugoslav butcher, a jaundiced English lord, or a Norwegian herring salesman'. READ MORE Walker's thrilling book also serves as a potted history of communist Russia, taking in everything from the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico (by an illegal), Stalin ignoring warnings about Hitler's invasion, a near miss for Yugoslav leader Tito and the rise of Putin. Lest we think that Ireland was spared, there's also the case of Yuri Linov who was sent to Dublin to 'scout for interesting contacts, particularly Americans' in the mid-1960s. [ Deep-cover Soviet spy in Ireland posed as travelling salesman and chess buff Opens in new window ] He paid his way by going door-to-door selling bath mats and television magnifying devices. 'Usually, spies have to find ways to coax important information from reluctant targets, but in Ireland Yuri had the opposite problem.' Apparently, he couldn't get people to shut up, although it's unclear if the gossip was of much use to the Kremlin. As Walker points out, we had still not established diplomatic relations with the USSR at that point so this 'Austrian bath mat salesman' was in effect 'Moscow's top representative on Irish territory, even if nobody in Ireland knew it'.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – gripping true stories of spies who lived deep undercover
O ne of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies. That story was based in part on the real-life pair of 'illegals' – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren't so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage. Vavilova and Bezrukov's story is one of many in this thoroughly gripping and eye-opening book, which shows amply how the life of someone chosen by the KGB to venture abroad as an illegal was nonetheless never without drama, glamour and heartbreak. Agents were forced to leave their infant children back in the USSR for years, acquired multiple romantic entanglements, or were driven to drink and burnout. Some of the earlier illegals could have swaggered out of an Ian Fleming novel. The Lithuanian Iosif Grigulevich, for one, a self-described 'romantic', transformed himself into a charismatic Costa Rican diplomat called Teodoro Castro, and was sent to assassinate the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito with a powdered version of bubonic plague. (The hit was called off when Stalin conveniently died.) Another man with an amazing life, Yuri Linov, was spotted by the spooks for his early talent in foreign languages, trained in East Germany, and then sent abroad. He impersonated an Austrian bath-mat salesman in Ireland, moved to Czechoslovakia to report on dissidents, and thence to Israel to gather information about its nuclear facility, before being kicked out by the Shin Bet. The work wasn't all exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, though, as Walker notes wryly of Linov's task of painstakingly transcribing secret radio communications: 'It could take Yuri hours of work to decode a message, only to find he was being heartily congratulated on the forty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution.' For the Soviets the use of illegals was an asymmetrical form of cold warfare. It was a necessity when the nascent USSR did not yet have diplomatic relations with other powers or embassies from which normal spies could operate. But the Americans could never accomplish the same thing in the 'bureaucracy-obsessed' enemy heartland. They concluded: 'It was simply much harder for CIA illegals to infiltrate a rigid police state without detection than it was for Soviet illegals to enter the freer atmosphere of the West.' Indeed, it was ordinary information about this freer atmosphere, Walker argues persuasively, that was probably the most valuable intelligence. Paranoid totalitarianism, with no independent news media, found it difficult to imagine a freewheeling world of dive bars, hippy protests and supermarkets. The heyday of the illegal seemed to have passed with the fall of the Soviet Union, after which émigré Russians could travel under their real identities without immediately being suspected of espionage. (Flame-haired spy Anna Chapman was welcomed as a real-estate agent in New York City.) But one fan of the old ways was a former KGB support officer for illegals – Vladimir Putin. And so the story continues. Putin is happy to deploy 'flying illegals' such as the pair who tried to murder Sergei Skripal in 2018, as well as the newfangled form of pseudonymous online illegal – fake social-media users with American-sounding names – created by Russian troll farms to destabilise the west. All this, Walker suggests, is a deliberate continuation of Putin's mission to restore pride in Russian history and derring-do. Western spooks now tend to downplay the threat from illegals, but then, as one tells the author, what if you had someone who was in a position to do real damage? 'Then it becomes the most dangerous thing imaginable.' skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker is published by Profile (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
