One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI”, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.
Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?” he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book,Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for theGuardianwho was based in Moscow for more than 10 years.
Alex’s parents were products of a programme that dated back to the earliest days of the Soviet Union: planting agents in enemy countries who would live apparently normal lives while spying for the motherland. Such spies were known as “illegals”, to differentiate them from spies with diplomatic cover. The system originated with the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, who had operated clandestinely as an underground movement to evade capture by the tsarist secret police. After the Russian Revolution many hostile countries refused to recognise the new Soviet Union, which therefore had no embassies from which conventional spies could operate. These were the heroic years of the “great illegals”, who posed as European aristocrats, Persian merchants or Turkish students while spying on the capitalist enemy, using Bolshevikkonspiratsiya(“subterfuge”) to elude detection. This generation of illegals was wiped out in the purges of the 1930s. Stalin saw enemy illegals where none existed – he was especially suspicious of those who practised deception, though they did so for the communist cause, and he mistrusted or ignored much of the valuable intelligence that they presented to him.
During the great oatriotic war, illegals once more became heroes of the Soviet Union, credited with assassinations of top Nazi officials. Then, in the cold war, the KGB selected individuals with outstanding language skills to undergo intensive training so that they might live undercover in enemy countries – principally, of course, the US. Typically, such illegals would assume the identity of someone who had died as an infant. Even in a nation of immigrants, posing as a native for any extended period was extraordinarily difficult, so they would usually be allotted a third nationality – Canadian, for example, or German. This was an unnatural existence, one of constant strain, isolated from friends, family or home, sometimes for decades. Husbands were separated from wives, and men and women allotted new partners from the pool of potential illegals. Couples were warned never to speak to each other in Russian, not even in their most intimate moments; one pregnant illegal feared that she might betray herself by crying out in Russian during labour. Many cold war illegals had no active role. They were known as “sleepers”, ordered simply to lie low and wait until their country needed them.
Illegals received training in tradecraft familiar to any le Carré reader. A white chalk symbol on a lamp-post indicated that an illegal was ready to make a drop; a blue chalk mark on a bench signalled that a handler was ready to receive it. At any rendezvous illegals greeted their handlers according to a pre-arranged formula. A stranger approached one illegal operating in New York and asked: “Have you read any books by Elie Wiesel lately?” The illegal replied: “No, I have been reading Hemingway.” It would be hard to imagine a more stilted exchange.
As Walker shrewdly observes, there was a paradox at the heart of the process. The Soviet Union was a closed society, which struggled to understand the west. The KGB wanted operatives who were intelligent, flexible and worldly enough to slip into the identity of a westerner, yet so ideologically firm as to withstand the strain of living undercover for years or even decades, while remaining oblivious to the increasingly obvious flaws in Soviet society. Many cracked under the pressure. After the collapse of communism some idealistic illegals returned to Russia dismayed by the changes they found. Was it for this that they had sacrificed so much?
As part of his desire to restore Russian pride, Putin revived the cult of the illegals. He praised their “strong morals” and “firm character”. In his Russia the achievements of the illegals have been wildly exaggerated; in reality they produced little to justify the enormous effort necessary to train and sustain them, and Walker demonstrates that the meagre intelligence that they were able to gather was often ignored or poorly analysed. Nevertheless their strange lives make compelling stories. The author ends his very readable book by quoting from a recent interview with a western intelligence officer. How many illegals are still out there? asks Walker. “I’ll be honest with you,” his informant replies. “Nobody knows.”
Adam Sisman’s most recent book is The Secret Life of John le Carré (Profile)
The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the Westby Shaun Walker is published by Profile (£22). To support theGuardianandObserverorder your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply