One 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.”
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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 atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.