THE ILLEGALS

On the hunt for Soviet and Russian spies from Lenin’s time to our own.

It’s the stuff of TV drama (The Americans) brought to real life: From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian spies were sent abroad to gather intelligence. Many were posted as diplomats, which meant that counterintelligence agencies could easily keep track of them; others went abroad as journalists, academics, businesspeople. But early on, writes Guardian international correspondent Walker, the “father of Russian intelligence,” a man named Meer Trilisser, was putting “illegals,” Soviet spies posing as natives of the countries in which they were working, to work. Trilisser himself, “posing as a specialist on Gothic architecture…traveled to Berlin, ostensibly to attend an academic conference,” but used the occasion to connect with an undercover agent. In time, writes Walker, “the Soviets were far ahead of their adversaries when it came to espionage,” emboldened enough to begin to insert illegals, once almost exclusively male but eventually including women, into countries under cover so deep that their children didn’t know they were spies. Such was the case with Don Heathfield (né Andrei Bezrukov) and Ann Foley (née Elena Vavilova), whom the FBI arrested in June 2010, posing as a married Canadian couple working in Boston, having taken their identities from real Canadians who had died in infancy. Elena/Ann styled herself as a soccer mom, “but once the kids were tucked away in bed, she crept into a back room and decrypted radio messages from Moscow.” Both, working for first the KGB and then Russia’s new SVR, were traded for Western spies imprisoned in Russia. There are surely more illegals out there, Walker concludes, especially since after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “ordinary” Russians traveling abroad are subject to greater scrutiny than before.

A fast-paced tale of real-world spycraft that will have you wondering whether your neighbors are who they say they are.