Don Heathfield and Ann Foley appeared to be an ordinary Canadian couple raising their children in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But that was a fiction. Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, and they were Russian spies who’d been living under false identities for more than 20 years.
Shaun Walker opens his nonfiction “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission To Infiltrate the West” with an electrifying account of their arrests in 2010. If the setup sounds straight out of the “The Americans,” that’s because the couple’s story helped inspire the show’s creation.
Walker’s book – consistently fascinating and at times thrilling – covers highlights from the 100-year-old program that sent Russians to live abroad as deep-cover spies. The author traces the program from its roots under Vladimir Lenin, continuing through the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and up to its revival under Vladimir Putin. Walker, a correspondent for The Guardian, makes good use of archival sources; he also conducted hundreds of interviews, including with former spies who had, until now, revealed little about their experiences.
Why We Wrote This
A history of Russia’s efforts to spy on the West offers a glimpse into the murky world of intelligence-gathering. It also examines the toll on the agents and their families.
Operatives had to undergo years of arduous training in order to pass themselves off as natives of foreign countries. Walker explains the process, which began with Russian intelligence agents scouting schools for promising recruits. (The country’s intelligence agency has gone through various changes in name and structure over the past 100 years; the most well-known, the KGB, existed from 1954 to 1991.) Strong candidates were rare because they had to embody the paradox of being, in Walker’s words, “intelligent, flexible, and worldly enough to slip into the guise of a Westerner,” while also remaining loyal to the Soviet state.
Once selected, trainees were immersed in intensive instruction in the language and culture of the country they were to infiltrate. Many, like Bezrukov and Vavilova, became what were called “dead doubles”: Soviet diplomats abroad (“legals”) would comb through old records and even cemeteries to identify people who had died in childhood and who had no living relatives. The operatives would assume their identities by requesting duplicate birth certificates, which they would then use to acquire passports. With the help of their handlers, they invented detailed backstories to account for the intervening years.
Many agents had advanced degrees from Russian institutions, but once abroad, they typically had to find blue-collar work since they weren’t able to reveal their Russian credentials. Their espionage activities might involve cultivating contacts to spy for the Russians (using financial incentives or blackmail) or merely compiling detailed observations of the society they’d infiltrated, receiving and sending reports via coded radio transmissions.
As interesting as the program’s nuts and bolts are its psychological dimensions, which Walker explores throughout the book. In the early years, the spies operated alone; they were separated from their families and their homeland for long stretches and lied to everyone they knew. Depression, paranoia, and alcoholism were common. Ironically, because of their facility at lying, they were often viewed with suspicion upon their return. Many of the early operatives didn’t survive Josef Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936-1938.
During the Cold War, when it became clear that the isolation was too difficult for some to bear, the KGB began pairing agents to work as couples. New complications arose when those couples had children who grew up in the West unaware of their parents’ real identities. Bezrukov and Vavilova were sent back to Russia in a prisoner swap; their young-adult sons didn’t fully accept the truth until they arrived in Moscow and were shown decades-old photographs of their father and mother in KGB garb.
In its early years, the program pulled off some striking operations. The spies were responsible for the assassinations of a number of high-ranking Nazis during World War II. In addition, Walker reports that because of intelligence from operatives, Stalin knew about the Manhattan Project – the Americans’ top-secret push to build the first nuclear bombs – before President Harry Truman did. But the author concludes that there haven’t been enough wins to justify the investment in time and money. (The United States attempted its own illegals-style program, which began and ended during the 1950s; Soviet surveillance of its citizenry was so intense that it was “much harder for CIA illegals to infiltrate a rigid police state without detection,” Walker explains.)
Walker understands why Russia remained committed to the program during the Soviet era. He observes that in the Cold War period, given that so few Soviet citizens received permission to leave the country (and that those who did were accompanied by KGB minders), out of a population of 290 million, only 100 people – operatives – were able to move freely throughout the West. As a result, even their banal analyses of American society were valued by the leadership.
Today’s agents don’t have to move freely under deep cover to do damage. In the wake of the 2010 arrests, Walker writes, “Moscow pivoted to a new kind of illegal, adapted for the digital world.” In the run-up to the 2016 election, these “virtual illegals” posed as Americans online, in the author’s words, “fanning partisan divides.” But Putin, a former KGB officer, is known to hold the old-style operatives in high regard. According to Walker, it’s conceivable that under the Russian leader’s direction, they continue to live among us.
