The spy next door: Moscow's century-long plot to infiltrate the west

Summary

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History Extra Podcast: "The Spy Next Door: Moscow's Century-Long Plot to Infiltrate the West"

Date: August 26, 2025
Host: Danny Byrd
Guest: Shaun Walker (journalist, The Guardian; author of The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West)

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Episode Overview

This gripping episode explores Russia’s “illegals” – deep-cover spies dispatched to blend into Western societies, live ordinary lives for decades, and gather intelligence for Moscow. Shaun Walker, drawing on his investigative reporting and new book, traces the origins, evolution, unique psychology, and ongoing reality of this espionage program, from its roots in Bolshevik conspiratorial culture to the 2010 unmasking of Russian sleeper agents in America and the celebrated status these operatives now hold in Putin's Russia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is a Russian “Illegal”?

[01:33]

• Definition: Illegals are Russian spies who live under “deep cover” with false, non-Russian identities. Unlike traditional operatives using diplomatic cover, illegals integrate fully into foreign societies with no obvious connection to Russia.
• Training: The program is uniquely intense:
  • Recruits are scouted as linguistically talented, adaptable university students, then undergo 4–5 years of solo training in Moscow safe houses (no group classes).
  • They master foreign languages, absorb cultural knowledge (“You’ll have to read every school textbook from the first grade to the final grade for what you would have studied in school in Austria.” — Shaun Walker, [03:58]), and receive technical spycraft instruction (e.g., surveillance detection, encrypted communication).

2. Origins: Pre-Revolution to Stalin’s Soviet Union

[06:44]

• Bolshevik Roots: Lenin, familiar with disguise and clandestinity, formalized the split between "legal" and "illegal" operations to protect his underground movement against the czarist regime.
• After 1917: Early Soviet foreign policy demands covert intelligence—lack of diplomatic relations means no official covers. Skilled revolutionary exiles repurpose their talents for the first Soviet intelligence service.
• Cultural Legacy: This culture of paranoia and subterfuge becomes self-reinforcing inside the USSR during Stalin’s Great Terror (1930s), where even loyal spies ("illegals") become suspected enemy agents.
  • “When you start to look at it through the mindset of a regime that grew out of this conspiratorial underground movement... it becomes more natural to assume that... your enemies must be doing this too.” — Shaun Walker, [12:15]

3. Anecdotes: The Wild Lives of Illegals

[13:16 – 20:24]

• Josef Grigulevich: Posed as Costa Rican ambassador in Rome, nearly tasked with assassinating Tito (Yugoslavia) via "plague powder" before plot was abandoned at Stalin’s death ([16:04]).
• Dmitry Bystralotov: Operative with multiple covers (Hungarian count), who brilliantly penetrated British security but was later tortured as a suspected triple agent in Stalin's purges and spent 20 years in the Gulag.

4. The Illegals Program Under Shifting Soviet-Western Relations

[21:40 – 24:25]

• WWII: Many skilled illegals were lost to Stalin’s paranoia, but those who remained carried out bold espionage—sometimes even against the Allies, despite the wartime alliance.
• Postwar: Early Cold War saw resurgent use of illegals, with the Soviets often outpacing Western intelligence efforts.

5. Spying on Allies: Infiltration of the Soviet Bloc

[24:39]

• Prague Spring (1968): KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov sent illegals to Czechoslovakia, disguised as Western tourists, to monitor and subvert reformist Communists—demonstrating Moscow’s mistrust of even nominal allies.
• Operation Progress: Illegals continued to work in Eastern Bloc countries through the 70s and 80s, often with no knowledge by the client state’s leadership. "This form of spying... designed as a brilliant way to infiltrate the West, turns out to be put to the biggest use to stifle dissent at home." — Shaun Walker, [27:49]

6. Decline, Revival, and Putin’s Celebration of Illegals

[28:20 – 31:19]

• 1991 Collapse: Funding and support for illegals abroad abruptly vanished, leaving some abandoned in place.
• Putin Era: A former KGB illegals support officer himself, Putin lionizes illegals as national heroes. Their myth is fostered through media, statues, and curated histories.
  • “Putin says... that they’re Russia’s most impressive and most dangerous weapon when it comes to espionage.” — Shaun Walker, [31:25]

7. From Decades-Long Covers to Digital Deception

[33:52]

• Long Horizons: Russian illegals are planted for the “long game” — decades, not months.
  • Recent example: In 2023, a spy couple arrested after 12 years under Argentinian covers.
• Digital Age Parallels: The principle of false identity is now leveraged in online disinformation. Modern Russian operatives can create dozens of American Facebook personas in minutes to influence elections—an adaptation of the old “illegals” method for the internet era.
  • “To create a fake American previously, that would take years of training... now you create a Facebook page, if somebody gets suspicious, you set up another one. It takes 10 minutes.” — Shaun Walker, [35:55]

8. 2010: The Big Western Bust & Families Living a Lie

[36:53]

• Anna Chapman Ring Exposure: Shocked the public—these “ordinary” suburbanites had been deep-cover agents for up to 30 years, even their own children were unaware.
  • Inside Story: The FBI knew for a decade due to a mole in the Russian SVR; the scale and duration highlighted both the program's patience and its vulnerabilities.
  • “If all you need is one person in Moscow to give you away... all these years of training and... deception turn out to be fruitless.” — Shaun Walker, [38:52]

9. Psychological Toll & Adoption of a New Identity

[39:31]

• Some illegals become so immersed in their cover that their original Russian identity fades.
• Examples:
  • Mikhail Vasinkov/Juan Lazaro: After 35 years as a Uruguayan-Peruvian photographer in New York, “he couldn’t really remember how to speak Russian properly, and spoke it with a sort of crazy accent.” — Shaun Walker, [41:50]
  • In the former Soviet bloc, states sometimes discovered lost illegals decades later who refused to return, having built new lives and families as Westerners.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the culture of secrecy:
  “These are operatives that, you know, you’re training them to lie to absolutely everybody around them, including often their own children and families. But they have to stay loyal to you, to the KGB in Moscow all these years...”
  — Shaun Walker, [04:26]

• On Stalin’s logic:
  “It becomes more natural to assume that, well, your enemies must be doing this too. So among all of these supposedly patriotic Soviet citizens, clearly there are enemy illegals who are doing exactly the same thing...”
  — Shaun Walker, [12:15]

• On the long game and psychological price:
  “I think one of the most mind bending things about the illegals program was the long horizons, the thinking not about the intelligence you might get next week or next month, but thinking really in decades.”
  — Shaun Walker, [33:52]

• On the digital shift:
  “To create a fake American previously, that would take years of training... now you create a Facebook page... It takes 10 minutes.”
  — Shaun Walker, [35:55]

• Anecdote:
  “One guy... said, ‘I’m married to somebody who doesn’t know my background. I’ve got kids. They don’t know my background. This is my life now. I’m not coming back. I don’t spy anymore. Leave me alone.’”
  — Shaun Walker, [43:10]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• What is an illegal? – [01:33 – 06:23]
• Bolshevik origins & Lenin – [06:44 – 09:57]
• Paranoia and Stalin's purges – [10:55 – 13:13]
• Cunning lives of Grigulevich & Bystralotov – [13:16 – 20:24]
• WWII and the Cold War – [21:40 – 24:25]
• Spying on the Soviet Bloc – [24:39 – 28:00]
• The Gorbachev years & collapse – [28:20 – 31:19]
• Putin’s embrace of the myth – [31:19 – 33:33]
• Digital age adaptation – [33:33 – 36:53]
• 2010 bust & sleeper families – [36:53 – 39:31]
• Illegals losing themselves in their identities – [39:31 – 43:40]

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Overall Takeaway

This episode reveals how Russia’s illegals program is intertwined with the nation’s revolutionary history, culture of suspicion, and self-image as a beleaguered fortress surrounded by enemies. Its agents are both celebrated and sometimes destroyed by the system they serve, and their techniques have evolved seamlessly into the digital age. The story of these spies is as much about psychology, loyalty, and identity as it is about geopolitics—offering a window into the hidden currents shaping modern espionage and Russian myth-making.

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Recommended for listeners fascinated by espionage, Cold War history, and the psychological drama lurking behind everyday lives.

Transcript

[Shaun Walker]

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[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In 2010, the world was stunned when the United States exposed a covert Russian spy network operating on its own soil. Seemingly all American families living in white picket fenced suburbia were were in fact deep cover Russian agents. Many had been living under assumed identities for decades, lying even to their own children. In this episode, journalist Sean Walker speaks to Danny Byrd about Moscow's long standing illegals program. He reveals how the roots of this operation reached back more than a century to before the Bolshevik Revolution, how the Soviet Union deployed it against supposedly friendly states, and how today's Russia reveres these spies as national heroes.

[Danny Byrd]

Sean, to kick us off, could you briefly explain what exactly an illegal refers to in this context?

[Shaun Walker]

Illegals in the most basic sense, what the Russians call their spies who don't operate under diplomatic cover. So the most basic form of a spy is that they're sent out, they work from the embassy and they pose as an ordinary diplomat while actually doing espionage work. Many agencies use spies with deeper cover. They might be posing as business people or consultants. But what the Russians do, which is quite unique with their illegals, is that they actually spend years training them to impersonate foreigners so that they then go abroad without any obvious connection to Russia at all.

[Danny Byrd]

And can you give us a brief sketch of how long that program takes in terms of training up somebody to be an illegal?

[Shaun Walker]

From the sort of later Soviet period and up to now, it's probably, I would say, the most intensive and comprehensive training period that there is in any espionage program. So people are spotted at university. While they're at university, they will be undergoing a series of interviews, tests, personality evaluations to make sure that they have what the KGB or today the svr, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, thinks are all the necessary qualities for an illegal. And for those who kind of pass onto the training program, that will generally take four or five years of full time individual training. So there's no classrooms. You don't sit in the KGB academy learning this stuff with a group of other illegals. This all happens in safe houses in Moscow, sometimes in other cities. And there will be very intensive, tailored training. So first of all, of course, because the illegals are going to be posing as foreigners, there's a really big language training element. There's also cultural training. So if your cover story is going to be that you're, let's say, an Austrian, you will sit there and you'll have to read through every school textbook from the first grade to the final grade for what you would have studied in school in Austria. You'll have to get up to date with Austrian tv, cultural milieu and so on. And then of course, there's the spying side of this. So you will also need to have training in all the different kind of secret techniques that the illegals would use. So back in the Soviet period, that would include being able to decode encrypted radio transmissions. It would include being able to spot, look out for surveillance, being able to know when you're being followed. And when I was talking to people who'd been through this training program, it reminded me a bit of like an induction into a cult, because these are operatives that, you know, you're training them to lie to absolutely everybody around them, including often their own children and families. But they have to stay loyal to you, to the KGB in Moscow all these years when they're out on a long leash abroad. So there's also this element of shaping the personality and making sure that they're creating operatives that are going to be loyal.

[Danny Byrd]

And just to clarify for the benefit of our listeners, these illegals can literally be civilian citizens of Russia or as was the former Soviet republics. They are just ordinary people that are groomed, essentially.

[Shaun Walker]

Yeah, that's right. So the, so in, in the, in the very early stages of this program, back in the 1920s and 30s when it was first getting going, what we'd see is people who already had experience in the communist underground. They were used to living in disguise. They sometimes spoke several languages and then they were repurposed as spies and it was kind of second nature for them. They didn't need this long training program. But what we saw happening in the Cold War and, and the way that the Russian illegals program still works today is exactly as you say. It's, it's plucking an ordinary, clever, linguistically talented 1920 year old out of university and molding them essentially until they're able to convincingly portray a foreigner.

[Danny Byrd]

I just want to zone in a bit on the origins of this program because I want to get a sense of the history of it, essentially. Where it came from. Could you go into how the. The idea for this program came about? And why did the Soviet Union consider it worth the risk to send spies so deep undercover and often with no diplomatic safety net or even any clear lines back to Moscow?

[Shaun Walker]

When I started researching this program, I was really amazed at how far back into history it goes. And I kind of realized that by tracing the illegals program over the years, you could kind of have this amazing reflection of a whole century of Russian and Soviet history. And the first character in my book is Vladimir Lenin. And essentially, before the 1917 revolutions in Russia, when the Tsar was still in power, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were basically an underground, conspirative movement. And many of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself, used a whole range of disguises to try to keep them ahead of agents of the Tsar, both inside Russia and outside Russia. So Lenin was sometimes posing as a German doctor. He traveled to Russia in 1906 on a British passport. So many of those people in his movements were used to using disguises. And Lenin basically decided that in the battle against the czars, the Bolsheviks would split into what he called the legal movement and the illegal movement. And the idea was that the legal movement would do all the things that the quite repressive law at the time allowed, but there were still opportunities. So the legal Bolshevik party would try to stand for parliament. It would do trade union organizing and so on, but at the same time, there would be these illegals who would work under disguise, who would try to go under the radar, and who would basically live these. These disguised lives. So that's kind of where the term from after the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks come to power. But it's a very fragile new government, doesn't have many other friends in the world. Most other governments think this new socialist government is going to be swept away before long. And because of this, it doesn't have diplomatic relations with most countries. So they don't have embassies that they can send diplomats or indeed spies pretending to be diplomats to. But what they do have in this very hostile environment is a whole group of really passionate Communists who have these years of experience working in the underground. They know how to use disguises. They know how to change their appearance. They often speak multiple languages. So basically, they repurpose all of that heritage for the first Soviet intelligence service, and they send out these illegals to capitals across Europe. Europe to try to get intelligence on the plots against their state and also to find out what the other powers are thinking, to try to steal the diplomatic correspondence, get insight into the geopolitics of the time.

[Danny Byrd]

I want to ask a question about the precedents for this in Russia itself, was there any sort of program like this that existed prior to the revolution which the Bolsheviks latched onto? Or was this purely a design invented by Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

[Shaun Walker]

This was something, I think that very much comes out of the underground movement against the tsarist system. So when, when the Bolsheviks took over, what they did take from the okrana and from the tsarist system is they took a lot of the technical expertise, the Okran were very good at cracking codes. They indeed had all of this experience going after the revolutionary movements for years. So there was a lot of know how they could take from there. But this concept of illegals and of using disguises, this is very much. It's not only the Bolsheviks, but they were the main proponents of this, but also some of the other revolutionary movements. I think this is really the heritage of where the illegals movement comes from.

[Danny Byrd]

You describe in your book how Soviet intelligence was steeped in paranoia. Do you think that obsession with subterfuge ended up turning inward and fuelling Stalin's Great terror in the 1930s, when even the regime's most loyal spies find themselves accused and often purged?

[Shaun Walker]

Yeah, I do, actually. And I think it was. It was a bit of a sort of eureka moment for me when I was researching this book, reading some of the testimonies and the accusations from the Great Terror, the purges of 1937 and 1938, and seeing that often, in fact, the word illegal is used to describe how these supposed conspirators, usually complete nonsense, were apparently conspiring against Stalin and the Soviet state. And it would often say that they used the tenants of illegal organization, they used illegal printing presses and illegal operatives to function inside the Soviet Union. And clearly, I mean, the Great Terror is in many ways quite confusing because Stalin was paranoid. There was opposition to Stalin, but it always seems like such a destructive and kind of counterproductive thing to do, to jail, to kill off so many of the best minds, to accuse so many people who are loyal Soviet citizens, who are running the enterprises and factories in the country of actually being wreckers. But when you start to look at it through the mindset of a regime that grew out of this conspiratorial underground movement that still itself uses these illegals. So they're sending people to London, to Germany, across Europe, who every day for years are posing as capitalists, as Westerners, when all of the time they're working for the Soviet state. And it becomes suddenly, when you're in that mindset, it becomes more natural to assume that, well, your enemies must be doing this too. So among all of these supposedly patriotic Soviet citizens, clearly there are enemy illegals who are doing exactly the same thing, and you have to really work hard to root them out.

[Danny Byrd]

Are there any specific examples you want to draw on?

[Shaun Walker]

One of my favorite characters in the book, and probably the most extraordinary transformation in the book is a chap called Joseph Grigorlevich. He was born in Lithuania and he had young life in the underground. He ends up being recruited into Soviet intelligence during the Spanish Civil war in the mid-1930s. And at some point, he speaks such good Spanish that he's able to pass for a native speaker. And he goes through all kinds of different identities, Brazilian, Chilean, Uruguayan. But he eventually picks up a really solid identity which he can use for years, which is that he persuades the Costa Rican consul in Chile to give him a Costa Rican passport. Based on a sort of fanciful story, he tells that he is the son born out of wedlock to a wealthy Costa Rican landowner who fled when he was a child and now his homeland is calling him back. So the consul buys this, issues him a passport, he then goes back to Moscow. And they decide that the best place for him to be deployed with this new Costa Rican identity is Rome. And this is 1948. It's the early Cold War. Italy is a Cold War battleground. The west is really worried it might go Communist. And into this arrives Teodoro Castro from Costa Rica, actually Josef Grigulevich from the kgb. And he sets up life as a kind of merchant in Rome. And he gets to know all of the local Latin American community. When there's visiting delegations from Costa Rica, he shows them around, he impresses them with all his political connections, and they decide that this is such a fantastic representative of Costa Rica in Rome that they actually make him the Costa Rican ambassador to Rome. And so Teodoro Castro, he's meeting the Pope, he's meeting the Italian president. He knows everyone in the city, and all the time, he's never been to Costa Rica, and he's actually a Soviet illegal. And what would have been his most extraordinary mission is that he manages to get accredited, in addition, as diplomat in Italy, he manages to get accredited to Yugoslavia, which is run by Tito. It's a communist nation, but Tito has fallen out with Stalin and basically wants to make Yugoslavia standard on its own communist way, separate from the Soviet way, which makes Stalin Absolutely furious. And when they in Moscow, they discover that they now have this illegal who will have personal access to Tito. He's already met him in person once to give his credentials. They decide he's in the perfect place to kill him. And so they set up a kind of whole range of options of how he might kill him. One of them is that he will have an audience with Tito. And during this audience, he will open a small box which contains plague powder. And everyone will die of plague except for the Costa Rican ambassador, who will have been pre vaccinated. And they're just deciding in Moscow which one of these options they're going to use. A meeting is set, and then at the last minute, Stalin dies. And luckily, I think, both for Tito and for Joseph Grigoevich, this mission is called off. And not long after that, he's withdrawn back to Moscow. And the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry wonders what on earth has happened to its ambassador in Rome, and has no idea what happened until the 1990s, more than four decades later, when the name Joseph Grigorlevich and his whole backstory comes out. One of the most fascinating characters from the earlier Legals program is a guy called Dmitry Bystralotov. He was born in 1901, so he was growing up during this revolutionary period. And many people at the time, he had a youth that was sort of conducive later on to taking on different roles because he spent some time living in poverty. He had some aristocratic upbringing. He was in Russia during the Civil War. And by the time he washes up in Czechoslovakia when he's about 25, he already speaks five or six languages, he's already worked all kinds of jobs. He's completely used to this sort of chameleon like existence. And he gets recruited by the new Foreign Intelligence Service. And after some time working as a legal operative out of the embassy in Prague, where he's posing as a Soviet trade official, but actually he's trying to steal secrets. They say, you know, you really have a talent for this. We want you to be an illegal. So he then goes on to this extraordinary career posing as all kinds of different personalities. The one he uses the most is a sort of down on his luck Hungarian count called Jozef Perelli. And in this identity, he works in London using a mix of charm and blackmail. He handles a British Foreign Office official who basically hands over suitcases full of Britain's diplomatic correspondence at the time. And after handling him for several years, he sleeps with his wife. He really fills up folders full of secret documents, and then he disappears without the Brits ever realizing that the Soviet Union had a hand in this. So really extraordinary operative and did a lot for the Soviet cause. And then in 1938, he's arrested, he's tortured, he's thrown in jail, he's accused of being a foreign spy. Basically in the document that he's after, he's tortured to such a degree that he eventually agrees to sign, he admits that the whole time he was the Czechoslovakia's illegal spy in Moscow. So essentially they were saying, you're a Czechoslovak illegal pretending to be a Soviet illegal pretending to be a Hungarian count. It's the most mind bending logic. And he holds out from the torture for long enough that he misses the period of the purges where everybody's being shot. But he's still sent to the gulag for 20 years. And he doesn't come out till 1954, just after Stalin dies. So this is kind of emblematic that you have somebody who's so good at what he. He does. He puts in this incredible shift for the Soviet cause and then he ends up being sent to the Gulag because they decide that after all of this, it's all been an act and he's a spy himself for the West.

[Danny Byrd]

So does that make him a triple agent or something like that?

[Shaun Walker]

Exactly, something like that. Yeah.

[Danny Byrd]

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[Danny Byrd]

Now it's a verbo. Make it a verbo. You raise an interesting point there because I was wondering. Throughout the Second World War, the Soviet Union and most of the west, the United States, Britain, etc, were allies obviously against Nazi Germany. How did this program fare during that conflict? Was it still active? Was the Soviet Union still using these legals against countries that they were supposedly allied with?

[Shaun Walker]

The Second World War is a really interesting time. There's not that much spying that's going on using illegals against the Allies. But that's partly exactly because of the purges on the eve of the war. So many of the operatives who were in the United States or in Europe were withdrawn back to Moscow under suspicion. Some of them were shot. So the purges right on the eve of the war really destroy the espionage network. And in fact, some of the illegals working in Nazi Germany send back intelligence in 1941 that Hitler is about to launch an attack on the Soviet Union. But it doesn't fit Stalin's worldview and it's ignored during the wartime. The Soviet Union continues to use illegals against Nazi Germany. It drops a lot of them behind enemy lines. Some of them carry out quite incredible missions posing as Nazi soldiers. And in one case, an illegal even manages to help organize the assassination of the Nazi governor of Belarus. But of course, at the same time as this work against Nazi Germany, espionage against the Allies is continuing. And in the final years of the war, the Russians send back a guy called Ishak Akhmarov, who was an amazing pre war illegal who worked in the US and he was withdrawn in the purges he was sort of demoted, but he somehow by the skin of his teeth, managed to avoid being arrested. He gets sent back, he handles a whole bunch of sensitive US government sources. And yeah, what we see as the Cold War starts to kick off, even before anyone quite realizes that the Cold War is kicking off in 1945, 46, is that there's already a large number of Soviet spies in place in the west and that Stalin and the Soviet Union seem much better prepared for the start of this conflict that's coming than the west is, who you don't really have any spies or sources in Moscow.

[Danny Byrd]

Now, while Soviet espionage was obviously aimed at the west, to what extent was it also inflicted on the USSR's own allies? Did Moscow ever deploy its spycraft, including illegals within the Eastern Bloc?

[Shaun Walker]

Absolutely. And this is really another moment where I felt that the history of the illegals program gives you this really interesting and telling reflection of the history of the Soviet Union itself. Because what happens in 1968 when in Czechoslovakia, the local Communist Party starts trying to implement some reforms? Society is really hungry for reforms. And this becomes known as the Prague Spring. It didn't want to completely get rid of Communism, but it wanted to liberalize. And this was seen as a huge threat in Moscow. And the new Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, he remembers that in 1956 in Hungary, when there had been an uprising. He was the ambassador at that time, and he remembers how quickly things spiraled out of control and how the reporting from the local KGB station and from their Hungarian allies didn't give them a true insight into society. So he looks at what's happening in Prague, and he thinks the illegals offer the ideal opportunity to get a much more rounded sense of what's happening, because what they have is this whole group of supposed Westerners who they can send. In newly liberal Czechoslovakia, it's quite easy to get a visa and to come as a tourist. So they send in more than a dozen illegals posing as Austrians, Swiss, one Mexican, there's a Lebanese carpet dealer, and they all descend on Prague. Many of them have tasks to kind of get to know the dissidents and to portray themselves as supporters of the Prague Spring, to maybe even hint that they're working for Western intelligence and could help them out, and by this, to receive information, intelligence on the plans of the leading lights of the Prague Spring and essentially to undermine everything that they're doing. And this works fantastically well. There's no sign that anyone at the time ever suspected that these foreigners were, in fact, working for the kgb. And Andropov and the KGB in Moscow was so happy with this operation, which was called Operation Progress, that they decided to continue it. And so for the rest of the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s, illegals were deployed across the supposedly friendly states, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria. The local authorities were not told. And Moscow used that as a way to either carry out some active tasks or. Or to simply get a sense of the real mood in society. And I think this is really telling that, you know, this moment, the illegals in the capitalist world in the west were producing much less of value than they had done earlier in the 20s and 30s. And so this form of spying that was basically designed as a brilliant way to infiltrate the west turns out to be put to the biggest use to stifle dissent at home.

[Danny Byrd]

And as the Cold War progressed, there was detente. There was, particularly under the Gorbachev years, not exactly a reconciliation between east and west, but there was a warmth developing between Moscow, Washington, London, etc. Did the program show any sign of being wound down during those years, or was it still very much in play throughout?

[Shaun Walker]

So right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the program keeps going. And one place where Gorbachev's perestroika, his attempts to open up society and to liberalize, doesn't really filter through is the kgb. And so illegals were being trained right up until the final years of the Soviet Union. There were several Soviet spies for the US who were unmasked when the Soviets managed to turn a mole inside the CIA, Aldrich Ames. And they were shot. They were executed in the mid-80s, just when Gorbachev was starting to talk about openness. So this idea that the Soviet Union was going to liberalize to the world, the KGB was very much against that. And, you know, I spoke to illegals who were trained in 86, 87 and sent out to Canada with the eventual goal to penetrate the US without really having any of this sense that everything was winding down and this was a new open world. When the program does start to disintegrate is exactly that, that moment of collapse. And this is an extraordinary moment for the illegals in the field, because when you're, when you're out there posing as a foreigner in a foreign skin, you're not supposed to be following news from home. You're supposed to distance yourself as much as possible from anything Soviet. So for many of these illegals, they were shocked to see that this system that they'd sworn their allegiance to had suddenly disintegrated. And the messages that they would be receiving by radio every week stopped coming, the money stopped coming. And for a period in the 1990s, they were essentially left to fend for themselves. So some of them decided to go back home, some of them decided to stick it out because they rather like their new cover lives. And they would wait and see what happened. Maybe if Russia and the west were really going to be friends forever, they would just simply live out their. Their new lives that they'd built as Canadians or Germans or whatever. So you have this period of uncertainty in the 90s. But then, of course, at the end of the decade, Vladimir Putin, a former illegal support officer in the KGB himself, takes over Russia. And very quickly, the funding, the prestige and the orders to infiltrate the west.

[Danny Byrd]

Return, as you've just alluded to there. It was revived under Putin. And I'm curious to know, how has post Soviet Russia engaged with or even celebrated these spies. And how have they been woven into the, the broader myth of Russian strength and historical destiny?

[Shaun Walker]

Well, Vladimir Putin loves the illegals. He talks about them a lot. He says, he said on many occasions that these are incredible spies, that nobody else has anything like the illegals, and that they're Russia's most impressive and most dangerous weapon when it comes to espionage. Now, that's partly true, of course. When you listen to Putin, you miss out the, the many stories that I write about in my book, particularly later in the Soviet period where illegals didn't seem to be achieving that much. You leave out all of this extraordinary psychological toll that this sort of work takes both on the illegals themselves and on the people around them. There's a lot of broken and confused lives that I write about, and instead what you're left with in the Putin narrative is this sort of glorious sacrifice that fits quite nicely into his idea that Russia runs on these ideals of patriotism and virtue and sacrifice in comparison to the sort of decadent, decaying West. And there's really been, in the past years, there's been a real, almost a cult of the illegal. Back in the Soviet period, there were one or two television series, you know, feature series, but the names of the illegals were secret, they weren't celebrated. Your average Soviet citizen would never have heard of them. What we have now is a situation where very regularly there's documentaries on television featuring the supposed feats of past illegals. There's been even some statues erected to former illegals in different Russian cities. And while the archives remain firmly closed, very carefully selected authors, usually with KGB past themselves, are allowed to write carefully curated histories about particular illegals. So all of this feeds in to a narrative of these wonderful and glorious spies.

[Danny Byrd]

Looking at how the illegals operated, which was often slow, methodical infiltration over many years, do you see a direct link between that Cold War mindset and today's Russian disinformation strategies? And how has that old model of long term subversion adapted to the digital age?

[Shaun Walker]

I think one of the most mind bending things about the illegals program was the long horizons, the thinking not about the intelligence you might get next week or next month, but thinking really in decades. And we still see that with the way that Russia uses illegals today. Just last year there was a spy exchange where a couple, a pair of illegals who'd been dispatched in 2012 had spent 12 years living abroad posing as an Argentinian couple, were returned to Moscow. So we're still seeing Russia thinking in this long term when it comes to illegals. But of course, both in the Soviet period and now, illegals were just one part of the whole range of different kinds of operatives and tactics that Moscow uses. One place where I think there's been quite an interesting sort of meshing of concepts when it comes to the modern world is in the way that Russia carries out one aspect of its disinformation. So the way it's carried out certain election meddling operations, of course, the most well known of that being 2016 in the United States, where we saw various different parts of the Russian intelligence apparatus intervening with a goal, it seems, to help Donald Trump. And one way in which they did this was to create fake American Personas on Facebook and using these Personas, contact real Trump supporters and offer to help them organize rallies, offer to help fund them. And in a number of cases, this actually worked. And so somebody sitting at a computer in St. Petersburg could be directing organizers on the ground in, for example, Florida and helping them to set up a Trump rally. And then on the day, they would just say, oh, unfortunately, I couldn't make it in person, but. But, you know, thanks for your help. And this is something where, you know, it's quite extraordinary when you compare it to the Soviet period. So to create a fake American previously, that would take years of training. We do have to go through this whole illegals program. And then once they got there, you wouldn't want to risk this operative, after all of those years of preparation, on setting up a rally. And what if somebody gets suspicious about them and then you've busted the whole career. Whereas in this case, you create a Facebook page, if somebody gets suspicious about it, it's busted. Then you close down the Facebook page, you set up another one. It takes 10 minutes. So this is sort of adapting the concepts of using foreign identities so that people don't suspect that they're linked to Moscow. But being able to use the digital world to make it much quicker, dirtier, and more deniable.

[Danny Byrd]

2010 represented a major watershed moment in the history of this program when the west finally exposed the full extent of this illegal's operation on its own soil. Did the scale of that program come as a shock, or had it been something the Western agencies had been tracking in the background for some time to.

[Shaun Walker]

The world at large? It came as a shock, certainly to me. At the time, I was living in Moscow, and it seemed like this extraordinary Cold War throwback, that among these agents, there were people who'd lived in their foreign covers for 20, 30 years since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I think most people thought that this was a kind of spying that had ended with the Cold War. It certainly wasn't such a shock to the FBI, because the FBI had actually been following some of these operatives for a decade because they had turned a spy for the svr, for Russia's intelligence agency. He'd been posted to New York in the late 1990s, and he. He was posted under diplomatic cover at the U.N. somehow the FBI managed to turn him, and then when he went back to Moscow, he ended up getting this really prime job of working in the illegals department on the North American illegals. So he was one of, you know, really a handful, three or four people in the SVR headquarters who knew who had access to the full files of these illegals. He knew where they were, he knew what their real names, and he knew what their cover names were. And so he passed this on to the Americans and they tracked them for 10 years. And this. This was really, I mean, one of the most extraordinary things about this bust for me. So you have a couple there who were arrested in Boston in 2010. They'd been abroad for 23 years. They had two children who were 16 and 20 at the time of their arrests. And their children thought they were ordinary Canadian Americans growing up in Boston. And so for 10 years, the last 10 years, the FBI has known all about them, and yet they've been lying even to their own children about who they are. So that was the first case that got me interested in legals, and it sort of brought home both the scale of the. The espionage, but also sometimes just how frustrating and pointless it can be that, you know, if all you're. All you need is one person in Moscow to give you away. And all these years of training and all these years of deception turn out to be fruitless.

[Danny Byrd]

I think that's really interesting, especially going back to the period of Stalin and the Great Terror and the fact that these people spend decades living a lie, essentially. But to what extent do they almost become the lie, if you see what I mean? Like, do they just adopt a new identity and step into it and abandon their old identity? Is there any example of that that you came across?

[Shaun Walker]

Yeah, there are some examples of that, and I think it depends on the operative. So some people got very, very adept at separating their real identity and their cover identity, but keeping them both alive. So there was one guy I spoke to who's. Who was an East German and was given an American cover, and he had a wife back in East Germany, and then he also got married in America. And he said, you know, neither of my identities ever cheated on a woman. They were just separately dating different people. And then you have people who just couldn't handle it at all and have some kind of mental collapse crisis and have to be withdrawn or in some cases, defect. And then indeed, you have some people who get so into their new identity that it's. It becomes their primary identity. There's a few cases of this. I'll give you two examples. So one is the oldest illegal who was returned in that 2010 swap. He'd been deployed back in the 1970s, so he was out for 35 years. His real name was Mikhail Vasinkov, but he had the COVID of a Uruguayan, Peruvian photographer called Juan Lazaro. And he'd been in this Juan Lazaro identity for 35 years. He was already retired. He retired in 2004, but he would sort of pick up a pension, so to speak, in cash from a handler once a year. So he was never intending to go back to Russia. He basically was going to live out his life in New York until he was arrested. And I was told by people that spoke to him that when he got back to Russia, he couldn't really remember how to speak Russian properly, and he spoke it with a sort of crazy accent. One other example, which I found fascinating, was something that was told to me by a source in an Eastern European country, because in addition to using its own Soviet illegals to spy in Operation Progress on the Eastern Bloc countries, at the same time, Moscow also set up satellite illegals programs in all of these countries. So it helped the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Poles, the Bulgarians to train their own illegals and then shared that intelligence. And I was told that when one of these countries, long after the collapse of communism, was preparing to join NATO, the eu, they were doing an audit of the old intelligence files, and they suddenly realized that their service had sent out a bunch of illegals back in the 70s and 80s, and they'd just gone dark and they'd forgotten about them. The, you know, communism had collapsed. Nobody, nobody thought to check in on them. And so now, with this country about to join the Western alliance, they thought we were going to have to go and work out what's happened to these people. So they dispatched a senior officer to go and knock on the door of these illegals. And they found one guy who, who basically said, I'm married to somebody who doesn't know my background. I've got kids. They don't know my background. This is my life now. I'm not coming back. I don't spy anymore. Leave me alone. And they went back and they had a discussion in the home capital. And they decided, actually, it's probably better if we just leave this guy to his new life as it is. And they left him there. So that was a fascinating case of a kind of illegal who took on their identity, new identity to such an extent they refused to go back to their old identity.

[Podcast Host]

That was Shaun Walker speaking to Danny Bird. Shawn is the Guardian's central and Eastern European correspondent. Previously, he spent more than a decade in Moscow, and his book, the Illegals Russia's Most Audacious Spies. And the Plot to Infiltrate the west is out now.