- THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY-LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST
- By Shaun Walker
- Knopf, pp.448
Fifteen years ago, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann Foley, took their two sons out to an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to celebrate their son Tim’s 20th birthday. They returned home and continued the celebrations – only to be disturbed by loud knocking at the door.
The visitors, dressed in black, snapped handcuffs on the couple, led them out of the house to a matching black car – all to the amazement of their two open-mouthed sons.
Ann Foley was, in reality, Elena Vavilova, born in Siberia. Her husband, it turned out, was Andrei Bezrukov. Both were deep-cover illegals, originally planted in Canada by the KGB in the 1980s and reactivated by Putin’s people after the fall of the Soviet Union.
They had spent many years being programmed by the KGB to become fresh, bright-eyed, all-American citizens – and played out a daily charade for the benefit of everyone, including their sons.
The two boys only accepted the dramatic truth when they were shown photographs of their parents in their youth – wearing KGB uniforms.
The FBI removed 191 items from the home, including the boys’ PlayStation. Andrei and Elena were later exchanged for, among others, Sergei Skripal – later the object of a botched Novichok poisoning by Russian agents in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
This episode is the first of many described in Shaun Walker’s 2025 book The Illegals. The author, an international correspondent for The Guardian, notes that their Soviet predecessors were meticulous in the painstaking process of transforming their agents. He quotes Bernard Hutton (Josef Heisler), who notes that in the area of Gaczyna, Russia, there were exact replicas of Western cities.
He writes that in the 60-square meter British zone, “The inhabitants wore British clothes, ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, traveled to their English-speaking jobs on real London buses, received their salaries in pounds, which they could use to purchase genuine British products in the shops.”
Other writers have cast doubt on whether this location really existed.
The illegals
Shortly after the 1917 October Revolution, Meir Abramovich Trilisser, head of the foreign department of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB), introduced the “illegals” as a weapon of Soviet infiltration, observation, and subversion into an anti-Communist West. An early success was the capture of British agent Sidney Reilly, aka Shlomo Rosenblum, nicknamed “Our Ace of Spies” and probably the inspiration for James Bond.
On Stalin’s orders, Trilisser carried out a purge of foreign Communists living in the USSR, which resulted in the deaths of many Jewish Communists. Trilisser met a similar fate; he was arrested in November 1938 and executed in February 1940.
Walker further describes an April 1953 meeting between Teodoro Castro, a Costa Rican diplomat, with Marshal Tito, head of Communist Yugoslavia. Castro was, in fact, Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet agent whose father was a Lithuanian Karaite, a sect that had broken away from Judaism.
Grigulevich had a history of instigation and involvement in eliminating Joseph Stalin’s ideological opponents abroad. During the Spanish Civil War, he was involved in the disappearance and murder of Andrés Nin of the POUM – the group to which George Orwell belonged when he fought in Spain.
Grigulevich was also one of the leaders of the failed first attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. His mission in Yugoslavia was to plan the killing of Tito, who had taken his country in a different Communist direction, and thereby infuriated Stalin.
Grigulevich was recalled to Moscow when it was feared that his cover had been blown. He reinvented himself as a Soviet academic, specializing in Latin America, leaving his first 40 years on his resume blank.
Yuri Linov worked as a Soviet spy in Vienna, Dublin, and Brussels – and even attempted to learn Irish Gaelic. After the 1967 Six Day War, the USSR increasingly focused its attention on Israel. It had broken off diplomatic relations and faced a growing Jewish emigration movement that demanded to depart for Israel.
The USSR was also confronted by incorruptible writers, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and by human rights activists such as Andrei Sakharov. In the early 1970s, Linov, posing as Karl Bernd Motl, was sent to Israel as an illegal.
His cover story was that he had recently discovered that his grandmother was Jewish, and he had become absorbed by this aspect of his heritage. He therefore proceeded to learn Hebrew, registered at Ulpan Etzion in Jerusalem, where he was the top of his class.He sent regular reports back to Moscow about every facet of Israeli life. He read The Jerusalem Post at breakfast every morning. Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB and later a Soviet president, assiduously read Linov’s reports from Israel.
In reality, Linov was more interested in the nuclear facilities at Dimona and was in contact with other spies living in Israel. Golda Meir ordered his arrest, and after weeks of interrogation he finally admitted that he was a Soviet illegal.
He was tried and sentenced to 18 years in prison but was quickly exchanged for Silva Zalmanson. Together with other Soviet Jews, she had been involved in the June 1970 attempt to take a light aircraft from Leningrad’s Smolney airport, fly over the Soviet border, and head to Israel.
In an age of artificial intelligence, the author asks whether it is still necessary to utilize the services of illegals. Why need real illegals when it is possible to construct artificial ones?
He points out that the hundreds of trolls, employed at the Internet Research Agency on Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg, churn out fake news, downright lies, and conspiracy theories daily to attract the gullible and vulnerable. Walker cites the fabrication of “Matt Skiber,” an administrator of Being Patriotic – a virtual illegal – whose task was to galvanize Americans to vote for Donald Trump.
In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his support for real illegals, not manufactured ones, at a conference of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. “Illegals are built in a particular way, with strong morals and a firm character,” he said. “We are proud of them!”
This was the genesis of a public campaign to present them as Russian heroes and committed patriots. Such undiluted displays of nationalism reached their apogee with the invasion of Ukraine three years ago. During this time, Russian illegals have been arrested in Ljubljana, Naples, Tromso, and other locations.
Putin’s minions have found it more and more difficult to cover their tracks due to open source material, such as Russia’s passport database, which can be utilized to detect the real identity of illegals, using facial recognition technology.
The author also notes that widespread corruption in Russia has led to “a flourishing black market in personal data.” All this proved remarkably useful to the Bellingcat investigation into the Novichok poisonings and its unmasking of its perpetrators, Aleksandr Mishkin, Anatoly Chepiga, and Denis Sergeev.
Any book about spies is almost by definition an absorbing read. Shaun Walker’s book mixes insights and revelations about espionage with popular storytelling. It conveys the combination of pain, anguish, and fear with the adrenaline of playing the game.As Ann Foley, aka Elena Vavilova, remarks at the beginning of this enticing book: “A spy is an actor, but an actor that does not need a public or a stage.”
Jerusalem Post 18 July 2025