Spies among us? Shaun Walker's new book details Russia’s decades-long international espionage program
It could be a scene from a thriller — watching the FBI arrest your own parents for being Russian spies. But for Alexander and Timothy Vavilov, who had known their parents all their lives as Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, it was reality.
Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, the real names of the boys’ parents, were two of the Russian sleeper agents apprehended in the U.S. in 2010 as part of the Illegals Program. Their arrest caused a media frenzy, sparking a renewed interest in Cold War–era espionage, and even inspired the acclaimed TV series "The Americans."
The couple was part of the Russian foreign intelligence service's deep cover spy program, and their arrest, along with eight other operatives, represented the ultimate failure of the decades-long endeavor. Journalist Shaun Walker dives deep into this unforgiving and shadowy world in his new book, "The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West."
As Walker notes in the book, the Soviets were well ahead of the U.S., the U.K., and other nations in building overseas intelligence networks out of necessity. Many Western governments didn’t immediately recognize the Bolshevik regime, leaving the Soviets with few embassies to provide cover for their operatives. Dubbed "illegals," these intelligence operatives maintained no overt connection to the Soviet Union — oftentimes pretending to be from a different country — or its government, operating entirely without diplomatic protections.
They integrated into foreign societies for years, often decades, leveraging their deep cover to collect political, economic, and technological intelligence. In addition, they influenced key individuals and institutions and recruited foreign agents, some of whom did not even realize they were serving Soviet interests.
Still, despite the Soviets’ early success in building foreign intelligence networks, their program ultimately unraveled under decades of pressure from global crises, internal divisions, poor preparation for the psychological toll on "illegals," and other systemic weaknesses.
Walker draws a contrast between the "illegals" trained under the Soviet system and those cultivated in post-Soviet Russia. Forged in the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution and the global turmoil of World War II, the earliest Soviet-era operatives endured years of rigorous training that instilled ingenuity, discipline, and a near-chameleon ability to blend seamlessly into local populations. Many of the Soviet foreign service’s most celebrated figures were deployed to hunt down German military secrets as fascism rose in Europe, while later, during World War II, others blended into the populace of Nazi-occupied Soviet towns to eliminate collaborators.
Yet, despite their accomplishments, these operatives were treated as expendable tools of the state — much like the soldiers currently fighting and dying en masse for Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine today.
A striking illustration of this is the fate of Dmitri Bystrolyotov. Despite all his accomplishments during his years of service, Bystrolyotov was arrested in 1937 during the height of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges, also known as the Great Terror, which is estimated to have claimed as many as 1.2 million lives. After being tortured into a forced confession of collaboration, Bystrolyotov was sentenced to twenty years in the gulags — forced labor camps — and ultimately served 16 years before being released in 1954.
Despite widespread fears about the rise of fascism in Europe, Stalin nevertheless signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 — a decision that, as Walker notes, some "illegals" even struggled to make sense of. Nazi Germany would launch its invasion of the Soviet Union just two years later. Among the most significant intelligence assets at the time who had tried to warn Stalin about the invasion was Richard Sorge, a German-born Soviet spy operating in Japan under the guise of a journalist.
Sorge provided Moscow with critical intelligence on Nazi Germany’s intentions, including advance warning of Operation Barbarossa, the German codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Yet Stalin, convinced that such reports were part of a British disinformation campaign designed to sabotage the Soviets, dismissed Sorge and other operatives’ warnings — an act of distrust that would prove disastrous when the German assault began in 1941. This was the prime example of how, even when vital intelligence was obtained for the Soviets by "illegals," it rarely underwent rigorous analysis or influenced decision-making.
Over the past 25 years of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, Moscow's use of "illegals" has evolved into a tool for creating and sustaining the myth of an all-powerful Russia. As the state-controlled media fostered a constant, polarizing narrative for perpetual conflict with the West, the identities of several of the country’s most famous "illegals" were revealed to the public. Their lives were retold in the mass media with cinematic flair— notably omitting compromising details like how the Soviet authorities turned on many of them.
This polished narrative has left no room for the human cost of work as "illegals:" the loneliness, the years spent apart from family, the guilt of living a double life, and the quiet suffering of those later betrayed or killed by the state. In this official state version of history, they are not complex individuals but flawless, one-dimensional "heroes."
This reinterpretation of history also applies to the Russian operatives apprehended by the U.S. Justice Department in the summer of 2010. Their arrest was the result of years of surveillance, initiated after a double agent exposed the existence of the spy program to authorities. As Walker observes, not only were they less well-equipped than the illegals of previous generations, but they were also tasked with gathering intelligence that would have been more efficiently acquired through formal channels — underscoring Putin and his inner circle’s enduring preference for covert operatives and fieldwork, a legacy of their KGB roots. When the operatives returned to Russia, they received a hero's welcome.
Events like the U.S. exposure of the Illegals Program operating on its soil, as well as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a decade later — which has severely restricted the movement of Russian nationals — effectively sounded the death knell for the traditional spy network. Yet, as Walker notes, the digital era offered new avenues: troll farms, including those run by former Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, were designed to sow discord, particularly among the American public. From computers in Russia, operators could impersonate U.S. citizens and disseminate disinformation online, even possibly influencing the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.
There is no clear indication as to whether the Illegals Program continues to operate today, one Western intelligence officer confides to Walker. Yet, the officer adds, a single successful operation can yield an outsized impact. Similarly, a source within Russian intelligence, speaking through an intermediary, emphasizes to Walker that despite the contemporary reliance on technology, human intelligence operations retain their strategic relevance. Even amid the formidable challenges of deploying illegals in the modern era, the payoff, the source insists, justifies the effort: "At the moment of truth, you still need a person on the ground."
While the tangible impact of intelligence gathered by "illegals" remains debated, the Kremlin’s "cult of illegals" in recent years suggests that its greatest achievement is psychological. Specifically, it fosters the notion that Russians can be embedded anywhere in the West, living undetected and poised to undermine it at any moment.
Frustratingly, the West appears to perpetually indulge in these Russian narratives of inherent superiority, when a more productive approach would be to look past the myth and recognize just how precarious this projection of Russian strength is — something the Kremlin itself has repeatedly failed to do at the peril not only of the world but its own people.
Note from the author:
Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this article. There is an ever-increasing amount of books about or related to Ukraine, Russia, and Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine available to English-language readers, and I hope my recommendations prove useful when it comes to your next trip to the bookstore. If you like reading about this sort of thing, please consider supporting The Kyiv Independent.
