The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

Drawing on archival materials and hundreds of interviews, including with former spies, Walker crafts a fascinating account of Soviet and Russian agents planted in various countries under false names and identities. His narrative starts in the 1920s, when Bolsheviks excelled in espionage by drawing on their prior experience with clandestine activities in tsarist Russia—and on the abundance of communist sympathizers in European capitals. Among that period’s most remarkable “illegals” was Dmitri Bystrolyotov, who posed as a Hungarian count, a Canadian painter, a Greek merchant, a Dutch artist, an Austrian traveler, and a British aristocrat. This early generation of Soviet spies was mostly exterminated during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. In the following decades, Soviet authorities remained committed to producing agents who could pass as Westerners, but, as Walker convincingly demonstrates, these operations became increasingly inefficient. In a recent illustration, ten agents from the Soviet era who had long lived in the United States produced very little, if any, valuable intelligence before they were exposed in 2010. According to the FBI, some of their moves were “comically inept.”