Spare a thought for Tim and Alex Foley. It was Tim’s 20th birthday when, on June 27th, 2010, the FBI pushed their way into the family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and snapped the cuffs on their parents, Don and Ann.
Turns out their parents, who had never even hinted it to their sons, were actually Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, KGB “illegal” agents. The brothers found this hard to believe but the truth sunk in once their Canadian citizenship was stripped and they found themselves in Moscow, “expected to start a new life in a country they had never previously set foot in”.
If this sounds like the plot of streaming spy caper The Americans, then Shaun Walker’s history of “illegals” – as opposed to “legal” intelligence officers stationed in embassies – that stretches all the way back to Lenin and Trotsky hiding in London from the Tsar, proves fact a lot more clandestine than fiction.
Once the Bolsheviks were in power, “Moscow’s illegals roamed Europe at will” long before the United States even had a dedicated foreign intelligence service. The adventures of Dmitri Bystrolyotov deserve a book on their own. He seduced secretaries in Nazi Germany, lived with Tuareg tribes, and “at other times he took on the guise of a Yugoslav butcher, a jaundiced English lord, or a Norwegian herring salesman”.
Walker’s thrilling book also serves as a potted history of communist Russia, taking in everything from the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico (by an illegal), Stalin ignoring warnings about Hitler’s invasion, a near miss for Yugoslav leader Tito and the rise of Putin. Lest we think that Ireland was spared, there’s also the case of Yuri Linov who was sent to Dublin to “scout for interesting contacts, particularly Americans” in the mid-1960s.
[ Deep-cover Soviet spy in Ireland posed as travelling salesman and chess buffOpens in new window ]
He paid his way by going door-to-door selling bath mats and television magnifying devices. “Usually, spies have to find ways to coax important information from reluctant targets, but in Ireland Yuri had the opposite problem.” Apparently, he couldn’t get people to shut up, although it’s unclear if the gossip was of much use to the Kremlin.
As Walker points out, we had still not established diplomatic relations with the USSR at that point so this “Austrian bath mat salesman” was in effect “Moscow’s top representative on Irish territory, even if nobody in Ireland knew it”.
