The illegals Russia's most audacious spies and their century-long mission to infiltrate the West

While most nations use intelligence operatives to obtain knowledge not publicly available about other countries, the Soviet Union took the concept to extremes by creating remarkably elaborate false identities for their spies. These operatives were called the illegals. Walker's deep dive into the KGB's extensive program is a fascinating story of espionage that spans the Bolshevik Revolution, the Stalinist purges, WWII, and the brutal USSR. Under the KGB agent-turned-president Putin, the illegals were resurrected as social media trolls disseminating toxic disinformation to influence and disrupt the U.S. Paranoia, frustration, and family secrets permeate this study of konspiratsiya (subterfuge). Walker's chronicle has all the elements of a great spy novel--assassinations, invisible ink, radio encryption, sabotage, misdirection, and treachery. Walker also examines the efficacy of the program. Was it really worth the resources dedicated to training and inserting agents who ended up as mere messengers and menial laborers in the West? Walker puts a human face on the illegals, especially agents in arranged marriages who had to live complicated lies, forbidden to speak Russian even in private and forced to conceal the truth from their children. Many illegals cracked under the strain and had to be withdrawn from service. The Illegals is outstanding in its engaging details and harrowing disclosures.

On the hunt for Soviet and Russian spies from Lenin's time to our own. It's the stuff of TV drama (The Americans) brought to real life: From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian spies were sent abroad to gather intelligence. Many were posted as diplomats, which meant that counterintelligence agencies could easily keep track of them; others went abroad as journalists, academics, businesspeople. But early on, writesGuardian international correspondent Walker, the "father of Russian intelligence," a man named Meer Trilisser, was putting "illegals," Soviet spies posing as natives of the countries in which they were working, to work. Trilisser himself, "posing as a specialist on Gothic architecture…traveled to Berlin, ostensibly to attend an academic conference," but used the occasion to connect with an undercover agent. In time, writes Walker, "the Soviets were far ahead of their adversaries when it came to espionage," emboldened enough to begin to insert illegals, once almost exclusively male but eventually including women, into countries under cover so deep that their children didn't know they were spies. Such was the case with Don Heathfield (né Andrei Bezrukov) and Ann Foley (née Elena Vavilova), whom the FBI arrested in June 2010, posing as a married Canadian couple working in Boston, having taken their identities from real Canadians who had died in infancy. Elena/Ann styled herself as a soccer mom, "but once the kids were tucked away in bed, she crept into a back room and decrypted radio messages from Moscow." Both, working for first the KGB and then Russia's new SVR, were traded for Western spies imprisoned in Russia. There are surely more illegals out there, Walker concludes, especially since after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, "ordinary" Russians traveling abroad are subject to greater scrutiny than before. A fast-paced tale of real-world spycraft that will have you wondering whether your neighbors are who they say they are. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.