It was a muggy, overcast afternoon in June 2010 when Ann Foley’s life unraveled. The day had received off to a pleasing sufficient begin; Ann and her husband, Don, took their two sons, Tim and Alex, for a celebratory lunch at an Indian restaurant not removed from the household house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Tim’s twentieth birthday, and he was again from D.C. for the summer time after ending his sophomore 12 months at George Washington College. After the meal, the 4 walked again to the home that Don and Ann had bought close to Harvard Sq. just some weeks earlier than. With three tales and a portico over the entrance door, it was by far the grandest place that they had ever lived, reflecting the household’s enhancing fortunes. Don’s consultancy start-up was doing properly, whereas Ann had lately taken a job in actual property. In the lounge, Don opened a bottle of champagne, to lengthen the festivities. After a toast, Tim went upstairs to his bed room.

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A bit later, there was a loud knocking on the door. Ann thought it should be mates of Tim’s, coming to want him a contented birthday. “A shock go to,” she known as out to Alex, who was on his manner up the steps to verify on his older brother. She opened the door to a bunch of males wearing black. “FBI,” they shouted, pushing their manner in. Two pairs of brokers hustled Don and Ann into separate corners of the open-plan lounge and snapped cuffs on their wrists. Later, Alex watched by means of the home windows as his mother and father had been marched out of the entrance door, down the redbrick path, and into ready black automobiles. The officers declined to inform the 2 brothers what was occurring, however Alex assumed there will need to have been a horrible mistake. He couldn’t think about what his slightly boring mother and father might have completed to warrant this type of dramatic raid.

The extra I examine this system, the extra I felt it supplied an interesting solution to inform a a lot larger story, of the entire Soviet experiment and its final failure.

9 years after the arrests, on a heat Moscow afternoon in the summertime of 2019, I made my solution to meet the girl who had as soon as been often called Ann Foley. She had prompt a energetic French-themed café, not removed from Gorky Park. Many of the faux-rustic tables had been occupied by younger, well-dressed Muscovites, a part of a nascent center class that had appeared throughout the lengthy years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. I discovered a free seat, and after a couple of minutes she arrived. In her mid-fifties, with a bob of blond hair, she was wearing a sky-blue shirt and wore a chunky necklace. She smiled warmly, shook my hand, and took a seat. The waiter got here, and she or he ordered a cappuccino in Russian earlier than switching again to English. She spoke each languages flawlessly, however someplace within the cadences of her English speech I might hear a faint Russian twang. I questioned whether or not I might have picked up on the accent if I had met her a decade earlier in the USA. And would I’ve thought, as I did now, that there was one thing distinctly Slavic about her facial options? Virtually definitely not. Again then, no person had any suspicions about Ann Foley, the pleasant part-time actual property agent from Canada.

In actuality, Ann Foley was neither pleasant nor working in actual property. She was lifeless. The true Ann Foley was born in September 1962 at Montreal Basic Hospital and died seven weeks later, of viral meningitis. Her mother and father, the newlyweds Edward and Pauline, had been left with simply two small pictures to remind them of the daughter who got here into their lives so briefly. Greater than twenty years later, Canadian authorities acquired a request for a reproduction beginning certificates, apparently from Ann Foley herself. Nobody questioned or cross-checked the request; information weren’t but digitized and centralized. The authorities issued a beginning certificates and later a passport. Ann Foley got here again to life.

The girl sitting reverse me within the café had spent greater than twenty years residing as Ann Foley from Montreal, proper till the day the FBI got here knocking, fooling her neighbors, her mates, and even her personal youngsters. In reality, she was Elena Vavilova, born and raised in Soviet Siberia. Elena was an unlawful, a deep-cover spy educated by the KGB. Her husband, Don, was additionally a KGB unlawful; his beginning identify was Andrei Bezrukov.

Elena and Andrei met within the early Nineteen Eighties as historical past college students within the Siberian metropolis of Tomsk. KGB spotters chosen them for preliminary vetting. Later, they progressed to an arduous coaching program lasting a number of years, molding their language, mannerisms, and identities into these of an odd Canadian couple. They left the Soviet Union individually in 1987, staged a gathering in Canada, and commenced a relationship as if that they had simply met. They wed a second time, as Don and Ann, and settled in Toronto, the place Elena gave beginning to their two sons, Tim and Alex.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and for just a few years the 2 illegals had been left to fend for themselves. However by the tip of the last decade, the previous KGB officer Vladimir Putin had come to energy in Moscow. Andrei and Elena started spying once more in earnest, now for the SVR, the international intelligence company of the brand new Russia. As Don Heathfield, Andrei gained a spot at Harvard’s Kennedy Faculty, which enabled the couple to maneuver to Cambridge, with their two youngsters, and set up operations in the USA. Whereas Andrei networked at Harvard, Elena performed the position of a self-described “soccer mother,” elevating their two sons and caring for the house responsibilities. However as soon as the children had been tucked away in mattress, she crept right into a again room and decrypted radio messages from Moscow.

Elena and Andrei by no means spoke a phrase of Russian to one another and by no means talked about Russia to Tim and Alex. Sometimes, Elena took a clandestine journey to South America or Canada to satisfy with handlers from the SVR away from potential FBI eyes, switching passports en path to cowl her tracks. For her sons, she invented tales about mundane errands to clarify why she had been away. No one Elena interacted with knew something about her actual abilities and achievements. 

She was a educated KGB officer pressured to play the position of a run-of-the-mill housewife. Once we met in Moscow, I requested her if it had been laborious to deal with this disconnect. She sipped her espresso and smiled faintly. Individuals who crave exterior validation would by no means make the minimize as illegals, she mentioned. “A spy is an actor, however an actor that doesn’t want a public or a stage.”

Elena insisted that she and Andrei would by no means have instructed their two sons the reality if the FBI had not come knocking. “We had been chargeable for our personal safety and security, and it creates a vulnerability if we inform anybody,” she mentioned firmly. She did admit that earlier than the FBI raid the couple had been making tentative plans to retire from espionage and, maybe sooner or later, transfer again to Russia. Absolutely then they might have wanted to say one thing to their sons? “Effectively, sure, however one other story,” she mentioned, with a jarring matter-of-factness. “We had so many tales. There was a narrative for our mother and father, a narrative for mates right here in Russia. Tales and tales and tales. Another story, that’s not an issue for us. Sadly, that’s only a rule of the sport.”

The elemental position of intelligence companies is to acquire details about different nations not accessible by means of open channels. A lot of this work is completed within the shadows, and most intelligence companies use undercover operatives. The only manner to take action is to disguise spies as diplomats. If caught, they will merely return house, claiming diplomatic immunity. However this additionally makes it straightforward for a number nation’s counterintelligence companies to observe the operatives. Diplomats are recognized entities and are tracked fastidiously. Some intelligence companies will due to this fact use a riskier however harder-to-detect possibility. A spy is dispatched overseas posing as a enterprise government or different innocent-seeming skilled, maybe carving out a protracted and profitable profession within the cowl position whereas on a regular basis secretly growing helpful sources and sending again intelligence. The CIA calls this “non-official cowl.”

Moscow’s illegals program took this idea a number of steps additional. The KGB put odd Soviet residents like Elena and Andrei by means of years of coaching to remodel them into Westerners. They might then spend a long time residing overseas, mixing into their host societies. Anybody who met a Russian diplomat asking plenty of questions will surely surprise if their new contact was a spy. They could even be suspicious of a sociable Russian commerce official or a very pleasant Russian journalist. However who would suspect a Canadian actual property agent of being a deep-cover KGB operative?

I first heard in regards to the illegals program in 2010, when Elena, Andrei, and eight others had been arrested in the USA and ultimately deported to Russia. Again then, I used to be working as Moscow correspondent for The Unbiased and spent some weeks attempting to trace down the returned spies. Editors had been significantly keen on twenty-eight-year-old Anna Chapman, who had used a canopy job as a New York actual property dealer to spy for the SVR. A glamorous socialite, she had flirted with the wealthy and highly effective, supposedly with the Kremlin’s pursuits in thoughts. She gave the impression to be a personality straight from the pages of an airport spy novel, together with her flame-red hair, her suggestive picture shoots, and the salacious tales her British ex-husband fed to the tabloids about their intercourse life. A 12 months after the spies returned to Russia, I lastly managed to influence Anna to satisfy with me in Moscow. She was a captivating and vivacious lunch date, however refused to say something about her espionage work. As an alternative, she wished to speak about her plans for a brand new style line.

In any case, I used to be extra within the older illegals and the contortions it will need to have required to spend a long time residing in a international pores and skin. The SVR saved them properly away from the media, however in 2016, I tracked down Elena and Andrei’s two sons, Tim and Alex, and interviewed them for a Guardian journal story. The brothers had been stripped of their citizenship by the Canadian authorities and had been suing to have it reinstated. They insisted that they had recognized nothing about their mother and father’ espionage work. Even within the weeks after the FBI roundup again in 2010, Alex instructed me, he refused to imagine the information studies. It was solely when he arrived in Moscow and was proven previous pictures of his mother and father carrying KGB uniforms that it lastly sank in that his complete upbringing had been a lie. Now he was anticipated to start out a brand new life in a rustic he had by no means beforehand set foot in. He acquired a Russian passport figuring out him as Alexander Vavilov, a reputation he couldn’t even pronounce correctly. “Typical highschool identification disaster, proper?” he mentioned to me, with a wry smile however a noticeable undertone of bitterness.

Fascinated by this twisted household story, I started studying in regards to the illegals program through the years, and shortly realized that there was nothing fairly prefer it within the historical past of espionage. At occasions, numerous intelligence companies have disguised operatives as international nationals, however by no means with the scope or scale of the KGB program. The illegals had been one thing uniquely Russian, rooted within the nation’s historic expertise. The extra I examine this system, the extra I felt it supplied an interesting solution to inform a a lot larger story, of the entire Soviet experiment and its final failure, a century of dramatic and bloody historical past.

The story begins in 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized energy within the October Revolution. The brand new Soviet regime had few mates in international governments, however might name on a wealth of cosmopolitan, well-traveled Communists, who improvised and ad-libbed their manner all over the world in numerous disguises, to assist defend the revolution and unfold its ideology. These virtuosic, devoted spies grew to become often called the Nice Illegals in Soviet intelligence lore. Posing as European aristocrats, Persian retailers, or Turkish college students, they used crafty, attraction, and intercourse to assemble intelligence. A lot of them evaded detection within the West however had been arrested and executed by their very own regime within the late Nineteen Thirties, throughout Joseph Stalin’s Nice Terror.

Later, throughout the Chilly Battle, KGB officers who labored underneath diplomatic cowl discovered themselves underneath round the clock surveillance from Western counterintelligence companies and restricted of their means to assemble secret info. Illegals, who had no discernible hyperlinks to both Moscow or Communism, might dwell and journey free from suspicion. The KGB drew up formidable plans to plant massive numbers of illegals inside the USA. However the Soviets now not had a recruitment pool of well-traveled polyglots. As an alternative, the KGB was pressured to recruit odd Soviet residents, giving them years of coaching to mould them into convincing Westerners.

Many Chilly Battle illegals residing within the West had been instructed merely to lie low and wait. If pressure escalated to the purpose that diplomatic relations with Moscow had been severed, unlawful sleeper cells might activate and proceed the KGB’s work behind enemy traces. However these long-term missions, which pressured illegals to spend years remoted from their households, mates, and homeland, took a serious psychological toll. Many cracked underneath the stress: some had breakdowns; others defected or had been caught. Few had completely satisfied private lives.

Most espionage utilizing human sources requires deception, however illegals deceived in a very intimate manner. In KGB lore, this psychological burden was one thing to be pleased with and spoke to the ideological mission of the Soviet state. “Solely an intelligence service which works for an awesome trigger can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers,” enthused the British KGB agent George Blake, explaining why not one of the Western companies used illegals.

For all of the lofty rhetoric, by the Nineteen Eighties the revolutionary fervor of the early Soviet Union had given solution to a plodding paperwork. Widespread discontent, mixed with a worsening financial state of affairs, ultimately led to the Soviet collapse, ushering in a brand new period during which Russia and the USA had been now meant to be companions. In certainly one of his first acts as president of newly impartial Russia, Boris Yeltsin disbanded the KGB. The directions that illegals acquired in weekly radio messages merely stopped coming. Some returned house; others, like Andrei and Elena, had turn into snug of their cowl identities and determined to stay residing in them.

At quite a few factors within the final century, the period of the illegals gave the impression to be over. Every time, Russia’s spymasters resurrected this system.

A decade later, Vladimir Putin grew to become president and commenced steadily restoring Russia’s spying capabilities. Putin had spent his personal years within the KGB working as an illegals assist officer, and he retained a passion for this system. Illegals who had stayed within the subject started receiving their coded directions as soon as extra, and in Moscow, a contemporary batch of operatives underwent coaching.

When the FBI rounded up Elena, Andrei, and others in 2010, in the USA there was a way of surprise on the audaciousness of the illegals program, but in addition an amused confusion: it felt as if the Kremlin had been caught within the Chilly Battle, utilizing outdated and pointlessly time-consuming strategies of espionage that had little relevance within the twenty-first century. But behind the scenes, Russia’s intelligence operations had been rising extra nimble and extra brazen. “Flying illegals” primarily based in Moscow flew out on short-term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin overseas. A brand new military of “digital illegals” impersonated Westerners on social media and had been a key a part of Russia’s makes an attempt to meddle in international elections. Even when the period of long-term illegals gave the impression to be over, the ideas underpinning their work remained on the coronary heart of Russian intelligence operations.

In February 2022, Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a choice that might end in horrific bloodshed and destroy any lingering goodwill in Moscow’s relations with the West, which grew to become extra perilous than at any time for the reason that top of the Chilly Battle. In June, 4 months after the invasion, Putin traveled to the SVR headquarters exterior Moscow to mark the centenary of the official launch of the primary Soviet illegals division. He paid tribute to the illegals of the previous, who had spent a long time removed from house serving the motherland, and to the illegals who “proper now are finishing up distinctive operations” throughout the globe.

By this level, Western nations had expelled a whole lot of Russian diplomats from embassies and consulates in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The bulk had been spies working underneath diplomatic cowl, and their expulsion dramatically lowered Russia’s espionage capabilities simply as relations with the West had been at an all-time low. Moscow’s spy companies needed to shift among the burden onto its unlawful networks, which in flip made them extra susceptible to publicity. Over the next 12 months, quite a few illegals had been unmasked. They included a Peruvian jewellery designer residing in Italy, an Argentinian artwork gallery proprietor primarily based in Slovenia, and an Austrian-Brazilian who ran a 3-D printing enterprise in Rio de Janeiro. Below their unique cowl identities, all of them had been as Russian as vodka and herring.

There may be little doubt that these captured spies might be changed with new ones. At quite a few factors within the final century, the period of the illegals gave the impression to be over. Every time, Russia’s spymasters resurrected this system. Now, in a community of nondescript SVR flats scattered round Moscow, a brand new technology of operatives are virtually definitely present process preparation for his or her missions—methodically honing the pronunciation of goal languages, finding out archives of international newspapers and magazines to be aware of salient cultural and social context, and memorizing the granular element of their cowl tales. Earlier than lengthy, these new illegals might be dispatched to dwell ostensibly mundane lives, in numerous areas throughout the globe, whereas secretly working to advance Moscow’s agenda.

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From The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Lengthy Mission to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker. Copyright © 2025. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home LLC. All rights reserved. No a part of this excerpt could also be reproduced or reprinted with out permission in writing from the writer.

Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random Home Audio from THE ILLEGALS by Shaun Walker, learn by Paul Thornley. © Shaun Walker ℗ 2025 Penguin Random Home, LLC.