The Illegals: A Secret History of Soviet Espionage, with Shaun Walker
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. On today's episode: The untold history of Russia's deep cover spy program.

Sean Walker is an international correspondent for The Guardian. He reported from Moscow for more than a decade, and his coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine was shortlisted for the Foreign Reporter of the Year category at the British 2023 Press Awards. In his new book, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West, Walker explores the untold history of Russia's deep cover spy program,

following its evolution from the talented Great Illegals of the 1920s and 30s up to the 21st century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties even after the fall of the Soviet Union. These deep cover missions, some remarkable feats of espionage, others high-profile failures, could last for decades. Walker shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment and its messy aftermath.

and how that hidden history shaped Russia and the West. Joining him to discuss the book is Carl Miller, the journalist, co-founder of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, and host of crime podcast Kill List. Let's join Carl now with more.

Alright, well welcome to Intelligence Squared everyone. I'm Carmilla and our guest today is Sean Walker. He is international correspondent for The Guardian, he's reported from Moscow for more than a decade and is the author of The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past.

His coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine was shortlisted for the Foreign Reporter of the Year category at the British 2023 Press Awards and he has appeared as a commentator on Russia and Ukraine for various television and radio programmes and today we'll be discussing his latest book, The Illegals.

which explores the untold history of Russia's deep cover spy program following its evolution from the talented great illegals of the 20s and the 30s up to the 21st century where agents have maintained their fake identities and loyalties even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Well, good morning, Sean Walker. Have you read any books by Elie Wiesel recently?

You know what? I know exactly what you're referring to and I can't remember what the correct answer to that coded meeting phrase is. The correct answer was, no, I've been reading Hemingway. Hemingway, yeah. Well, I

Well, I barely know whether we're able to continue the interview given that we have not made trusted contact with one another. That's true. Yeah, I have to memorise instructions better. But of course, that is the kind of contact that illegals would make, isn't it? Which I always thought was apocryphal, but actually seems to be true as they were kind of flowing through the kind of streets of various kind of contested kind of capitals around the world. But let's begin...

before the Soviet state emerges. So take us into the kind of Bolshevik underground, where it seems that much of the kind of culture of the illegals really began. Yeah, that's right. So I mean, in the late Tsarist system, where you had autocracy, a quite aggressive and for the time sophisticated secret police that was cracking down on various revolutionary movements,

Their answer was essentially to go underground, to work under cover identities, to carry out all of their organisational and political work away from the eyes of the Tsarist secret police.

And Vladimir Lenin, who obviously was the leader of the Bolsheviks and went on to lead the October Revolution in 1917, he came up with this concept that he wanted to divide the Bolsheviks into legal work and illegal work. So the legal work was, you know, when the Tsar, after the 1905 revolution, allowed a parliament, like the Bolsheviks went to the parliament and they engaged with the parliament, they had...

people quite openly saying, "We are Bolsheviks and we support this, this and this." But at the same time, they had an illegal network. And illegal is, you know, in Russian it's "нелегальная" and it doesn't quite mean illegal in English. It means something more like clandestine. So a lot of what they did was illegal, but not everything they did was.

And the idea of these illegals was exactly that. They would do things in the shadows. They might have a foreign identity. They may even use their own identity, but they pretend to be doing another job when actually they would be secretly running a printing press or arranging meetings.

this kind of thing. And so there was this real culture, you know, Lenin himself, Trotsky, Stalin, all of the big Bolsheviks, they were all like masters at what they called 'conspirazia', like making a clandestine arrangements. They all used disguises, they all posed as foreigners, they all went long periods on the run from the police.

And so when they took over in 1917, they kind of had this background and this came as second nature to them. And they brought some of that into organising their new state. So would this have been the kind of first time that that statesman had that kind of background? Because, I mean, the contrast between that and the kind of genteel, almost kind of courtly politics of a kind of France or aristocratic milieu of the UK, like, can't be more stark.

Yeah, that's right. I think it's quite unusual. And obviously, when you go back and when you look through the lens of Soviet propaganda, what happened in October 1917 was a popular revolution where the workers and the peasants and everybody came together to overthrow the provisional government. But in reality, this was essentially a coup by a pretty small, extremely well-organised

bunch of people who had spent long years living in the underground. You know, there's actually a scene on the night when it's happening where Lennon and Trotsky are talking and Lennon said, like, it makes you dizzy that we've come from, you know, this

this existence of holding little meetings above pubs and traveling around Europe and having these aggressive theoretical discussions, but seeming miles away from the reality of power. And now suddenly these guys have taken over and they're building a state.

So as these people are building a state then, Sean, how do they see the illegals as being a tool of state's craft? Because it seems like in the early years anyway, they're genuinely pioneering and innovative in the way that they want to use clandestine agents in order to further the interests of this fledgling and vulnerable Bolshevik state.

Yeah, I mean, I think a bunch of factors come together. So you have the fact that this is in their heritage, it's in their blood, like working undercover, using disguises. And then you have the fact that obviously the Soviet Union starts to take shape in what is a very hostile international environment.

A bunch of states don't recognise its existence. You have all of these exiles outside the country who are sort of assuming that at some point it's going to collapse and they'll be able to go back. You know, the US and the Soviet Union don't establish diplomatic relations until the 1930s.

And so in this environment, once the state is set up in the early 20s and they're engaging with the world, they want to understand, first of all, they want to defend themselves against foreign powers and all of these white Russians, the exiles conspiring against them.

but they don't have in many countries embassies because they're not recognised as a country, so they can't do what nations normally do, which is send out diplomats to collect information and maybe also send out spies disguised as diplomats. They don't have the ability to do that, but they do have this background of conspiracia and they also have a whole bunch of

cosmopolitan, well-travelled, not necessarily Russian, some of them might be Austrian, Hungarian, Central Europeans, but they have all of these revolutionaries who have huge experience of moving around Europe, speaking multiple languages, slipping in and out of different kind of social classes. And this is really what is the kernel of

transposing that pre-revolutionary underground political movement into the beginnings of like a new intelligence service for this country that's sort of in quite fragile position. Introduce us, Sean, to one of these Ligals, maybe Yosef Grigulovitch, because I mean, I think people hearing this, they're hearing Stalin and Lenin. I mean, they might be getting the sense that these people are kind of grim people.

kind of ascetic, committed revolutionaries. And of course in a sense they are, but they are also the most, some of them anyway, the most flamboyant, fabulous, kind of colourful characters I think I've ever read about.

Yeah, I mean, particularly in these early decades, they are really, really incredible characters, many of them. And, you know, it's quite funny that indeed, as you say, I mean, most of them are committed communists, but in sort of defence of the cause, they have to go out and live these lives, quite often quite decadent lives in the capitalist world. There's a rather amusing note in the

autobiography of one of them from the 30s where he says, you know, I never took a sip of alcohol or I think seduced a woman except for in the cause of the great Soviet homeland. And you can, you know, you sort of almost hear the irony as he's writing it. Like you get the sense he really did have quite an enjoyable time doing all this stuff. But yeah,

Yeah, the guy you mentioned is one of my favourite characters. He comes a little bit later. In the 1930s, he first surfaces. So he's a guy who was born in Lithuania, but his father moved to Argentina. So he went and spent a couple of years after university, after he got kicked out of university for kind of fights and his links to the communist underground. He goes to Argentina, he learns, picks up perfect Spanish,

surfaces all over the place over the subsequent years in different identities, notably running the first failed attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. But where he really comes into his own is the assignment that he gets after the Second World War.

And he's posted to Italy, which at the time is this kind of battleground between communists and right-wing parties supported by the West, supported by the Americans.

And Grigolevich shows up in Rome. He has a document that identifies him as a Costa Rican. He's managed to pick up a Costa Rican passport. He's never been to Costa Rica, but he's really good at telling stories. And he has this whole yarn about how his father, he was born out of wedlock and he had to leave Costa Rica as a child.

And now he's sort of going back to his heritage and he gets involved in this community of South American, Latin American merchants in Rome. And before long, through this kind of charm and cunning, he's managed to get himself appointed as the Costa Rican ambassador to Rome.

So you've got a guy, you know, Russian speaking guy from Lithuania, never been to Costa Rica, and he is suddenly appointed as the ambassador to Rome. And then, you know, he spends a few years on the cocktail circuit in Rome, goes to visit the US ambassador, meets the Pope multiple times. He gets himself accredited to Yugoslavia.

And he even gets a mission from Stalin to kill Tito, who was the leader of Yugoslavia and was, you know, he was a communist, but he'd broken with Moscow.

And there were no diplomats. So there were no Soviet diplomats in Belgrade. There was no way for them to send someone in. But what they could do is send in an illegal. So Josef Grugalevich, in his identity as Teodoro Castro, the Costa Rican ambassador, travels to Belgrade illegally.

gets all these meetings, he does meet Tito. And in fact, the only reason he doesn't end up trying to kill him is because Stalin dies just before this meeting happens and they call the whole thing off. But yeah, it's certainly, I mean, certainly one of the more extraordinary transformations to manage to sort of put yourself into the position of being the ambassador of a country that you've never been to. I mean, and illegal in the sense that not having any diplomatic cover

gaining diplomatic cover of a third... I mean, it's extraordinary. And he kind of flirts the idea, doesn't he, at one point of actually maybe thinking it was possible he might become foreign minister of Costa Rica.

Yeah, that's right. Everything's going really well for him. He's got this, you know, he's got a lovely embassy that he sets up in Rome. He's throwing banquets. He's sending back, you know, we can see these letters in the Costa Rican archives that a historian there helped me access where he's sending back all these reports and they're reading with delight that, you know, that guy in Rome is really putting Costa Rica on the map.

And yeah, he's very, very well politically connected. The guy who will go on to lead the country in the subsequent years is a sort of close associate who he's helped set up business ties in Italy. And I think there was every chance he could have been made foreign minister. After Stalin dies, he ends up being recalled to Moscow. That's the end of his career as a legal. He's desperate to be sent somewhere else. He says, you know, he could be used all over the world. They could give him a new identity.

And they say, look, you know, you've been on the front page of newspapers as Costa Rican ambassador. You were way, you were sort of way too visible. There's no way we can send you abroad as someone else. And so he goes on to have a career of about 30 more years until I think he died in the late 1980s as an academic in Moscow specializing in Latin America and never tells anyone except for a few trusted people that actually had this whole career where he was posing as a Costa Rican diplomat.

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It's not just him though, is it Sean? There's something about many of these early illegals especially who have so much knowledge and exposure to the world in general where identity becomes so molten to them. They seem to be able to develop this kind of tremendous ability to impersonate all these different national groups to the extent where even people in those countries can't understand or tell that they're not. How are they able to do this so successfully?

Because that isn't something which is easily replicable in later generations, is it? In many ways Soviets seem to be less good at emulating other cultures as time goes on. So I think there's two parts to it. There's the one part is about the people themselves and as I said, you know, there are these... they are people who had generally lived incredibly rich and varied lives before they became illegals. So, you know, the time of the Russian Revolution is

is a time of crazy upheaval for many people. People who are aristocrats end up begging on the street. People who'd been born in a village end up kind of running ministries. So you have this huge social mobility in both directions and people transform,

Borders of countries are shifting. People might have been born in one empire, ended up speaking another language and so on. So you have these people who are quite kind of shapeshifty anyway. And of course, the hardest thing for an illegal, I mean, that's why Grigulevich, the ambassador, was so extraordinary, because the hardest thing is to pose...

as someone from the country that you're in or that you're surrounded by. And it's much easier to say I'm an Argentinian and convincingly pull that off in Austria than it is to pull that off in Argentina, clearly. And quite often,

Usually they would be trying to use illegals in third countries so that exactly for that reason, I mean, even for the most brilliant operative, if you don't start learning the language till late in life, it's almost impossible to completely sound like a native Brit or Argentinian or whatever. And then I think the second part of it is that this was a time when

there were fewer people travelling, there were fewer databases of passport controls and things like that. You know, a passport was a piece of paper with a couple of stamps and a signature on. There's a couple of scenes where illegals early on are sort of

charm their way into a consulate somewhere and just sort of swipe off the table like 50 blank passports and then they can make these passports up for other illegals. So it was much easier. There's no biometric data, obviously, and so on and so on. So it was a lot easier to kind of slip between these identities. And then the state was also a lot less bureaucratized. You know, there was almost the kind of atmosphere of a startup, maybe, that they were just they were kind of winging it, going with it.

changing identity one day to the next.

In the later years, when they replicate this programme after the Second World War and when it becomes much more institutionalised, you know, it would take you years to like painstakingly learn all of the facets of your character, of the cities where you grew up, of the places you were supposed to know. In those early years, you know, there could be a Hungarian banker one day and a Norwegian fish salesman the next day. And they was kind of switching these characters almost overnight. Let's talk about the role of sex and love.

Because that seems to be really important and both a great opportunity, you know, I mean, specific programmes, I think they were called the Romeo spies, actually trained in the art of seduction to gain information, but also seems to be one of the great undoings of a lot of the illegals, Sean, where their marriages crack under pressure or they become involved in a kind of ill-advised affair of some kind and have their cover blown or get recalled to disgrace. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, as you can imagine, particularly when we get on to the later missions where we're talking about, you know, the Cold War era, where we're talking about sending someone abroad,

maybe for years, maybe for decades, where they have to live in this cover identity. You might bring them back to Moscow once every two, three, four years. It's very difficult, involves a circuitous route and kind of changing passports and things to not show any trace. So you have these people who are out in the field for years on end. They can't have any contact with Soviet diplomats. They don't have any contact with anyone from home.

It's an incredibly lonely existence. And so what happens when they first start on these longer missions after the war is that there's a couple of them who basically go a bit mad. They kind of hook up with people, hook up with women, because usually the illegals, the Soviets, were mostly in the early decades training men as illegals.

So they would send them abroad, they would meet women, they would get into relationships and often they'd confess everything and it would completely destroy all of those years of preparation. So at some point in the early 60s they come up with an idea in Moscow that the best way to deal with this is to send illegals abroad in pairs, so to find suitable partners, pair them up

and send them out together. And that will have the dual thing, both of giving them a bit more support, they can work in a kind of two-person unit, and will also, if one of the couple is cracking, the other one will be able to kind of sound the early warning signal and drag them back to the Soviet Union, which does happen on a number of occasions.

But the Soviets were, it was a pretty patriarchal system, particularly the KGB. They still always saw the male illegal as the kind of main figure, even in cases where we see that when they get abroad, quite often the female is much more capable. But they would recruit the man first and then they would go on a search for a wife.

Sometimes this would just be somebody that was kind of paired up and there was no choice in it and you'd have to go abroad. But they also realised that this isn't very helpful for operational reasons. If you put two people together who hate each other, who can't get on with each other, it's probably even worse than sending someone away.

on their own. So after a while, there's a kind of vetting system where, you know, the male illegal will be in training for maybe three or four years and around the fourth year they'll start to sort of suggest

test candidates or ask this person if ask the guy if he's got candidates and then they will do the vetting and I mean there's some I found some some documents some training documents in the archives in in Kyiv where some of the illegals were trained and uh you know it's extraordinary you can see the the central KGB office sending out to all of the regional KGB officers saying you know we've got that never would never say an illegal because it's too secret but they say we have an operative

"and he's gonna be ready soon, "and we're looking for women. "Please let us know if you have anyone." And the criteria, basically, they should be politically reliable, should be attractive, but not too attractive, 'cause you don't want them to stand out in the crowd. Not too tall, not too short, not too thin, not too fat. Basically, nice looking, but average, excellent languages,

and politically reliable pro-Soviet. So they look for these candidates, pair them up, and then they will send them abroad as duos. It's kind of like the world's most ominous dating app description, isn't it? Yeah, it was a bit like KGB Tinder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as we move now from the 20s into the 30s, and obviously Stalin has consolidated power, it seems like this whole world becomes in a way like much darker.

Like both in the sense that the illegals begin to be themselves, it looks like, Sean, like used more as tools of coercion, whether that's assassination or other forms of kind of like more kind of kinetic espionage. But then also, and this must have been terrifying for them, they're seeing the purges happen. And I imagine that they, you know, they must be coming under suspicion because they are living abroad and they're a kind of class of Soviet citizen who is actually seeing and living amongst the capitalist West.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, the illegals...

Many of them are shot in the purges. Some of them are jailed. You know, the character that I follow who had this extraordinary, Dmitry Bistrolyotov, who had this extraordinary career working mostly in London, kind of gaining really valuable secrets for the Soviets. He's in Moscow in 37, 38. He's arrested. He's accused, basically, he's basically accused of being a double illegal. You know, he was pretending to be

So his cover was a Hungarian count. So he's pretending to be a Hungarian count, but actually he was working for the Soviet Union. But the Soviets decided that actually he was a Hungarian count pretending to work for the Soviet Union. But actually there was another layer of cover. And all the time, his whole mission was that he was working for the West, in this case, the Czechs. And, you know, we see this obsession with enemy spies that comes up.

Tens, hundreds of thousands of people are accused of being enemy spies during the purges. And of course, you know, these guys who walked around in the skins of capitalists pretending to be capitalists traveling all over the place, they are prime suspects in this and many of them do suffer.

And that's actually, I mean, that's kind of one of the reasons I got so interested in this book and I didn't want to just write about today's illegals, but wanted to go back and look at the whole history of it was that I realised the sort of more I read about it, that it was this, it did offer this kind of remarkable...

mirror of this century of Russian Soviet history that, you know, from the beginning it comes out of the Bolsheviks. Then it's the reason it's used is that they need it for their kind of the exigencies of this of this new state that's very fragile. And then you have this this period of terror of looking for enemy spies everywhere and a bunch of them get shot. And in a way, it also kind of made me realize, I mean, there are

the reasons for the great terror are like many and complicated and massive. But there was something quite interesting where I felt that like, you know, it's in some ways less surprising that a regime that has the illegals, the regime that is used to taking on disguise, that is sending these people out to spend years in kind of fake identities, pretending to be great capitalists when actually they're loyal Soviets,

it's somehow less surprising that this crazy logic of the terror that amid the Soviet population, there are all these enemy capitalist spies that are lurking and they're, you know, they're really, really deep. You have to really find them in their property. You know, this thing that seems crazy, suddenly it starts to make more sense because like that's what the Soviets are doing to the West. So by definition, there should be all these illegals that the West has borrowed into Soviet society. And so there was also this kind of, yeah, this, this,

interesting moment and I think in the terror where the kind of thinking that creates illegals creates this sort of paranoia. So as we move past that paranoia at least at least the apogee of it from 37 into kind of Khrushchev and Brezhnev kind of eras tell us a bit about the training because because that seems to me anyway to be one of the most extraordinary aspects of all of this the scale and

and sheer kind of length of time that it was taking them to kind of shape Soviet citizens into these believable foreign entities. And this tightrope, it seemed that they were having to walk. On the one hand, you know, they were like putting them in houses and trying to train them how to be like an American capitalist. On the other hand, terrified, you know, terrified that they were going to become ideologically corrupted. And so trying to instruct them in the kind of tenets of Marxist-Leninism at the same time.

Yeah, that's kind of one of the most ironic, I think, paradoxes of the whole thing. I mean, this whole idea, which is, I guess it's similar for training any kind of spy, but it's particularly intense here, which is that you're trying to create someone who is brilliant at deceiving and deceives everyone around them and their whole life as a lie.

but at the same time is completely honest with you and never thinks they can get away with lying to you. And that's particularly, you know, for the Soviets where

I mean, it's already a very paranoid society, like any normal Soviet citizen can't travel in the West without the KGB keeping an eye on them. And here we are sending here they are sending these guys out for four years on end. So they're really terrified about how to keep the illegals in check and how to make sure that they don't defect, that they don't give stuff away.

And so, yeah, you have this extraordinary training program, which by the 60s and onwards lasts for around four or five years.

full time, one on one. You never go, so an illegal will never go to a KGB building. They'll never meet a KGB person in uniform. It will all be done in a series of what the Russians call conspiratorial apartments, basically safe houses, which are sort of dotted around Moscow, Kiev, a couple of other Soviet cities.

So you'll have language training, you'll have manners training, you'll have etiquette training, you will have tradecraft training. So you will learn how to detect surveillance. You will learn how to do these incredibly tricky meetings with people in the field or leaving things in dead drops and retrieving them. Because of course, it's quite risky when illegals go abroad for them to meet with diplomats, because if the diplomats being followed

FBI sees who they're meeting, you've caught the illegal. So in general, illegals don't have any face to face contact. It's quite rare. So you have to learn this kind of incredibly time consuming and tedious way of leaving things in a dead drop, signalling them, picking them up again. What I started to realise when I was interviewing some of the people who've been through this training

was that, you know, yeah, of course it takes so long because you have to, it's difficult to teach someone to pretend to be a foreigner. I mean, of course it takes years to, and they're sitting there practicing exactly how to, you know, where exactly where your tongue should be when you're saying a T in German to make you not sound like a Russian saying a T in German. That takes time. But I think what you mentioned then, the question is perhaps the reason it takes quite so long that,

Quite often when I was talking to these people, it sounded more like the induction into a cult than a training program. You know, they would be sent off to do tasks, then they'd have to write a report of what they'd done. And then the instructor would tell them that actually they'd misremembered because they thought they had one drink and they had two drinks. And we know this because they were being watched the whole time.

So the whole time they're letting them know, you know, you can't keep anything secret from the KGB. One of the guys I found in his files, 200 pages of audio, transcribed audio, because they put a bug in his training apartment when his parents came to visit. KGB wanted to check that he didn't tell his parents he was working for the KGB. His story was supposed to be he had a job at a scientific institute. So they listened for three days.

did a whole transcript of every conversation with his parents just to make sure that he was loyal. So this takes endless amounts of time before the KGB is ready to say, "Okay, this is like a reliable person. We're ready to send them abroad." And even then, quite often, it turns out that when they do get abroad, they struggle to deal with the pressures of living double lives.

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Because it seems that when actually, you know, by the 70s and the 80s, when these illegals do turn up, they've got no university credentials recognised in the West. So they end up kind of doing, living quite normal lives in New Jersey and elsewhere, you know, and kind of sending back things that they've heard on the street. But it seems like there's a kind of ludicrous asymmetry often between the amount of time and expense it's actually taken to put that person there and what they're actually, you know, they're not delivering anything that a diplomat, you know, wouldn't be able to hear.

Yeah, I mean, that's what's so fascinating about this programme. It starts off, you know, as these brilliant mavericks who are doing things that sometimes are, you know, history changing missions. And it gradually gets harder and harder to replicate. But instead of saying, OK, that was a great programme that we had in the 1920s and it really answered the challenges of the time.

doesn't really make much sense now when, you know, FBI is all over us. It's much harder to move in and out. It's much harder to pose as an American, et cetera, et cetera. We better abandon this. Instead, they just double down. They're like, OK, well, that means we need more training. We need to hire more people to look for the identities that will appropriate. And you end up with this giant kind of Heath Robinson machine running

that is, you know, thousands of people working in Soviet embassies in Moscow, trainers to sustain this sort of few dozen operatives. And as you say, the intelligence returns are quite often pretty mediocre. There are some cases still where illegals are doing quite interesting things, but they are massively outweighed by the number who seem to be living pointless lives. The only thing is that Soviet Union's a closed state.

There's no travellers, there's no people going out and like chatting with Americans in the street. Even the diplomats are not doing that. Diplomats are in the embassy being watched over by the KGB. Any contact with an American has to be pre-approved. So in some strange way, there is still something that the illegals bring to the paranoid leadership of the KGB

in the 1980s, where there is this feeling before Gorbachev comes that we might be heading to a nuclear confrontation, what they at least do is bring this word from the street and this ordinary sense of America. They write reports on the political mood and so on. And, you know, completely ludicrous to train somebody for years and things they're trained in to use them for that information. But actually, the Soviets didn't necessarily have another route to get that information. So in some ways,

perverse roundabout way they were quite helpful still. There was also I found another interesting dualism that you touched on one aspect of that Sean and that's the kind of dualism of like distance but yet actually being in a weird way very close to the centre of Soviet power at the same time

where, you know, they never touch a KGB institution, they don't speak to uniformed officials. But it seems that, you know, many of the kind of leaders of the Soviet Union, of Andropov and others, you know, are former KGB or intelligence officers. And they seem to have this kind of particular interest in reading sometimes the kind of raw reports

of these illegals in the field. And I think, especially for those of us in the West, the idea that our heads of state are reading like raw reporting coming from intelligence assets seems crazy.

Yeah, I mean, so Andropov, who was he was chairman of the KGB for 15 years before he went on to be general secretary. And he's he's one of the one of Vladimir Putin's great idols. Of course, another person who went from running the KGB or the FSB, as it was later renamed to run the country. And yeah, I mean, Andropov,

was fascinated by illegals. This is somebody who never travelled outside the Soviet bloc. He almost never interacted with foreigners. He didn't really have a concept. He understood quite well how the Soviet Union worked because KGB had informers everywhere and was actually quite sophisticated in understanding the country, but very little idea of how the world worked.

And when illegals would be back on their trips to Moscow, he would often bring them into his office and just chat with them for an hour. What was it like there? What was it like in America? What do you think about this? And that was kind of the closest thing he got to talking to foreigners. And yeah, it is extraordinary. And I think...

I think, you know, part of that late Soviet fascination with illegals, which has indeed carried on to the present day. And when you look at kind of Putin's background as well, that often these people, I mean, they're just...

naturally more inclined to trust or believe something if it comes from a highly classified intelligence source than if it's open source. And in the case of an illegal, that just might be you've trained someone for five years, they've gone and they've read the New York Times for a week and they've put together a report on what they think about

upcoming US policy. It's not necessarily because they've, you know, burrowed a tunnel into the White House and put a bug there. But if you put that information in a red folder, label it top secret and say, this is from our deep cover source in the US, it somehow sounds more convincing than if you're like someone in the embassy read the New York Times, and this is what they've come up with. Let's go up more closer to the present now. So Putin, what do we know about Putin's background and

as a handler. We think he was an illegal handler. Is that right?

Well, like with every good KGB officer, there's a huge amount of confusion and kind of differing accounts of what Putin did. So there's one account that actually he was kind of running really quite sensitive operations. He was based in Dresden in East Germany, and he was running quite sensitive operations and agents into West Germany. I'm not sure that...

I'm not sure that I buy that. There's another version that, yeah, Putin was essentially doing incredibly low level work in Dresden, but that he was part of the directorate that worked on illegals. And that essentially, there's a book by, the book that came out 25 years ago, written by someone who was in the

who served with Putin in Dresden, not fully reliable source, but I think it's the most interesting one we have. And he basically claims that Putin's job was the very earliest phase of illegal selection. So at this stage, the KGB was also taking East Germans as well as people from the Soviet Union. So you would basically go through, you'd look kind of who might be

Again, those criteria, politically reliable, good at languages, keen to have a career abroad. And then you would put together a pool, start to watch them, maybe the most promising ones you would approach,

send them to start some preliminary training, the most promising ones, etc., etc., with each stage more and more people dropping out. And that Putin's basic goal was, Putin's basic role was the first stage of this. And as his colleagues said, you know, he didn't even really have any hope that his guys would be selected. But it was just that that was part of the work he had to do. But he definitely does seem to...

From this period, he seems to retain a real fondness for the illegals. A few years ago was the first time he ever said anything about his work in the KGB. He said that it was fully connected with illegals without giving any details.

And it's possible that, you know, Putin spoke pretty good German. He was politically reliable. I think it's highly likely that he was at least considered for an illegal, probably in that very early stage. As far as we know, he never started any training, but it's very likely that they were watching everybody as potential illegal. So he may well have been considered and then discarded illegally.

But yeah, he's fascinated by the program. He talks about it a lot. He goes to the SVR, which is the current day Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters and gives speeches about the importance of illegals as recently as the last year or two. So it's something that...

as I track this programme over the 100 years, there's multiple points where you're just like, OK, surely this is the moment where they say this doesn't really make any sense. And another one of those comes early on in the Putin era where you think, OK, Russia and the West are reasonably friendly now. It's not like the Soviet period.

millions of Russians are travelling. You can be a Russian scientist, a Russian tourist, a Russian doctor, and you can go to the US, you can go to Europe. You don't have to dress yourself up as an Argentinian gallery owner. But yet they decide to keep going with this. They keep having these illegals. And as far as we know, they still have them today. And Putin coming forward and talking, as he did, about

being involved in the illegals program that was part of a kind of a wider push to kind of celebrate the illegals program across like kind of soviet pop culture wasn't it sean like it do you see that as kind of part of their general like revanchism and and kind of desire to find ways of kind of expressing and celebrating this kind of renewal of of kind of russian power as a geopolitical player

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously under Putin and particularly late Putin, there is a kind of drive to celebrate everything that is quote unquote great in Russian and Soviet history. There's also a drive that, you know, to portray this sort of

decadent, valueless West against the patriotic, pure Russia. And I think the myth of the illegal, not the reality, but the myth fits very well into this. You know, these are people who sacrifice everything, spend years in fake identities just to further the interests of the motherland. And yeah, I think what I've noticed in the last maybe five or ten years is

is that the illegals program has gone from something pretty secretive that you don't hear, you know, it's not referenced much at all to something that's all over the place. You know, there are documentaries on TV about illegals. They're building statues to past illegals. There are authors who are given, you know, trusted authors who are let into the KGB archives, which are very, very firmly closed to everybody else to write like carefully crafted histories of particular illegals. And, yeah,

It doesn't bear much. When you read these books, you watch these documentaries, they're an extremely partial version of the truth, if not a fully distorted version of the truth at times. They don't bear much weight.

in common with what really happened. But yeah, they're part of this, I think they're part of this like drive to kind of, to sort of portray Russia's great history and the illegals. And the one thing that is true is that they're unlike anything quite else that has existed in intelligence history and that they are kind of extraordinary. And, you know, that I got fascinated by them. Most people, when they just, the,

the concept is so extraordinary that like you're disguising yourself as a foreigner for years on end. So there is something kind of exciting about it. But that's, yeah, that's then, there's also lots of things, broken families, broken people, as you said, the kind of long missions where they don't actually seem to achieve much. All of that is kind of quietly glossed over. And instead you end up with this picture of these like brave servants kind of giving it all for the motherland.

Well, we're almost out of time, but one final question, Sean, and it's an important one. It might well be one that people listening to this have been screaming at me to ask you throughout the whole of this interview. It's also one that is probably the hardest for us to know about, but where do you think we are now?

What's your sense of what the illegals program currently looks like? I mean, is it likely that that Peruvian flautist, you know, is really a Russian deep cover agent or, you know, some, you know, some Milton Keynes vacuum salesman, you know, secretly gathering information and then passing it back to the Kremlin? Like, what do you think the program looks like?

I did give this book to a couple of people who read drafts of it and were then kind of a week later was saying to me like, oh, my God, like I knew I'm sure that this woman who lives just down the road was an illegal. I knew there was something odd about her. So, you know, I definitely don't think people should be looking for them everywhere. But but it is clear that they still use them. I mean, in 2020.

In 2023, there was the arrest of a couple of Argentinians in Slovenia. And they were, you know, he was an IT worker. She ran an art gallery. They'd lived there for years.

They were both Russian illegals. And just after their arrest, I went to Slovenia and met with people who'd known them, people who they interacted with. And they all said, like, this is ridiculous. Like, there's no, you know, spies are meant to be sexy and exciting. Like, she was this kind of boring kind of gray mouse, as one person described her. There's no way she could be a spy. And, you know, they later showed up on a prisoner exchange and flew into Moscow and were greeted by Putin with flowers.

So, you know, there are still these cases. And from what I heard indirectly from sources in Moscow, I mean, this carries on, particularly now after the war in Ukraine and so many Russian diplomats being kicked out of Western capitals. And that, of course, is not only diplomats, but also spies.

So if you go back to the original thing we talked about, the distinction between legal and illegal spies. So the legal spies are the ones working out of the embassy under diplomatic cover. They've lost...

so much of that legal network because of what's happened in Ukraine and the expulsions that I think they'll be looking to the illegal network for much more of the burden. Well, Sean, thank you so much. This has been totally fascinating all the way through the whole hundred years of this crazy, incredible story. So really, really appreciate you coming on and telling us about it.

That was Sean Walker, everyone, author of The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West, which is available, I believe, now online or at a bookshop near you. I've been Carl Miller. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much, as ever, for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Bea Duncan. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared.

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