It looks like a story out of a television series and, in fact, it became a very successful one: a Canadian couple who has been living in the US for 11 years. And with American children, they are arrested by the FBI for being actually Russians and spying for that country. The first to be surprised are her two children.
The couple is Donald Heatfield (real name Andrey Bezrukov) and Tracey Lee An Foley (Elena Stanislavovna Vavilova).
Both were arrested in June 2010 along with eight other spies, including a couple who was peruvian (she was Russian).
After a brief arrest, the ten people were exchanged in Vienna on 19 July of that same year by four Russian prisoners who had been convicted in their country for spying for the United States and the United Kingdom.
That news was the thread that Shaun Walker, a correspondent in Central and Eastern Europe for the British newspaper The Guardian, began to investigate the history of the clandestine program known as The Illegals, which culminated in a book of the same name published in English in 2025 and in Spanish this year.
And what a story it is: it covers the 115 years of “Russia’s most secret espionage program”, from before the Revolution to our day. But better than it is Walker himself -- who is present at the Hay Festival of Querétaro 2026 -- who tells it.
Your book “The Illegals” is, in a way, a history of Russia and the Soviet Union from the early 20th century to the present. It goes through all the major events: the creation of the Soviet Union, World War II, the Cold War, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Putin era. How did you get interested in this topic?
I was interested when I was destined to Moscow as a journalist for many years.
I was there in 2010 when ten illegal people were arrested in the U.S. and deported back to Russia in a spy exchange.
It seemed like a crazy idea that some spies had been sent to the U.S. in the 1980s and had been hidden for decades.
A few years later, I managed to interview two of the children of a couple who were 16 and 20 in 2010 when their parents were arrested in Boston.
They had been born in Canada and grew up thinking they were Canadians. They became naturalized U.S. citizens and then, in the summer of 2010...
These were the sons of Andrey and Elena.
and yes. Andrey and Elena, whose false names were Don and An. I met these two young people and they told me about how they grew up without suspecting their parents were Russian and then, suddenly, one day, the FBI arrived, their parents were deported and they ended up in Russia, where they had never been before, trying to reconstruct what demons had happened to their lives.
It was a fascinating story. I wrote an article and started thinking: let’s try to find out more about this program.
And in fact, as you said, every time I went back a little bit, I discovered that it wasn’t just a story of the Putin era or the Cold War. It dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. Even before that. The whole origin lies in the Bolshevik clandestinity.
So I decided to turn this book into something that, on the one hand, was a collection of fascinating spy stories and, on the other hand, a sort of story in the shadow of the Soviet Union and its collapse.
It is fascinating that it began with Lenin, with Bolshevik clandestinity, before the very creation of the USSR.
The whole idea of the illegal, the distinction between legal and illegal spies, arises from that clandestine movement, where the legal were those who used the political opportunities existing at the time: presenting themselves to the Duma – the tsar’s parliament – and doing the things they could do legally.
And then there were the illegal operators, who worked covertly, did acts of sabotage, explosions, organized secret militias, etc.
When the Bolsheviks take power, they have the country surrounded by enemies, without diplomatic service and without the usual ways by which a State would send spies abroad, but they do have many passionate communists.
Many spoke several languages, were accustomed to living in clandestinity and using false names.
Then they recreate that clandestine party structure as the first intelligence service of the Soviet Union.
First they were Britain and Germany, but then, after the Second World War and with the beginning of the Cold War, it went to focus on the United States.
At the beginning of the illegal program, what worried the Soviet government most was a possible intervention by the capitalist powers.
And of course, at that time the US was not an important player on the European continent.So Germany and especially Great Britain, were considered the main targets.
The other concern was the white emigrants, the Russians who lived in Europe and wanted to restore the tsarist order.
Then is this period of the 1920s and 1930s, with very peculiar characters who didn’t even need training.
They could be Germans today, Hungarians tomorrow and Romanians on Friday.
What happened after World War II?
First, during the Stalinist purges, many of these illegals were executed by their own side because they were suspected of being secret capitalists for having lived abroad.
Then the Cold War begins and, of course, the main enemy becomes the US.
At the same time, the United States And the European countries are investing much more in counterintelligence. So if you’re a KGB officer working at the Russian embassy in Washington, London or Paris, every time you get out of the door, they’re following you. You can no longer hold the same kind of meetings as before.
Then the KGB thinks: we have this great system of illegals.
The first is that there is no longer that group of cosmopolitan and polyglot communists, because the USSR has become a much closer state.
And the second is that the missions become much longer. It is no longer a matter of sending someone a week with a fake passport. It’s creating a really solid false identity and sending someone to the US. for many years.
They can do the work that is too risky for embassy officials because they are watched.
Over time, the illegals begin to be used more as sleeping agents.
They think: we have the Cold War.Maybe someday it becomes a real war, they expel all our diplomats and then we will have cells of illegals that we can activate.
Somehow it professionalized being illegal. They even wanted to pretend to be American citizens.
Usually, the ideal situation was to pass on as third-country nationals. For example, if your identity was Austrian, you could live in the United States as an Austrian, because it would be easier. There would be fewer questions about your accent and your background.
But effectively, getting an American passport was seen as a dream, creating a false identity up to the level of getting an American passport.
There were people who lived for many years as Americans in the United States.
There is a fascinating character, Iósif Grigulévich, a Lithuanian Jew who became known as a Costa Rican diplomat named Teodoro Castro and who was later sent by Stalin to try to kill Tito. He was also involved in plans to kill Trotsky, in the first attempt to assassinate him in Mexico City.
He led the group that tried to kill Trotsky and failed.
At that time, he was pretending to be a Frenchman; that was in the 1930s.
He had spent part of his youth in Argentina, so there he learned Spanish.
And I think that at the end of the 1940s he was in Chile, where he made friends with someone who knew the Costa Rican consul in Chile.
Then they found a newspaper article about a Costa Rican landlord who had recently died. He went to see the consul and told him a story that he was the illegitimate son of that man and that he had to leave Costa Rica when he was a child.
Already with a Costa Rican passport he settled in Italy in the late 1940s, which was of course one of the great battlefields where communism and capitalism faced.
The Communist Party of Italy was the most powerful party in Europe.
and yes. And it is probably the most extraordinary story of the book. This man, who had never been to Costa Rica, settles in Rome as a Costa Rican businessman and knows the entire Latin American diplomatic community.
And when a delegation of Costa Rican politicians visits Rome, he is so well connected that he gets them a meeting with the Pope.
It impresses them so much that they decide that this man should be their ambassador in Rome.
And José Figueres, one of the main figures of modern Costa Rica and who became president, became his friend.
There is a Costa Rican historian who also wrote a book about him, based on documents found in the archives of her country, and sent me some of those documents.
It’s extraordinary because, basically, this man was his ambassador for four years.
And then, one day in 1953, he simply disappears. And they have no idea what happened to their ambassador in Rome until about 40 years later, in the early 1990s, when the Soviet archives are opened and they discover that he was actually a man who pretended to be Costa Rican.
And another of the fascinating stories is that he wanted, as a Costa Rican, to start diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia.And then Stalin, who hated Tito almost as much as Trotsky, wanted to use him to kill him.
This is one of those incredible cases that almost changed history.
They had this man accredited as ambassador in Rome. He attends a meeting of the United Nations in France and there he meets the Yugoslav delegation. Since there were no diplomatic relations between Costa Rica and Yugoslavia, he proposed to establish them, suggesting that Costa Rica could export coffee and cocoa and import Yugoslav heavy machinery.
He obtains the good sight of St. Joseph and secretly that of Moscow, and manages to be accredited and travel several times to Belgrade.
Then, as an accredited ambassador, he is invited to present his credentials to Tito at an official meeting.
At that time, Moscow and Belgrade had no diplomatic relations, and several attempts to kill Tito had already been made, but Tito had eliminated all Stalinists from his environment.
And then comes to Stalin’s desk the idea that they have an agent perfectly positioned to do so. So, in the spring of 1953, before the planned meeting, they begin to study different scenarios to kill Tito.
Some ideas were extraordinary. One was to release a kind of biological dust during the meeting, after having previously injected a vaccine to be immunized. There were several explosive devices. They even considered the possibility of shooting him.
We don’t know what Grigulevich thought, but I imagine he should believe it was a suicide mission.
But a few weeks before the plan reached its final phase, Stalin died and the entire operation was cancelled.
But he came to meet with Tito in Belgrade.
The meeting was held.
In fact, I managed to find in the archives of Belgrade the official report drafted by Tito’s transcriptor on that meeting with the Costa Rican ambassador.
Theodoro Castro appears joking, slandering Tito, making jokes about the Soviets and the Americans, and presenting Costa Rica as a kind of third-way country with which Yugoslavia could have excellent relations.
And there is a very funny note at the end of that four-page document.
It was written by the translator and says: “After the Costa Rica ambassador left, Comrade Tito commented: He has a great sense of humor, but clearly he is trying to snatch me because he wants to get an economic deal.”
Tito realized that he was trying to find him, though for very different reasons than he imagined.
He returned to Moscow in 1953, but no longer acted illegally.
He returned to Moscow that year and was desperate to continue working. He begged them to be sent to another mission with a different identity.
But the new authorities told him no.
First, because that coverage identity was already too known.
And secondly, because the entire illegal program was changing.It was becoming much more bureaucratic and there was no longer room for free and virtuous characters like him.
He ended up becoming an academic at a Moscow university.He wrote numerous books under a pseudonym.None of his colleagues knew too much about his past.
One of the most surprising things is that one of the books he wrote was a biography of Mexican artist David Siqueiros.
That he had participated in that first attempted assassination against Trotsky.
Yes, but nowhere in the biography is mentioned that the author helped the book’s protagonist organize an assassination attempt against Trotsky.
He died in 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and before any information about him was made public.
Her daughter is still alive. She was born when they were still in Rome. She is also academic and is now over 80 years old.
He refused to talk to me, but he’s a really fascinating family.
In the book you show the different transformations of the illegal and their program.In 1979, the illegal fighters who participate in the invasion of Afghanistan appear.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a very strong feeling that the Cold War could turn into a real war. The man who now leads the illegal unit, Yuri Drozdov — who had been an illegal — is obsessed with the idea of creating faster, more rudimentary agents, trained as special forces.
It’s not about people who need to spend ten years living perfectly hidden. These are people who, if a war with the U.S. breaks out, could embark from Cuba, get to Florida and be pretended to be tourists or something like that.
So a training zone is set up near Moscow and a group of these people are trained for six months in special forces techniques.
The first and main occasion in which they are used is, as you mentioned, just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, during the coup in which Hafizullah Amin, the Communist leader who had broken with Moscow, is replaced.
Then come the “illegal flyers”, who are the ones that bring us closer to the current era. tourists who travel to carry out murders and other types of attacks in Europe.
For short-term missions.
One of the strange things that happened to the illegals is that, as it was so difficult to create them and the training was so long, paradoxically the KGB began to worry more about using them for really risky espionage operations.
If you’ve spent eight years preparing a person and during the first week you have to try to kill someone, something goes wrong and it’s captured, you’ve wasted eight years of training.
For me, the book begins with incredible stories of spies, murders, recruits and all that sort of things. But it ends, in the late Soviet period, becoming more of a story about the psychological effects of living under these identities, because in reality the espionage they were carrying out was no longer so impressive.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, something important happened: the Russians began to travel.
If you look at the CIA or MI6, they have similar concepts. They have spies in embassies and spies who appear to be businessmen, sellers or professionals.
The Soviets could not do that because there were virtually no Soviet businessmen traveling abroad.Even if you were a journalist or a cultural figure, people suspected you were a spy.
But after 1991, suddenly there are hundreds of thousands of Russians traveling around the world.
But that changed with the invasion of Ukraine and the isolation of Russia from the West.Now it is much harder for Russians to get tourist visas and travel.
And that again makes the use of foreign identities more attractive for the illegal.
There was a period of time between the fall of the Soviet Union and Putin’s return to power in which there was a kind of limbo for the illegals deployed abroad as sleeping agents. When did Putin decide to reactivate the program?
There was a period in the 1990s in which he was completely dead.Then Putin arrived in 1999 and 2000 with the mission to restore intelligence services.
One of the key dates that several Western intelligence sources have mentioned to me is 2004.It was a time when Putin decided to allocate much more funding to a new generation of illegal.
But one of the interesting things is that there were illegals deployed in the U.S. and some more were sent there during the Putin era.
However, the Americans had recruited a person from the SVR, the successor of the outside intelligence of the KGB, who revealed all the information about those illegal.
The result was that in 2010 all were arrested and the program was completely destroyed.
It was another of those moments, like 1937 or 1991, in which one thinks: surely this is the end.
But since 2022 we have realized that there is a new generation of illegal, many of them with Latin American identities, that was created after 2010 and that remains a key part of the Russian intelligence apparatus.
The last cases that are publicly known are people with Latin American identities, several Brazilians and the couple who lived in Slovenia and made themselves argentine. Why this in Latin America?
I think it’s a mixture of several things.
The first is quite obvious. If we think where the Russians could get identities for this program, it has to be a place where there is at least a credible possibility that a Russian can pretend to be someone from that country.
So we can discard much of Africa and Asia.
Then it has to be a place where birth records and other documents are not yet fully digitized.
Moreover, it should be a place where the legal part of Russian espionage, that is, agents working from embassies, still have a significant presence, because they will need to recruit people in civilian records or municipalities to enter these fake identities.
Because one of the ways this usually works is that they find, for example, a Peruvian boy who died at the age of three and then someone appears saying, “I’m that kid.”
One of the interesting things about the man who was detained in Slovenia under the Argentine name is that he was born in Namibia in his passport.
I think what probably happened was that a Russian intelligence officer in Namibia found a list of Argentine couples dead there.
And he thought: very well, we have these people. we will invent them a son. we have recruited someone in the civil register. Let's say that in 1972 these two Argentines had a son.
Then he takes that identity, goes to Argentina and says: “I was born in Namibia.
The whole process takes a lot of time and requires enormous efforts, but in the end you get an authentic document.
One of the current problems for Russia, I think, is artificial intelligence. Now it's much easier to detect this type of anomalies. Before, if you didn't have a preliminary clue, it was very difficult to identify an illegal one.
But now you can enter information in a database and say, “We know the Russians had someone recruited in Namibia.
And then you can examine them relatively quickly and conclude, “These seem normal, but there’s something suspicious in this case.”
I think that’s how some of the recent illegals have been discovered.
Do you think this kind of program says something about Russian culture or psychology?
I think it definitely says something about Russian history.
It arises from this very specific environment of revolutionary clandestinity. And when you look at today’s Russia, it has become a perfect symbol of Vladimir Putin’s idea that it is a unique, more spiritual, more devoted, less decadent country than the West.
You have these operatives that, although in reality many times lead miserable lives, they represent something that is impressive.
Putin has said several times that no one else has spies like these, and to a large extent, it’s true.
And if you also consider that Putin and many of the people around him belong to that world, men about 70 years old trained in the KGB, you better understand why it happens.
The illegals have always been the most prestigious part of the KGB, so all this is part of the culture of the current Russian ruling elite.
And it can be said that this program will continue in the future.
As we have mentioned, it has become much more difficult.With biometrics and other advances it is very complicated to create new identities.
The truth is, at each stage, the process has become more difficult, and yet the Russians have continued to use it.
The world of computerized databases has completely destroyed a classic practice of espionage.
Previously, in many countries, a spy could have several passports stored in a strong box. He could say, “I’m a CIA agent who is going to meet with a contact in Vienna. Today I am Dave. I’ll be Mike next week.” He simply chose a different identity.
With biometrics that is impossible, because there are fingerprints, iris scanners and other systems that make it impossible to constantly change identity.
But if you can create a single identity that has real footprints, real biometric data, and use it for ten or twenty years, that’s still possible.
That’s why I think that, strangely, the illegal has become harder to create, but more attractive.
