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Russia's Secret Spies

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 141

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Have you ever wondered about the real-life inspiration behind shows like "The Americans"? Shaun Walker pulls back the curtain on one of history's most audacious espionage operations in this riveting conversation about his meticulously researched book, "The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West."

Walker reveals the extraordinary world of Russian "illegals" – spies who spend years, sometimes decades, living under completely fabricated foreign identities with absolutely no official connection to Moscow. Unlike traditional diplomatic spies, these deep-cover agents immerse themselves so thoroughly in their adopted countries that even their spouses and children may have no idea of their true identities. The training process alone is mind-boggling – five years of intensive preparation where recruits study everything from a country's school textbooks to its cultural nuances.

The origins of this program stretch back to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement itself, when Lenin's underground party used false documents and code names to evade Tsarist authorities. After the 1917 revolution, these same techniques were repurposed for intelligence gathering, creating a tradition that continues to this day under Vladimir Putin – himself a former KGB officer who once worked in illegals recruitment.

Most surprising is the program's continued relevance in our digital age. Despite biometric passports and advanced verification systems, Russia continues deploying illegals alongside newer tactics like social media manipulation. Walker's nine years of research, including access to the remarkable Mitrokhin Archive of smuggled KGB documents, provides unprecedented insight into this shadowy world where truth is stranger – and often more fascinating – than fiction.

Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon, your host. You can find out all about me on my website called bookcluescom. And we have a winner of an interview today where, if you have any penchant for any kind of spy novel of any kind of Cold War era, this is your interview. So stay tuned. I hope you enjoy the interview. If you can like and subscribe, it helps the old algorithms. Anyway, thank you, god bless. Happy listening.

Michele McAloon:

Today we get the great opportunity to welcome Shaun Walker, who has written an opus of a book for the spy world. It is a great book. It is called the Illegals, russia's Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, and it is out by Knopf Publishing. It is a deep book, it is a well researched book and if you have any any penchant towards spy novels, this is your book. Man, it is such a good book. It is. It's the Americans, it's Red Sparrow, it's all of it. You know John LeCarr all melded into one book. It's the background of these, these fictitional characters. So it is a great book.

Michele McAloon:

Shaun Walker is the central and Eastern European correspondent. He has spent more than a decade in Moscow, and he's the author of the Long Hangover Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past. Sean, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. This I tell you, it's a real thrill to have you. And so let's go ahead and start with this conversation and I think what we have to really begin with, because you really do look at a hundred years of this and it's surprising to me that it's gone on for a hundred years. Let's do the first thing. What is an illegal?

Shaun Walker:

So in its most basic sense, an illegal is a spy that it's what the Russians call their spies that don't have diplomatic cover. So you know, traditionally big espionage agencies have the classic spy under diplomatic cover, which in the Russian system is called the legal officers, and then they will have their spies under deeper cover. So the CIA has something called non-official cover, nocs, where they might be an American business person or consultant, and the Soviet Union and now Russia has the illegals, which takes that concept but takes it several steps further. So in the Russian sense, an illegal is usually someone who spends several years training to be able to convincingly portray a foreign citizen, so somebody who has absolutely no links at all to Moscow, the Soviet Union, russia, and can go out on missions spying abroad that might last for months, years and even decades.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, I hate to bring it down to the lowest level here, but most people that I'm talking that are listening to this conversation now watched the Americans. I think it was a Netflix series that went over six or seven seasons, One of the best series that's been out there, I think, and you actually addressed the kind of the people that they may have probably sort of were influenced by the story. I think Anna and Lena and we'll talk about that in a little while but those were Russian illegals, correct?

Shaun Walker:

Yeah, that's right. So that's the story that people know best. That, of course, was set in sort of the height of the cold war and and transitioning into the end of the cold war. The couple that it was based on in reality were operating a little bit later. They left just before the end of the cold war russia, and they were operating in the 90s and they were busted in 2010.

Shaun Walker:

Yeah, I think the americans is a really wonderful series for getting into the, the psychological mind space of working as an illegal, and that was one of the things I also wanted to focus on in the book. I think you know, but the the needs of of a tv series means that there's probably like rather more wigs and assassinations and car chases in the Americans than there were, certainly in the later period of the Soviet Union, and some of the early illegals were up to all kinds of crazy stuff, but later on it actually got quite pedestrian. But what was really interesting about it was the way that people were coping with essentially having to live in a second skin, a fake identity, for years on end.

Michele McAloon:

As I read your book I realized that actually in the Americans they brought a lot of different elements that were addressed through different spies, like the Romeo spies, kind of brought a lot of that into that show. If you read the book, folks, you really see how that kind of whoever was the writer of that series was actually influenced to actually probably did some pretty decent research. Have you ever spoken with the writers for the Americans?

Shaun Walker:

Yeah, I have. Yeah, there's two of them, joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, I believe they're called. First got in touch with them some years ago when I was writing my first magazine story about illegals, which was about in, in fact, the two kids of the family that their show was based on. So I wanted to talk to them then and that was the thing that kind of sparked my interest and and sent me off down a rabbit hole for for many years. But yeah, I I think they did a really good job. I think it's very clear they did good research.

Shaun Walker:

Uh, obviously it's not, you know, obviously it's fiction. They've taken plenty of liberties, but I think it's written sort of within the realm of a lot of of really realistic stuff. I also think it's one of the best shows when it comes to sort of you know, the russians, although you wouldn't be under any impression that the soviet union wasn't a place that was doing a lot of sinister things. The Russians don't come across as sort of cartoon bad guys in the Americans. They come across as complicated, sophisticated people, and I think that was one of its big strengths as well.

Michele McAloon:

Well, let's talk about some more of the realistic portion of it is how did the illegals operate? And you really do a very good job of showing how it actually they started off with, how the KGB actually came to be the KGB, because that's actually key to your story of how they've handled these hundred years of illegals. So can you give us just like a little brief history of what we know as the KGB, which has gone through many transformations?

Shaun Walker:

today is known as the SVR, but I think it is important to this story what I started to find out when I started looking into this was that this comes out of not only the earliest part of the Soviet Union, but in fact it predates the Soviet Union. So the origins of the illegals come from the Bolshevik movement, when the Bolshevik party are basically this conspiratorial underground party that's working to overthrow the Tsar. As a conspiratorial underground party they use a lot of these things. They use fake identities, they use false documents, they have code names, they write each other letters and invisible ink and then later, when lenin and the bolsheviks take over in october 1917, they basically repurpose all of this for their first intelligence service. And they do this partly because, you know, soviet union is a new state's vulnerable. It is surrounded by enemies, it doesn't have diplomatic relations with most of the world, so it can't do the normal thing that many countries do of sending out spies posing as diplomats. It can't even send out diplomats. But what it does have is this group of very passionate communists, many of whom have already spent years in the underground. They're used to taking on new identities, they're used to working undercover, and so they just repurpose all of that heritage and they create these new characters for some of these communists and they go out in the in the 1920s as the first illegals and that basically what happens is that you know, over the next hundred years there's, you know, this program just keeps on reincarnating itself.

Shaun Walker:

If we take like several milestones so I mean you the start of the cold war, at At this point the Soviet Union's established it does have embassies, it can send spies out under diplomatic cover. But now they're in a situation where you know it's the Cold War, america's investing huge amounts in the FBI. Those people in the embassy, as soon as they step outside the embassy they're going to be followed. But they say well, hang on, we've got this great concept of the illegals. Unfortunately, all of those polyglots, well-traveled communists, were shot in the purges. Or they've died, or in the war, or they're just too old. So instead, what they decide to do is to start off the program as kind of as we think of the program now, of basically plucking a clever 18-year-old Soviet citizen and giving them years of training until they can start posing as a foreigner.

Michele McAloon:

Okay. So what's very, very interesting is two things the training for the classic illegal so now the legal has changed somewhat but the training that goes into the illegal, and how they selected these people to be illegals, because it was definitely. This is going to sound very prejudiced, but a lot of the Russians who were selected as illegals actually had souls and they could not handle being an illegal. They broke down, they had alcohol problems, they missed home. They were basically human beings and so it took a very, very specific personality type. Tell us a little bit about how they selected these people and kind of the training that they went through, because that's really fascinating.

Shaun Walker:

Yeah. So I mean, if we're looking at the kind of height of the Cold War so the 60s and the 70s and the 80s what we see is that there's this whole network of of spotters from the kgb, from director at s, which is the part of the kgb that is in charge of illegals, and they're basically on the lookout across soviet universities for people who might be good candidates for an illegal. And so the basic attributes that they're looking for they want somebody who is politically reliable, as the Soviets would call it. So you know nobody in their family who was a dissident or had been sent to jail, that hadn't been kind of, you know, hadn't been noticed in any kind of subversive circles at university. That was the first thing. Of course, they should be incredibly academically gifted, and particularly at languages. That goes without saying. Then there, when it comes to looks, ideally they would be kind of fairly attractive, quite pleasant looking, but not incredibly good looking, and there should be nothing about them. Basically that would stand out in a crowd. So you know, you can't be incredibly tall or very fat or anything that, like people might. People might remember you, as I'd say, if they found people that they thought met this basic set of criteria. There'd be a tap on the shoulder and the local kgb spotters, perhaps once a week after classes at university, would start to take them aside to an apartment and start to chat to them about the future. They may give them some tasks to write personality reports on their friends, to look out for suspected subversive elements in the university. They might get them incredibly drunk and see how they behaved when they were drunk, do all these kind of different tests and exams and then, if at the end of that it was felt okay, this person really might have what it takes to be an illegal.

Shaun Walker:

They would then be sent, usually to moscow, although sometimes to leningrad or kiev, and there the real training would begin, and that would be four or five years of incredibly intense, tailored, one-on-one training. You wouldn't go and sit in a classroom in the kgb building. You'd never even go to the kgb building. You'd meet a variety of trainers in different safe apartments across the city and you'd be tutored in language you'd be tutored in. If your cover was going to be austrian, say, you would sit there and you would read every austrian school textbook from the first year to the final year of school, and you'd have political instruction. You'd have instruction in all the different elements of tradecraft that you'd need. So you know, decoding the radio messages, evading possible surveillance.

Shaun Walker:

And then to go to the second part of your question, one thing I realized when I was talking to the people who'd been through this training is that, you know, yes, of course it's incredibly difficult to to pose as a foreigner. So part of the reason this training took so long but it was because that's very difficult but there was also another part of it, which is that, you know, it was kind of a paradoxical personality profile the kgb were trying to set up. Because, on the one hand, you're creating this person who is an incredibly slippery maverick, who's going to lie to everybody. They're going to lie to their own kids, they're going to lie to their family at home, they're going to lie to everyone they meet and they're going to live this life of deception. But on the other hand, you have to make sure that they're going to lie to everyone they meet and they're going to live this life of deception.

Shaun Walker:

But on the other hand, you have to make sure that they're always loyal to you in the KGB and that even when you're sending them off for years on end, and don't forget, of course, the Soviet Union. It's an incredibly paranoid society. There are no tourists who just go off on traveling trips. If sports people or artists travel abroad, they're always accompanied by the KGB, and here we have them sending out the illegals for years on end with no oversight, and they need to make sure that these people are going to stay loyal. And so to do that, I mean that there's almost part of it that made me think of a kind of cult induction ceremony, because there's all these tests, there's all these things to show the illegal that they're always being watched, that they can never lie, and it really was, in a way, designed to kind of psychologically break the person and make sure that they were gonna remain loyal.

Michele McAloon:

What was really interesting. I mean, these people had to be true believers because in the 90s, when basically all of this falls apart, right, they go through glasnost and all of this falls apart, they're still working. So these are people that are truly impassioned by the cause of Mother Russia.

Shaun Walker:

Yes, they were recruited young. They tended to be passionate communists. They had a lot of ideological indoctrination in the training period. And you know, there's a question that people are often asking me is like well, when they got to the West didn't they quite like it and didn't they start to have some doubts? And I think with some operatives you do see that.

Shaun Walker:

But with other operatives I think what you see is that living in the West they're exposed to all of the flaws of the West and of course these were not and are not perfect societies by any means. So they could see all of that. But what they couldn't see so much was the flaws of Soviet society. Because they'd been recruited at 18 into this quite elite program. They'd be ferried around these safe houses and then they'd been dispatched abroad quite young and they'd only really be coming back to the Soviet Union for a few days every two or three years. They'd be kept in very tight surroundings because they weren't supposed to be out and about meeting people. That was too risky. So actually it was kind of easier for them not to see the flaws in Soviet society because they weren't exposed to them.

Michele McAloon:

You spoke to. I think it was Yuri Livonov, who was a.

Shaun Walker:

Leonov yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, leonov, what was he like? What was I mean? Because he had spent years and then was caught right, and what was he like? I mean, what are they like to talk to?

Shaun Walker:

So I would say the defining the sort of linking characteristic of all the illegals that I spoke to, and there were very different kinds of people in different circumstances. You know, some were still in Russia, some were had defected and were in the US or in other places, different ages but the one thing that united them all is they're all incredibly charming people, they're very pleasant to talk to, they're, you know, funny, they're very intelligent and they're great conversationalists. Of course, it was also a bit of a challenge when I'm researching the book because, I mean, these are people who are trained to lie right, yeah, and so, of course, you know, I had to try to check things.

Shaun Walker:

I had to see like where, where I feel like I'm getting a story and where it's probably true. But yeah, I mean, yuri is in his eighties now, but still a kind of somebody who I agree to be very fond of, to be honest, uh, he was just, you know, very, very charming and then had a very interesting life.

Michele McAloon:

How about? I know the CIA has a program called and I forgot what that stands for. What is?

Shaun Walker:

that Non-official cover.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, non-official cover. How successful are we at this sort of program as Americans? I'm sorry, we as Americans, or you know what. For that part, how about the Brits? How successful is the West with this kind of program?

Shaun Walker:

Well, look, I think there is two parts of this question On a very basic level. So let's just start by saying that, as far as we know, the Brits and the Americans do not spend years training Americans to pose as French or German or Russian. But they don't need to. I think is the key, because the Soviet program comes out of a context where the Soviet Union's a closed society. If you're in New York in 1970 and you meet a Soviet journalist or a Soviet trade representative or anyone from the Soviet Union who starts asking you a few questions, you'll immediately start thinking well, hang on a minute, perhaps this guy's from the KGB. But of course, US, Britain, they weren't closed societies. People did travel. It wasn't so strange to have an American businessman who worked in the Middle East or you know all kinds of professions that could be used as cover for these knocks. So it's a lot easier to run somebody if they're using their own name, their own identity, but they're just working a cover job. That's a little bit more deep than working in the embassy. Where that becomes more difficult to operate, of course, is if you want to operate in a closed society.

Shaun Walker:

How would the Americans operate inside the Soviet Union? So again we're talking about a closed place where these knocks that we're talking about the businessmen or the consultants or even journalists. They would immediately be under suspicion because there weren't hundreds of American businessmen roaming around the Soviet Union. As soon as they arrived people would think they're probably a spy.

Shaun Walker:

So what there was was there was one attempt, which I write about in the book in the early 1950s to create kind of a reverse illegals program where the CIA looked for Russians and Ukrainians in sort of displaced persons camps, mostly in Germany in the post-war period, and they took them to a kind of villa in Southern Germany that the CIA had brought and they gave them training in how the Soviet Union had changed.

Shaun Walker:

They forged some documents and they actually flew these people over the border and and dropped them with parachutes inside the soviet union and the idea was that they were meant to kind of blend into society and report back to the cia. But the problem is again closed society, a lot of bureaucracy. It's much harder to just show up in a town and start to live there than it is, say, in the us. So this program, most of these operatives, were busted immediately within a few years. I think there were two or three that hadn't been caught, and after after five or six years the program was just abandoned as too dangerous, too expensive and a waste of time, and I think after that we haven't really seen this attempt to do this again.

Michele McAloon:

It's really interesting reading through your book and you kind of talk about how you do your research, but there's a lot that I mean. This is really a really deep researched book. How long did it take?

Shaun Walker:

you to write it. That first magazine story that provided the inspiration was I think I published that in May of 2016. And the book came out in April of 2025. So it's about nine years. Of course, I wasn't working full time on that whole time. I took about nine months off from my day job at the guardian back in 2021 when I was full-time researching this.

Shaun Walker:

It was a lot of work because, of course, on the one hand, it's this, it's this sort of really secretive, obviously, organization and and so it was hard from that perspective, and then I'm also covering this incredibly long period. So I would say that, you know, it was a mixture of, for the later, later characters I mean, I'm a journalist, so a lot of interviews, a lot of journalistic work but then also for the earlier stories, a lot of archives, secondary literature and probably the most useful source for the whole book overall was the metrokhan archive, which, uh, if you're yeah, if your listeners are not familiar with, I've just briefly explained, so that this is this amazing trove of documents that a kgb archivist who was called vasily metrokhan, in the 1970s, was put in charge of reorganizing the foreign intelligence archive and basically over a period of about a decade on an almost daily basis, secretly took notes of all the files that he was reading, smuggled them in his shoes or elsewhere on his person out of the KGB and hid them in his dacha outside Moscow and then just sat on. You know he retired from the KGB in 1984 and did nothing with these notes for eight years and then in 1992, when the soviet union collapsed, walked into the american embassy in one of the baltic capitals and said you know, I've got this, I've got the entire kgb archive copied. And they kind of thought he was a mad old man and sent him away. And he walked into the british embassy and they sort of said, well, maybe we'll have a look at what you've got there. And yeah, and realized what he was sitting on.

Shaun Walker:

So they exfiltrated all of these documents, got him to Britain and there's a couple of great books that were published in the late 90s based on these documents by the historian Christopher Andrew. But there's also a huge amount that wasn't in those books Since 2014,. The archive is now available to the public. So I went and just spent weeks reading through all of these documents and there's thousands of pages in there that are about illegals. That's the closest I think we're ever going to get to the real KGB documents.

Michele McAloon:

That's interesting, boy. That must have been some really interesting reading, some time-consuming reading, I'm sure, but very, very interesting reading. Okay, so we move into the 80s and the 90s and the aughts, and how has the illegal program changed? And do you know, I'm always shocked that I'm always shocked about Russia, I really am. And we opened up in New York Times. There was a big New York Times article a week ago about how they busted about 10 of them in Brazil. Even up into right now, this program still exists, correct, mm-hmm.

Shaun Walker:

Yep.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, exists correct. Yep, okay. But the program has changed and you do a really good job of showing how it's sort of changed with the fall of the Soviet Union. But it's sort of morphed back. It seems like it's gotten new breath under our favorite man, putin. There. Sarcastic, there you go.

Shaun Walker:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things for me looking at this is that there are so many moments over this hundred years where you just feel like, okay, so illegals were working very well for you, but now surely it doesn't make sense anymore. It's it's, it's harder, it's you know, 20s and 30s of the last century like brilliant way to solve the problems the new Soviet Union had of getting information. Cold War much harder, but still makes some kind of sense. Collapse of the Soviet Union you're like OK, we all thought that's basically obviously at the end of this program you know we were talking about part of the reason they needed illegals was because there were no non-suspicious Russian or Soviet travelers In the 90s. That all changes. There are hundreds of thousands of Russian scientists and business people and artists and whatever who travel the world. Of course, almost all of them have nothing to do with Russian intelligence. So it's very easy to slip in a few that do have nothing to do with russian intelligence. So it's very easy to slip in a few that do. So what? Why do you need to spend five years training somebody to be a brazilian or german or an american? It doesn't quite make sense, but it turns out they, they continue to do it.

Shaun Walker:

I think partly it's. It's about, you know, historical myth making. As you say, you have vladimir putin, who takes over in the 80s, when he was working for the KGB in Dresden, one of his main roles was actually working in the very early stages of illegals recruitment. He's spoken many, many times about how the illegals are unique. There's something uniquely Russian like no other nation would have a program that required so much sacrifice and so many years of training. So it for him. It really fits into this rhetoric of russia as this land of higher ideals where you sacrifice for the cause, in comparison to the kind of decaying west. So I think part of it is that what I would say just as aument now is that actually, in a strange way, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it may be that in fact, illegals are once again more useful, and that may also be why we've seen so many be caught in the last three years.

Shaun Walker:

In the last three years, because we're again, I think, in a moment where russians, russia, is suspicious, again russian people are suspicious of russians and all of those people like anna chapman, who could freely walk around new york in the early 2000s and nobody would even think that this you know, young, glamorous real estate agent could be a kgb spy. Now I think people are wary again of anything to do with russia. And if you do meet a russian business person or consultant or journalist or artist at a party and they start asking you sensitive questions, probably your brain is fairly quickly going to go to a place of like this person seems suspicious. If you meet an Argentinian gallery owner or Brazilian researcher, you probably won't think, oh, hang on a minute, this person could be a Russian spy.

Shaun Walker:

I think there is a big question of is it worth it? Is it really worth all of the effort, and particularly today, in a world of computerized databases, biometric passports and so on. You know the early illegals could just pick up one passport, change it for another one and, like, change their identity in mid-afternoon. You can't do that anymore. It takes a huge amount of effort to create a sustainable identity. So is it really worth it? Hard to say, but most people seem to think it isn't. But they would also say that you know, actually, if you do have an illegal and they do end up in a you know, sensitive or interesting place, they can still potentially do a lot of damage.

Michele McAloon:

Sure, how are these people caught? Did you find any thread of how they are caught? Did you find any thread of how they are caught? Do they slip up? Or was the FBI or the MI6, were they particularly talented at finding these people, these Brazilians that were caught?

Shaun Walker:

How were they caught? Agencies, particularly with the more recent cases. Of course, how they come to information is always going to be one of the most closely guarded secrets right okay.

Shaun Walker:

So my understanding and what I've been told and and what that article suggested, was that in the case of those brazilian spies, they were actually caught through some very painstaking work to look at patterns of anomalies in documents and birth certificates.

Shaun Walker:

When they realized how, when one illegal was caught and they realized how they done it to kind of get around this, then they got on to all the others. Now, of course, that's what they might want to say if there was a mole in Moscow who was leaking to them the identities of these people. So it's hard to say for sure, but if you look back at the historical cases, what I would say is that it's quite rare to just find an illegal by looking for an illegal. Usually they were caught either because somebody in Moscow turned and passed on information or because the illegal themselves cracked. There was a case of one who came to Canada in the early 1950s and pretty much one of the first things he did was get drunk, decided he'd fallen in love with the daughter of the guest house owner he was staying with and told her everything, and she told him to go and tell the Canadian police, which he did. So it's much more often that it's either a sort of crisis of faith or it's a defector.

Michele McAloon:

There was just a thousand person prisoner exchange over this weekend between Ukrainians and Russians. Any chance that there may have been illegals in that? Or I was reading through some of the articles saying if I could find any hints, but I didn't find any hints of that so no, I think that's probably quite unlikely.

Shaun Walker:

I think that because that's mostly going to be, you know, soldiers and uh, and civilians and in the war, yeah. So I think the last, the last exchange we saw with illegals was that one in august 2024 when we had the pair of argentinians supposed argentinians who came back with their two children, who apparently were only told on the plane that they were in fact russians. Um and yeah, and another illegal who was posing as a Brazilian researcher, who was arrested in Norway.

Michele McAloon:

Did you get a chance to talk to those children that were the Argentinians? Did you say that or no?

Shaun Walker:

No, so they were only eight and 11. So I probably wouldn't be bothering them, even if I had the opportunity.

Michele McAloon:

No, no, that's, I think. Okay, I remembered something wrong there. When you were researching this book, did anyone reach out to you and say hey, where are you getting this information from? Where? Or did you come under scrutiny at all?

Shaun Walker:

So I think there were definitely places where I would find people's names and archive documents and I would call them. And there was several former illegals who I tracked down, who basically told me to get lost and they never wanted to speak to me. There were others who I worked on politely and slowly and tried to kind of marshal all of my charm as much as I could and kind of persuaded to talk to me. But yeah, and I would say, since the publication of the book, I'm also getting a lot of emails from people who are saying you know, I think my neighbors might be illegals or I think my dad might have been illegal.

Shaun Walker:

I mean, who knows right, Maybe some of them were, but I'm remaining mostly skeptical so far.

Michele McAloon:

When things don't add up right. I've got a few family members, no family, I love you. If you're listening to this, I don't think anybody is an illegal. Well, the story is just fascinating. And it just fascinates me because it seems like it would be nearly impossible to do this now, and especially in the United States where everything is going towards. You know, you have to have a star ID card, you have to, I mean, I guess I guess they're bright enough to get around the system somehow, but as biometrics comes on board and you have to have verification of everything, I just find this fascinating. Don't you think they maybe use it more in a soft direction, where they know that a Soviet businessman or, sorry, a Russian businessman or a Russian family, and they're saying, hey, what did you find out about that? Or what did you find and not actually the illegal program and you actually bring that up, that that was a technique that they started using. Just, I mean, people could be out in the open and spying out in the open.

Shaun Walker:

Yes, yeah. So I mean I think Russia uses a whole range of different things now, and I mean when I was saying that you know what we've seen, I think, since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, with all of the expulsions of diplomats from Russian embassies across Europe and of course, many of those diplomats were spies posing as diplomats. So that's massively russia's capacity to use spies under diplomatic cover. Part of the kind of loss there has been made up by relying more on illegals, and I think that's maybe one of the reasons we've seen so many be caught. But we also see something that's, you know, different to all of those things we've talked about so far, which is the recruitment of people to take part in sabotage operations, and that's done via Telegram, the messaging app. So you know, there's cases I was covering a few cases in Poland where people are recruited, offered sort of $200, $500 to burn a car down or put up some posters, and this is something that the russians can do without the intelligence officer, even leaving russian territory. They recruit them remotely, they pay them remotely and if the person is caught and jailed, then okay, nobody's gonna put a big effort to exchange them. They'll just recruit someone else to do it again.

Shaun Walker:

So I think there's a whole spectrum of of different ways of carrying out operations for mosc, moscow, and that's not surprising.

Shaun Walker:

But perhaps what is surprising is that illegals are still part of that, and I think it, yeah, it's.

Shaun Walker:

It's both confusing from, as you say, it's so much harder to do and it's also a bit confusing for me, and I think we saw that in the some of the text messages between the illegals that were published as part of that New York Times investigation where they're kind of asking you know the guy is asking his wife like why on earth did we get into this? This is like such a waste of time and it's like messing with our minds. And you know, for me it's quite easy to see why a bright, young Soviet kid in 1960 or 1970 would think this is a very, very attractive option because there were not many ways to see the world, to travel, to learn foreign languages. If you're a bright, young, smart, wealthy kid in Moscow today, for me I would think you have many more more appealing options to go and have a life in the world and sort of, you know, do interesting things than this like contorting yourself into right yeah, this other personality, so for me it's very confusing what the motivation is now yeah, that's really interesting, though.

Michele McAloon:

One last thing I do want to talk about was the 2016 trump election, the Russian influence on the election and basically were able to make fake illegals on the internet. To me, that is still astounding, sean, that that happened, or supposedly happened, that they were able to influence maybe influence the election, who knows but it's.

Shaun Walker:

I mean that's got to be spycraft in the future completely different, but for me, what was interesting about this is that during the Soviet period, you had to spend years to create a convincing foreigner who could enter, or convincing American who could interact with other Americans and not be seen as coming from Moscow.

Shaun Walker:

What you have now is, you know, you create a Facebook profile with about 10 minutes, you put some trump or whatever content you want to put on it and you can start messaging other americans and if they're not particularly careful about checking, does this person have a long history?

Shaun Walker:

Before long, you can do what we saw people doing in the 2016 campaign, which was, you know, messaging other pro-Trump groups saying let's set up a rally, I'll send the finances, you do the organization and then, on the day, you're just saying, oh, I can't make it, but you know, you guys go ahead and what you have is like somebody sitting in St Petersburg with a fake profile setting up a real rally attended by real Americans for a real American political cause in America, and to me, that's you know, that's something that the real life illegals wouldn't have dared to do, because it would have been way too risky. I mean, why would you? Why would you waste all those years of training that somebody might get suspicious of you, of you funding a rally, and start to look into who you are. But of course, if you're the Facebook page, then if somebody gets suspicious of you, you just delete it and make a new one, and it's that easy.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. Oh, just so interesting, I have to bring up another television show. Have you ever watched the Bureau?

Shaun Walker:

I have, oh my God, that's a great one.

Michele McAloon:

There's a French version and there's an English version, and they're both equal.

Shaun Walker:

Oh, I haven't seen the English version. I didn't know.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, it's a new series out and it's basically. It's basically the French story, but it's in English and it all happens in London. But I mean that's, that's another where they're creating legends, right, and they're creating illegals to go to Iran and super, super, great, super fun. You know the the Western fascination with spies. We just love this stuff. We can't get enough of it because I think it is. It's so intriguing and it's so out of our ordinary, right. But what you show in the book it was really part of the ordinary too. So it was how ordinary could these people be doing something absolutely extraordinary? And that, I think, is our fascination with it in a certain way. You know, just power and control and all that kind of good stuff, but it was good.

Michele McAloon:

Well, sean, I congratulate you on this book. To the folks out there, I really can't encourage people enough to go out and read this book. It's really well, well researched, it reads very well, it's dense, but I mean just, I mean every, every spy novel you've ever read backs up everything that you want to be about spies and want to know about spies and illegals and all that kind of stuff. So it's a good read, it's a fun read. I actually think it would be a great summer read and all that kind of stuff. So it's a good read. It's a fun read. I actually think it would be a great summer read. So, sean, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy work. What are you working on?

Shaun Walker:

Anything currently or any big plans. I am currently in between trips to Ukraine, so I will be. I was back a couple of weeks ago and I'll be heading back in in a week or two.

Michele McAloon:

Well, you know what? We pray for your safety as you go to Ukraine and pray for the people of Ukraine. So again, Shaun Walker, thank you very much. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 ¶¶. © transcript Emily Beynon.