If it’s a good time to be a spy, and by all accounts it seems to be, then it may be an even better time to be writing spy books. In nonfiction alone, recent titles abound.
Kevin Riehle’s Soviet Defectors from 2020 looked at Moscow’s’ evolving perception of security threats from 1924-54, and its publisher, Edinburgh University Press, this year released Luca Trenta’s assassination book, The President’s Kill List. Late last year, Georgetown University Press put out Emrah Gürkan’s Spies for the Sultan, on Ottoman intelligence during its 16th-century rivalry with Spain, and Richard J Aldrich and Rory Cormac’s Crown, Cloak and Dagger, and will very soon release my own The Intelligence Intellectuals, about social scientists and the making of the CIA. British historian Helen Fry has a bookshelf to herself with The Walls Have Ears, The London Cage, MI9 and her most recent, Women in Intelligence (Yale University Press).
Now come two somewhat complementary books: Shaun Walker’s The Illegals and Douglas Waller’s The Determined Spy. They are complementary because they show how “illegal” operations were employed by both sides and, perhaps more interestingly, because they illustrate the often tragic human cost of spying.
British foreign correspondent Walker spent 10 years reporting from Moscow. He became interested in the Soviet illegals when he read of Elena Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov, who as Tracey Foley and Don Heathfield led pretend lives in Massachusetts from 1987-2010. When finally exposed, they were returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange, taking their two teenagers with them. Their sons learnt the truth only when the plane touched down in Moscow and Vladimir Putin greeted the family as heroes.
The concept of “illegals” comes from the Bolsheviks’ recognition that there were some things revolutionaries could do openly and others had to happen under the radar. This called for “‘two arms, one out in the open, functioning publicly, the other unseen, secret, underground”. In the early days, the Soviet Union did not have embassies established and therefore could not plant spying “legals” under the auspices of normal diplomatic roles. The answer was to train swashbucklers such as Dmitry Bystrolyotov, aka the Greek merchant Alexander S Gallas, aka the Hungarian banker Joe Perelly.
The Great Illegals, as they are known – and still celebrated in Russia – were directed by shadowy departments of the Cheka (Lenin’s secret police agency) and KGB. It was an investment not only in training talented linguists to affect American accents and back stories (or “legends”), but also playing a waiting game with sleeper agents who may not be activated for years. Time, however, did not stand still – particularly during the Stalin era when senior intelligence officials were often shot.
Later, as the Soviet Union crumbled, funds dried up and communications were severed. This left the illegals out in the cold, not knowing whether they were meant to continue their spying or had been abandoned. Some took to drink, had mental breakdowns, or turned themselves in. Others simply decided to get on with their new lives, in the hope Moscow would forget about them.
Although Moscow was serious about training spies to blend in and go undercover, it was unforgiving when mistakes were made, undermining the give and take required to make the operation durable. The illegals were meant to be ideologically pure while at the same time affecting the values and aspirations of the democracies they were hiding in. Women spies were often either broken by the stress or became more resolute than their husbands. Even their bosses acknowledged it was “rarely possible to solve the family lives of illegals satisfactorily”.
In 1974, Peter Herrmann was recruited by his father Rudi (born Dalibor Valoušek), who had with his wife Inge crossed over to West Germany in 1957, then to Canada and finally the United States. At 16, Peter was taken by his parents to Moscow and offered an ultimatum: work for the KGB or don’t return home (he would be a safety risk). He chose the life of a spy, but on his return began to suffer depression, sending a letter home from McGill University in Canada with a drawing of him with a noose around his neck and the caption “shit”. Peter would be known by the code name “Erbe”, or “the inheritor”.
Trainee illegal Yuri Linov interviewed a number of language students as a potential wife, and chose Tamara Kovalenko. Tamara was ill-suited to the life of an illegal. She was separated for long stretches of time both from husband and baby, and spent nights crying herself to sleep. Her husband found her polite, kind and naive, and told his handlers she was unfit for the job. She was sent home in disgrace. Others tried to commit suicide or became deeply paranoid. One illegal became convinced MI5 had planted bugs in his shirt buttons.
Douglas Waller’s book on Frank Wisner shows the other side of the story. Wisner served with the Office of Strategic Services , a forerunner to the CIA, during and after World War II, first in Bucharest then in occupied Berlin.
From 1948, he headed the CIA’s covert operations and, as the US’s main instigator of coups and assassinations, was freewheeling and out of control. Wisner considered himself invulnerable, and his mania took hold not only at work but at home – he beat his wife badly. His life ended just as violently.
In 1958, he was admitted to the Sheppard Pratt Hospital with acute manic depression and given electric shock treatment. In 1965, after recurrent episodes, he shot himself.
Talking later to her friend and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, his wife Polly agreed their husbands “could not bear not being in the centre” of the country’s affairs.
The irony for Wisner, as well as the Soviet illegals, was that living in the centre offered no more real a perspective of world affairs than living outside it.
The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West, by Shaun Walker (Profile, $49.99 hb) and The Determined Spy: The Turbulent Life and Times of CIA Pioneer Frank Wisner, by Douglas Waller (Dutton, $49.99 hb), are out now.
