Shaun Walker
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They get short lists. They start interviewing them. At this early stage, they won't even tell them, you know, we're considering you might become an illegal spy. They just start to have conversations once a week. And eventually they sort of whittle it down to a short list of really promising candidates, which Andrei and Yelena were both on.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, so the early stage training will happen when they're still at university. That will be personality tests and just sort of checking they're compatible. And then they were sent when it was decided that they really could be illegals. Then they were sent on to the full training course. And by the early 1980s, this would last four or five years.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
It would be entirely one on one or in the case of couples like Andre and Yelena, one on two. They would have they would. And one of the things that runs through the program. So they would never it wouldn't be that they would go in the morning to their training room at KGB headquarters and attend classes for the day. So they would never set foot inside a KGB building.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They would never see any of their trainers in KGB uniform. They wouldn't even know the real names of most of their trainers. This was all done in safe houses, secret apartments across Moscow. So you'd go to one for your language classes. You'd go to another one for your etiquette classes. You would sit.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So if you have a Canadian cover, you would sit in an apartment for hours on end reading Canadian school books year by year. So you would imbibe the things you would have imbibed if you really had been to Canadian school. And then you'd have a whole set of tests for loyalty because almost nobody, the illegals, in fact, are the only Soviet citizens who are allowed to travel freely.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And the KGB is very worried about... kind of how to do this I mean it's such a paradoxical situation that you have to shape these sort of virtuoso maverick spies who are going to go out in the field and lie to absolutely everyone about everything including their own children But at the same time, without any oversight, you have to make sure they stay slavishly loyal to you.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And I think in all of the stories I heard from different people about the training, I mean, it almost sounds a bit like an induction into a cult. I mean, they're really trying to break you. They're trying to show you that they're watching all the time. They will engineer different situations, fake arrests, where you'll be sort of You know, pressured.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And if you finally break and say, listen, there's been a terrible mistake. I work for the KGB. Please call my handlers. That's it. You'll be kicked off the program. So just endless tests to make sure that you have what it takes for this, like, really quite intense psychological recovery. endurance that it's going to be to live abroad for these years.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And then it's only after you've kind of passed all of those tests and learned how to look for surveillance, learned how to receive the messages in code. All of this stuff is incredibly time consuming. Finally, after four or five years, they're ready to go.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, they turn on the TV and they see the Soviet flag being lowered over the Kremlin for the final time. They see... President Bush talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fact that the US has won the Cold War. And here they are sitting in this cold motel room. A few years after their deployment, they've had this intense training, they've sworn an oath to defend the motherland.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And now the motherland doesn't exist.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, many. I mean, it was a really kind of individual moment. So some of them decided to come home, be with their families. Others had a look at this choice and decided not to come home. Maybe in the way that Andrei and Yelena tell it, they were always patriotic and they were just waiting for for Russia to kind of come back to get back off its knees and they could spy again.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I think the reality was probably a little bit more complicated, I think, for a lot of these people.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
they they looked and they saw okay well we've started building a life in the west we've got quite a comfortable life we've made solid foundations this is what we've spent years training to do we have kids who are born in the west so we can either stay here see what happens maybe russia and the us will become friends but then okay we don't need to be spies we'll just live this this other life that we've created for ourselves or we could go back to the soviet union which is in chaos where there's economic turmoil
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
where it's uncertain what will happen, where it's also at this stage, it's uncertain. I mean, will there be trials for top people in the KGB? Suddenly, the work they were doing that was seen as sort of patriotic, wonderful work, maybe it's not going to be viewed like that in the new Russia. So some of them maybe just decide to wait and see.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Perhaps they'll come back into the fold if and when there is a renewed demand for spying. Or maybe they will just start their new lives and their cover identities and no one will ever know that once upon a time they were from Siberia.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, so after this nearly quarter of a century of living in these cover identities, they're very comfortable, they've got the two kids, they think that everything is going very well. But of course, as with all spies, you're only ever one turncoat, one defector away from being exposed. And for some years, they'd actually, every move had been tracked by the FBI.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And this was a day, the FBI had been tracking illegals across the United States. There was about 10 of them. And this was finally the time the defector wanted to be exfiltrated. They needed to round them up. And this was the day in June 2010 that it was decided it was going to happen. So across the U.S., coordinated raids and arrests. And it's actually Tim, the oldest son. It's his 20th birthday.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
There's a knock at the door. Everyone thinks it must be somebody come to wish him happy birthday. It's actually the FBI who put Andre and Yelena, Don and Anne, into separate cars, drive them away. And Tim and Alex, the two sons, are left there kind of asking what on earth is going on. And they're basically told, well, your parents have been arrested for being agents of a foreign government.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And it's only a few days later that they will start to hear the full details and even then not really believe it.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, so she tells them, you should fly to Moscow. And they do. And this is like, I mean, this is one of these kind of slightly confusing moments here. So what on earth was this trip that they were going to do to Moscow that summer? In their telling, this was just going to be an ordinary tourist trip. You know, they traveled all over the place.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
One of the kids had said, oh, let's what about Russia? We've never been there. They were going to go. They were going to stay in character the whole time as Canadians, Americans and leave again. Now, of course, I'm a little bit suspicious about this. I do wonder if we had that story decades earlier of the illegal trying to recruit his son as a second generation.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Maybe this was a trip where they were going to reveal they decided it was time and see if their children would join their mission. The FBI have suggested they believe that might be the case. Parents and the children fully deny it. I think we'll never know the truth of that. But
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
But yeah, I think at the moment when your mom tells you what I think you should do is fly to Moscow, I guess that's the moment where you realize, OK, looks like this is true. So these these poor kids, they fly off to Moscow. Their parents arrive a couple of days later in a in a spy swap. They swapped on the tarmac at Vienna Airport and they arrived back in Moscow.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And yeah, one of the younger brothers said to me that the moment he realized it was all true was when one of the people that met them at the airport and they introduced themselves as, you know, we're friends of your parents, we work with them.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And they showed the two brothers pictures of their parents in KGB uniforms, which had been taken just before they were sent off to Canada back in the late 1980s. And Alex said, you know, this was the moment where I realized it was all true. So they have this, I mean, unimaginable sort of family summit back in Moscow.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They meet grandparents they didn't know they had, or at least they thought they were living somewhere in remote Canada rather than in Siberia. They're taken to the Bolshoi Theatre. They have these long discussions with their parents about what on earth has just happened. And they're given Russian passports with new names. They can't even pronounce their names properly.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And yeah, it was meeting the two of them. It was actually back in 2016 when I wrote a story about them and their battle to have their Canadian citizenship restored. That was the sort of first impulse for me, this crazy twisted family story that sort of set me on this path of getting obsessed with the illegals over the years.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I spoke with Elena a couple of times a few years ago. We haven't been in touch a lot recently. I think context has changed a bit since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I used to go to Russia very regularly. I'm now on a blacklist, so I can't visit.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
But yeah, I mean, they were essentially, I mean, what's fascinating about them, so with earlier illegals who achieved an awful lot, they were often, as we discussed, sent to the gulag shop. Some of them were disgraced because they were caught. And despite having, you know, given years of their lives to this program, what you see with Andre and Jelena is sort of the opposite.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I mean, they definitely did a very impressive job to integrate so well and live many years undercover. But because of this defector, for 10 years, the FBI knew exactly what they were doing. So essentially, their value as espionage agents was pretty much zero. But that's slightly glossed over, or rather fully glossed over when it comes to the sort of modern Russian telling of their story.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And of course, now under Putin, there is a really big focus on finding patriotic stories on nationalist myth-making. And the illegals are perfect for this. These people who sacrificed everything. They lived abroad for years. They gave everything for the motherland. And that's now their position in Russian society. So they came back. They were given a very nice apartment.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They were both given quite lucrative jobs in state controlled companies. They met with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and sang songs together. And then, you know, they're introduced on chat shows as legendary spies and they will give the talking points. Well, more Andrei actually. Andrei will often be on chat shows too.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Well, it's great to be back talking to you again, Dave. And yeah, I mean, the Soviet and then Russian illegals program, it does have some similarities with spying programs that a lot of countries use. But It's really something quite unique.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
giving the talking points of the day about Russia's war in Ukraine or how the evil West is trying to bring down Moscow. So they fit quite nicely into this system. What they say to each other in their quieter moments in the evenings, I don't know.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So I think it was very difficult for them, particularly, I think, Alex, the younger son. They had both found ways to live outside Russia, but they were struggling with getting visas. You know, I know Alex had been applying to various schools in Europe and then had not been able to get visas. And I think with their parents, it was not an easy conversation.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
But they somehow felt they'd had a loving childhood. They felt their parents had been very good to them in many ways. And they tried to find a way, I think, to sidestep this big deception. And I guess there are ways in which With all of these families, and it was the same talking to Peter Herman, the guy whose father tried to recruit him.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
In many ways, the dilemmas these kids face and these families face are similar to a lot of families. There might be a secret affair or a secret past history that parents don't want to talk about. You have the dilemmas of immigrant parents coming to a new country and, you know, they want their children to integrate, but they also don't want to lose them to the new culture.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And illegals had all these same dilemmas, but they were just heightened 10 times over by this kind of extraordinary secret that they had a second life as Soviet citizens.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
What I'd love to say, it was a phenomenal journalistic scoop that infuriated Vladimir Putin. But it was basically early on in the full-scale war, in the summer of 2022, I think the Brits must have put sanctions on a certain number of Russians. And as the Russians love to do, they put reciprocal sanctions on whoever's sanctioning them. If you sanction me, I'm going to sanction you back.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So they released a list of about 50... British journalists, politicians, analysts, all kinds of people. My claim to fame is I was number one on the list. But there was also every other journalist for The Guardian who'd reported from Ukraine pretty much was on this list.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And yeah, and actually most of the people, what was frustrating about it, most of the people on this list were not people who were ever going to Russia. So they get to sort of very proudly put on their biographies that, you know, I've been banned by the Kremlin. Whereas, yeah, I mean, I was I was last there a few months before the war started, the full scale war started.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I was continuing to go back. I'm obviously, you know, it's it's really quite sad and depressing to see what's happened to the country. But I would it doesn't feel a good feeling to not be able to go after I spent so many years reporting from there.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And that was sort of what kind of got me obsessed with the program over the last years when I've been researching this book, because I just felt that somehow understanding the illegals and understanding the way this extraordinary program works that evolved from right at the beginning of the Soviet Union, through the Cold War, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and up to now.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Thank you very much for having me.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
At all these moments, there were so many moments in this program where you just think, okay, this doesn't quite make sense anymore to do this, to train these people for years, to spend, you know, one-on-one really intensive training for years on end until you have an operative that's ready to be sent out into another country and pose as someone with no links at all to Russia.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
There's pretty much no other intelligence service that does that in this kind of scale.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So Lenin was the head of the Bolsheviks. And the Bolsheviks at this point before the revolution were a kind of close-knit conspiratorial underground group fighting the Tsar. Some of them were inside Russia. Some of them were in exile. And Lenin developed this concept that on the one hand, they were going to organize openly inside Russia. They would send people to the parliament.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They would work through trade unions. These would be the legal workers, but they'd also have illegals who would do clandestine organization. They would often live in disguise. They would be trying to keep one step ahead of the Tsar's secret police. And these illegals, they often had fake foreign identities. They lived under false documents. They had code names.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They wrote each other letters in invisible ink. Basically, they used a lot of spy craft. And so when Lenin and the Bolsheviks take over after the October revolution in 1917, they readapt a lot of this spy craft for their brand new intelligence service.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And it's that heritage of the Bolsheviks as an underground clandestine organization that really kind of informs this idea of sending illegals out into the field.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah. I mean so the logic of the purges was such that even the most loyal people were subject to suspicion and everybody was desperate to show they were more loyal than everybody else. Yeah. A key feature of the purges was accusing people of having links with foreign intelligence services. So essentially spying for the enemies of the Soviet Union to bring down the Soviet state.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And of course, the illegals here were kind of first in the firing line because unlike your factory director in Siberia or your train worker in the Urals who might be accused of working for German or Japanese intelligence and it's fanciful, here were people who were traveling all through the world. They were posing as capitalists. They had all kinds of links.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And so suspicion, when it was so ubiquitous, naturally fell on them very quickly. And so what you see is that these people who, you know, in the case of someone like Dmitry Bistralyotov, he had spent years posing as a Hungarian, as a Brit, as different brands of capitalists, and he hadn't been uncovered in the West yet.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
He comes back to the Soviet Union and he's accused that this whole career when he was working for Moscow was all a sham. He actually there's another layer to his cover. And the whole time he was this secret enemy spy. Now, this is ridiculous. But to get him to admit to this, there are weeks, months of interrogations. violence, torture, until eventually he feels his life slipping away from him.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And he agrees to sign whatever they put in front of him just to make it stop.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, luckily for him, he managed to hold out long enough that by the time he signs the real peak is winding down. He doesn't get shot like many of the other illegals. But he does end up with 20 years in the gulag, which which completely breaks him.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, I mean, it's a really extraordinary scene. And actually, Dimitri's description of his interrogations, it's some of the most interesting and evocative writing about the purges that I've ever seen. And yeah, there's this moment where the guy who's been in charge of his torture...
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Suddenly, it sort of suddenly dawns on him this life that Dimitri had had in the West, wearing nice suits, going out to bars, traveling, having money. And he just looks at him and he says... So you mean to say you could have just run off somewhere with all this money and you could have lived in luxury until the end of your life, but you chose to come back here and face a bullet?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I mean, what an idiot. And he starts berating Dimitri, like, why on earth did you come back here? And I think there's this moment where... Dimitri sort of sees this a little bit of the kind of curtain of the theater raises a bit and he sees this guy as maybe someone who's also a bit of a victim of this crazy system, even though he's the torture and Dimitri is the tortured.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah. So you have a few of these early post-war spies, illegals who were sent out to the US. And yeah, as you say, it's very hard on them. There's one and the one case that springs to mind is a chap called Yevgeny Brick. So he arrives in Canada with the ultimate goal of getting to the US. And he's supposed to spend a bit of time in Canada brushing up on what the KGB called the legend of the spy.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So his backstory, basically. So he would go around several Canadian towns. He would visit the places where... supposedly he had grown up and he would sort of get himself a nice cache of stories that he'd be able to tell about these places. But he shows up and in one of the first places he stays in, in Winnipeg, he's in a guest house.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
He's missing his wife, who's back in Moscow, his family's in Moscow. Of course, he has absolutely no links. He's not allowed to contact them and not even allowed to contact the local Soviet embassy. And so rather lonely, he starts drinking in this guest house. He meets the daughter of the guest house owner, decides that he's in love with her.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And basically at the first opportunity, he sort of spills the whole story, who he is, what his training was, what his mission is. And she's absolutely horrified and persuades him to go to the police and confess everything. This story much later ends with Britt going back to Moscow and being arrested because the Soviets had realized that he talked to the Canadians.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
But, yeah, there's a whole bunch of these stories where illegals would sort of – get drunk, they would confess, they would defect. And the whole idea of this program is that they have to be on a very long leash that the Soviets can't be watching them from the embassy, because they they can't have any links. So it becomes a real problem of what do you do?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
How do you send these people out and make sure that they're loyal when you have no oversight?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So he was actually a cameraman, Rudy Herman. Cameraman, that's right. Rudy Herman, exactly as you say, I mean, he had this wonderful degree from Charles University in Prague. He was an incredibly clever guy. And he was posing brilliantly as a right-wing German. But he was very, very good at the job. But the problem was he didn't have any German or American qualifications.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So he was a very resourceful guy. He learned how to... be a cameraman. He got a good job at CBC, Canadian Broadcasting. Then he moved to New York. He was doing very well. He was making movies for IBM, doing all kinds of interesting stuff. But
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
The KGB really wanted him to penetrate decision-making circles in Washington, D.C., and they particularly were interested in the Hudson Institute, which they were sure was a kind of front for the CIA. And Rudy Herman kept saying to his handlers, like, how do you expect me to do this? Like, I don't have a degree. And they would just sort of say, well, do the best you can.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And, yeah, I mean, it's sort of emblematic of the way that As the decades go on, it gets harder and harder to do this job. The missions are longer and longer. The psychological strain is more and more. And the espionage results, with some exceptions, seem to get fewer and fewer.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, that's right. So by the time you get to the early 1980s, which was when they were starting their university in Tomsk, all these people that we were talking about at the beginning, the Dmitry Bistrolyotov characters who had already traveled the world and spoke many languages, they were long gone. The Soviet Union was quite a closed, quite a paranoid society.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Anyone who actually had traveled would be a magnificent suspicion. So instead, what they're doing is they're looking for very, very talented young students who come from what would be considered politically reliable families who are clearly clever. have an aptitude for languages, and they have spotters in universities all across the Soviet Union to look for these ideal candidates.