Shaun Walker
speaker
137 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 8 Jul
Shaun Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're not going to facilitate this.
They get very offended and upset.
So I think,
That kind of tension is perhaps going to come out more and more if Trump continues with sort of this quite rogue foreign policy.
Thanks for having me.
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.
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.
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.
There's pretty much no other intelligence service that does that in this kind of scale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And he agrees to sign whatever they put in front of him just to make it stop.
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.
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...
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