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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
How do you send these people out and make sure that they're loyal when you have no oversight?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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