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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And now the motherland doesn't exist.
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.
I think the reality was probably a little bit more complicated, I think, for a lot of these people.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it's only a few days later that they will start to hear the full details and even then not really believe it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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