In The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, journalist Shaun Walker shares how agents were trained to blend into a target country and posed as citizens. Walker tells the story of Andrei Olegovich Bezrukov, aka "Donald," and Elena Vavilova, aka "Tracey," who were embedded in Cambridge, Mass. until a 2010 FBI raid. Even their two children didn't know their parents' true identities. Also, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead pays tribute to versatile tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Who are the real-life spies that inspired 'The Americans' TV show?
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.
And ends up with a very long prison term.
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.
I think one of the most interesting points of this description is when he is being repeatedly tortured, beaten and tortured by this operative who is trying to get him to sign a statement making this false admission that he had betrayed his country. And at some point he realizes what his interrogator is going through. Tell us about this.
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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