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
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This is Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what.
To try and do that, we've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. This is American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The FX TV series The Americans portrayed a seemingly ordinary couple raising two children in a suburb of Washington, D.C., except that mom and dad were actually Soviet spies working on long-term assignment for the KGB.
In this scene, the couple, played by Matthew Reese and Kerry Russell, are talking after learning that their new neighbor is an FBI counterintelligence agent. The husband's telling his wife maybe it's time to give up their ruse and defect to the U.S. government.
We just get relocated, take the good life, and be happy.
Are you joking? Is this a joke? You want to betray our country. Well, after everything we've done, I don't think it's such a betrayal. Defecting to America? America's not so bad. We've been here a long time. What's so bad about it, you know? The electricity works all the time. Food's pretty great. Closet space. Is that what you care about? No, I care about everything. Not the motherland.
I do, but our family comes first.
The series, which earned a host of honors, including two Peabody Awards, was fiction. But our guest today, investigative reporter Sean Walker, has written a new book about the real-life espionage program that inspired it. Among others, Walker interviewed two members of the family the show was partly based on.
brothers who had no idea their parents were Soviet agents born in Russia, until the day when the boys were 16 and 20 that the FBI raided their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and arrested their parents. We'll hear more on that later.
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