It was a muggy, overcast afternoon in June 2010 when Ann Foley’s life unraveled. The day had got off to a pleasant enough start; Ann and her husband, Don, took their two sons, Tim and Alex, for a celebratory lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from the family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Tim’s twentieth birthday, and he was back from D.C. for the summer after finishing his sophomore year at George Washington University. After the meal, the four walked back to the house that Don and Ann had purchased near Harvard Square just a few weeks before. With three stories and a portico over the front door, it was by far the grandest place they had ever lived, reflecting the family’s improving fortunes. Don’s consultancy start-up was doing well, while Ann had recently taken a job in real estate. In the living room, Don opened a bottle of champagne, to prolong the festivities. After a toast, Tim went upstairs to his bedroom.
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A bit later, there was a loud knocking at the door. Ann thought it must be friends of Tim’s, coming to wish him a happy birthday. “A surprise visit,” she called out to Alex, who was on his way up the stairs to check on his older brother. She opened the door to a group of men dressed in black. “FBI,” they shouted, pushing their way in. Two pairs of agents hustled Don and Ann into separate corners of the open-plan living room and snapped cuffs on their wrists. Later, Alex watched through the windows as his parents were marched out of the front door, down the redbrick path, and into waiting black cars. The officers declined to tell the two brothers what was going on, but Alex assumed there must have been a terrible mistake. He couldn’t imagine what his rather boring parents could have done to warrant this kind of dramatic raid.
The more I read about the program, the more I felt it offered a fascinating way to tell a much bigger story, of the whole Soviet experiment and its ultimate failure.
Nine years after the arrests, on a warm Moscow afternoon in the summer of 2019, I made my way to meet the woman who had once been known as Ann Foley. She had suggested a lively French-themed café, not far from Gorky Park. Most of the faux-rustic tables were occupied by young, well-dressed Muscovites, part of a nascent middle class that had appeared during the long years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. I found a free seat, and after a few minutes she arrived. In her mid-fifties, with a bob of blond hair, she was dressed in a sky-blue blouse and wore a chunky necklace. She smiled warmly, shook my hand, and took a seat. The waiter came, and she ordered a cappuccino in Russian before switching back to English. She spoke both languages flawlessly, but somewhere in the cadences of her English speech I could hear a faint Russian twang. I wondered whether I would have picked up on the accent if I had met her a decade earlier in the United States. And would I have thought, as I did now, that there was something distinctly Slavic about her facial features? Almost certainly not. Back then, nobody had any suspicions about Ann Foley, the friendly part-time real estate agent from Canada.
In reality, Ann Foley was neither friendly nor working in real estate. She was dead. The real Ann Foley was born in September 1962 at Montreal General Hospital and died seven weeks later, of viral meningitis. Her parents, the newlyweds Edward and Pauline, were left with just two small photographs to remind them of the daughter who came into their lives so briefly. More than two decades later, Canadian authorities received a request for a duplicate birth certificate, apparently from Ann Foley herself. No one questioned or cross-checked the request; records were not yet digitized and centralized. The authorities issued a birth certificate and later a passport. Ann Foley came back to life.
The woman sitting opposite me in the café had spent more than twenty years living as Ann Foley from Montreal, right until the day the FBI came knocking, fooling her neighbors, her friends, and even her own children. In fact, she was Elena Vavilova, born and raised in Soviet Siberia. Elena was an illegal, a deep-cover spy trained by the KGB. Her husband, Don, was also a KGB illegal; his birth name was Andrei Bezrukov.
Elena and Andrei met in the early 1980s as history students in the Siberian city of Tomsk. KGB spotters selected them for preliminary vetting. Later, they progressed to an arduous training program lasting several years, molding their language, mannerisms, and identities into those of an ordinary Canadian couple. They left the Soviet Union separately in 1987, staged a meeting in Canada, and began a relationship as if they had just met. They wed a second time, as Don and Ann, and settled in Toronto, where Elena gave birth to their two sons, Tim and Alex.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and for a few years the two illegals were left to fend for themselves. But by the end of the decade, the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin had come to power in Moscow. Andrei and Elena began spying again in earnest, now for the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency of the new Russia. As Don Heathfield, Andrei won a place at Harvard’s Kennedy School, which enabled the couple to move to Cambridge, with their two children, and establish operations in the United States. While Andrei networked at Harvard, Elena played the role of a self-described “soccer mom,” raising their two sons and taking care of the housework. But once the kids were tucked away in bed, she crept into a back room and decrypted radio messages from Moscow.
Elena and Andrei never spoke a word of Russian to each other and never mentioned Russia to Tim and Alex. Occasionally, Elena took a clandestine trip to South America or Canada to meet with handlers from the SVR away from potential FBI eyes, switching passports en route to cover her tracks. For her sons, she invented stories about mundane errands to explain why she had been away. Nobody Elena interacted with knew anything about her real talents and achievements.
She was a trained KGB officer forced to play the role of a run-of-the-mill housewife. When we met in Moscow, I asked her if it had been hard to cope with this disconnect. She sipped her coffee and smiled faintly. People who crave external validation would never make the cut as illegals, she said. “A spy is an actor, but an actor that doesn’t need a public or a stage.”
Elena insisted that she and Andrei would never have told their two sons the truth if the FBI had not come knocking. “We were responsible for our own security and safety, and it creates a vulnerability if we tell anyone,” she said firmly. She did admit that before the FBI raid the couple had been making tentative plans to retire from espionage and, perhaps one day, move back to Russia. Surely then they would have needed to say something to their sons? “Well, yes, but another story,” she said, with a jarring matter-of-factness. “We had so many stories. There was a story for our parents, a story for friends here in Russia. Stories and stories and stories. One more story, that’s not a problem for us. Unfortunately, that’s just a rule of the game.”
The fundamental role of intelligence agencies is to obtain information about other countries not available through open channels. Much of this work is done in the shadows, and most intelligence agencies use undercover operatives. The simplest way to do so is to disguise spies as diplomats. If caught, they can simply return home, claiming diplomatic immunity. But this also makes it easy for a host nation’s counterintelligence services to monitor the operatives. Diplomats are known entities and are tracked carefully. Some intelligence agencies will therefore use a riskier but harder-to-detect option. A spy is dispatched abroad posing as a business executive or other innocent-seeming professional, perhaps carving out a long and successful career in the cover role while all the time secretly developing useful sources and sending back intelligence. The CIA calls this “non-official cover.”
Moscow’s illegals program took this concept several steps further. The KGB put ordinary Soviet citizens like Elena and Andrei through years of training to transform them into Westerners. They would then spend decades living abroad, blending into their host societies. Anyone who met a Russian diplomat asking lots of questions would certainly wonder if their new contact was a spy. They might also be suspicious of a sociable Russian trade official or an overly friendly Russian journalist. But who would suspect a Canadian real estate agent of being a deep-cover KGB operative?
I first heard about the illegals program in 2010, when Elena, Andrei, and eight others were arrested in the United States and eventually deported to Russia. Back then, I was working as Moscow correspondent for The Independent and spent some weeks trying to track down the returned spies. Editors were particularly interested in twenty-eight-year-old Anna Chapman, who had used a cover job as a New York real estate broker to spy for the SVR. A glamorous socialite, she had flirted with the rich and powerful, supposedly with the Kremlin’s interests in mind. She seemed to be a character straight from the pages of an airport spy novel, with her flame-red hair, her suggestive photo shoots, and the salacious stories her British ex-husband fed to the tabloids about their sex life. A year after the spies returned to Russia, I finally managed to persuade Anna to meet with me in Moscow. She was a charming and vivacious lunch date, but refused to say anything about her espionage work. Instead, she wanted to talk about her plans for a new fashion line.
In any case, I was more interested in the older illegals and the contortions it must have required to spend decades living in a foreign skin. The SVR kept them well away from the media, but in 2016, I tracked down Elena and Andrei’s two sons, Tim and Alex, and interviewed them for a Guardian magazine story. The brothers had been stripped of their citizenship by the Canadian government and were suing to have it reinstated. They insisted they had known nothing about their parents’ espionage work. Even in the weeks after the FBI roundup back in 2010, Alex told me, he refused to believe the news reports. It was only when he arrived in Moscow and was shown old photographs of his parents wearing KGB uniforms that it finally sank in that his whole upbringing had been a lie. Now he was expected to start a new life in a country he had never previously set foot in. He received a Russian passport identifying him as Alexander Vavilov, a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?” he said to me, with a wry smile but a noticeable undertone of bitterness.
Fascinated by this twisted family story, I began reading about the illegals program over the years, and soon realized that there was nothing quite like it in the history of espionage. At times, various intelligence services have disguised operatives as foreign nationals, but never with the scope or scale of the KGB program. The illegals were something uniquely Russian, rooted in the country’s historical experience. The more I read about the program, the more I felt it offered a fascinating way to tell a much bigger story, of the whole Soviet experiment and its ultimate failure, a century of dramatic and bloody history.
The tale begins in 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. The new Soviet regime had few friends in foreign governments, but could call on a wealth of cosmopolitan, well-traveled Communists, who improvised and ad-libbed their way around the world in various disguises, to help defend the revolution and spread its ideology. These virtuosic, devoted spies became known as the Great Illegals in Soviet intelligence lore. Posing as European aristocrats, Persian merchants, or Turkish students, they used cunning, charm, and sex to gather intelligence. Many of them evaded detection in the West but were arrested and executed by their own regime in the late 1930s, during Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror.
Later, during the Cold War, KGB officers who worked under diplomatic cover found themselves under round-the-clock surveillance from Western counterintelligence agencies and limited in their ability to gather secret information. Illegals, who had no discernible links to either Moscow or Communism, could live and travel free from suspicion. The KGB drew up ambitious plans to plant large numbers of illegals inside the United States. But the Soviets no longer had a recruitment pool of well-traveled polyglots. Instead, the KGB was forced to recruit ordinary Soviet citizens, giving them years of training to mold them into convincing Westerners.
Many Cold War illegals living in the West were told simply to lie low and wait. If tension escalated to the point that diplomatic relations with Moscow were severed, illegal sleeper cells could activate and continue the KGB’s work behind enemy lines. But these long-term missions, which forced illegals to spend years isolated from their families, friends, and homeland, took a major psychological toll. Many cracked under the pressure: some had breakdowns; others defected or were caught. Few had happy personal lives.
Most espionage using human sources requires deception, but illegals deceived in a particularly intimate way. In KGB lore, this psychological burden was something to be proud of and spoke to the ideological mission of the Soviet state. “Only an intelligence service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers,” enthused the British KGB agent George Blake, explaining why none of the Western services used illegals.
For all the lofty rhetoric, by the 1980s the revolutionary fervor of the early Soviet Union had given way to a plodding bureaucracy. Widespread discontent, combined with a worsening economic situation, eventually led to the Soviet collapse, ushering in a new era in which Russia and the United States were now meant to be partners. In one of his first acts as president of newly independent Russia, Boris Yeltsin disbanded the KGB. The instructions that illegals received in weekly radio messages simply stopped coming. Some returned home; others, like Andrei and Elena, had become comfortable in their cover identities and decided to remain living in them.
At numerous points in the last century, the era of the illegals seemed to be over. Each time, Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program.
A decade later, Vladimir Putin became president and began gradually restoring Russia’s spying capabilities. Putin had spent his own years in the KGB working as an illegals support officer, and he retained a fondness for the program. Illegals who had stayed in the field began receiving their coded instructions once more, and in Moscow, a fresh batch of operatives underwent training.
When the FBI rounded up Elena, Andrei, and others in 2010, in the United States there was a sense of wonder at the audaciousness of the illegals program, but also an amused confusion: it felt as if the Kremlin were stuck in the Cold War, using outdated and pointlessly time-consuming methods of espionage that had little relevance in the twenty-first century. Yet behind the scenes, Russia’s intelligence operations were growing more nimble and more brazen. “Flying illegals” based in Moscow flew out on short-term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin abroad. A new army of “virtual illegals” impersonated Westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long-term illegals seemed to be over, the concepts underpinning their work remained at the heart of Russian intelligence operations.
In February 2022, Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a decision that would result in horrific bloodshed and destroy any lingering goodwill in Moscow’s relations with the West, which became more perilous than at any time since the height of the Cold War. In June, four months after the invasion, Putin traveled to the SVR headquarters outside Moscow to mark the centenary of the official launch of the first Soviet illegals department. He paid tribute to the illegals of the past, who had spent decades far from home serving the motherland, and to the illegals who “right now are carrying out unique operations” across the globe.
By this point, Western countries had expelled hundreds of Russian diplomats from embassies and consulates in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The majority were spies working under diplomatic cover, and their expulsion dramatically reduced Russia’s espionage capabilities just as relations with the West were at an all-time low. Moscow’s spy agencies had to shift some of the burden onto its illegal networks, which in turn made them more vulnerable to exposure. Over the following year, numerous illegals were unmasked. They included a Peruvian jewelry designer living in Italy, an Argentinian art gallery owner based in Slovenia, and an Austrian-Brazilian who ran a 3-D printing business in Rio de Janeiro. Under their exotic cover identities, all of them were as Russian as vodka and herring.
There is little doubt that these captured spies will be replaced with new ones. At numerous points in the last century, the era of the illegals seemed to be over. Each time, Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program. Now, in a network of nondescript SVR apartments scattered around Moscow, a new generation of operatives are almost certainly undergoing preparation for their missions—methodically honing the pronunciation of target languages, studying archives of foreign newspapers and magazines to take note of salient cultural and social context, and memorizing the granular detail of their cover stories. Before long, these new illegals will be dispatched to live ostensibly mundane lives, in various locations across the globe, while secretly working to advance Moscow’s agenda.
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From The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker. Copyright © 2025. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from THE ILLEGALS by Shaun Walker, read by Paul Thornley. © Shaun Walker ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC.
