Like many who work in secret intelligence services, Vladimir Putin was heavily influenced by spy fiction. His imagination was coloured by novels and films, and he spoke of his amazement that ‘one man’s efforts could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.’ Putin was especially entranced by the immensely popular television series Seventeen Moments of Spring, first shown in 1973 and often repeated. It was about a Russian spy who burrowed his way into the senior ranks of the Nazi Party and unearthed a secret wartime agreement between Germany and America to make a separate peace at the expense of the Soviet Union. This melodrama was inspired by the KGB and, as Shaun Walker says in his well-researched study of Russia’s deep-cover agents, it cleverly fused villains of the Second World War with those of the Cold War. Kremlin propagandists gradually identified its hero, a steely patriot sometimes dubbed ‘the Soviet James Bond’, with Putin himself.

For all its make-believe, Seventeen Moments of Spring reflected the fact that, from its inception, the Soviet regime had sent operatives abroad to embed themselves in Western societies. Lenin charged these ‘sleepers’ or ‘illegals’ with the task of fomenting global revolution and countering any capitalist threat to the communist motherland. Stalin directed them towards espionage and murder. Such was his ‘sickly suspicious’ (Khrushchev’s term) mind that he saw traitors and plotters everywhere, sparing no pains to eliminate them and all around them. After two illegals had poisoned a defector called Vladimir Nesterovich in a Mainz café in 1925, they were further ordered to remove the witnesses, ‘especially the daughter of the restaurant owner’. Stalin’s most famous victim was, of course, Trotsky, targeted in Mexico by at least two clandestine hit squads. Tito was better protected in Yugoslavia: in 1949 he told Stalin that he had captured five of his assassins, one armed with a bomb and another with a rifle, and warned that if more were sent, ‘I’ll send one to Moscow.’ While faithfully sustaining the policy of assassination, Putin takes elaborate precautions against retaliation.

During the interwar years, Stalin’s illegals were instructed to focus on gaining access to European ciphers and diplomatic dispatches. The ablest of them was Dmitry Bystrolyotov, charming, handsome and multilingual, who adopted a bewildering number of roles and aliases. He once seduced a secretary at the French embassy in Prague, obtaining codes and confidential documents. He also helped to run two corrupt cipher clerks in the British Foreign Office (where security was hopelessly lax), who handed over a mass of classified information. But during the Great Purge he was arrested and tortured; he confessed to having worked undercover for Russia’s enemies and was swept into the Gulag. Bystrolyotov’s subsequent memoirs were entirely unreliable since, like many in his profession, he was ‘an incorrigible fabulist’, as Walker observes. Nevertheless, he and other illegals did the Soviet state some service, and Stalin gravely damaged its intelligence capability by eradicating so many of them.

Russia continued to plant sleepers in the West after 1945. The process was made more problematic in America because of the Red Scare and the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Much of the alarm was pure paranoia: J Edgar Hoover once claimed that the Soviet Union was training millions of children to attack the United States as ‘suicide paratroopers carrying small bombs’. But the FBI’s background checks on more than two million federal employees, along with a huge increase in the CIA’s budget (from under $5 million in 1949 to over $80 million in 1952), seriously hampered alien infiltration. In any case, it was extraordinarily hard for native-born Russians to impersonate Westerners. The slightest linguistic slip or foreign mannerism could expose them. Illegals were taught to avoid the Russian habit of patting their stomachs to show that they were full. They also learned to smile, something not frequently done in the Soviet Union. 

Walker includes several case histories of illegals, which reveal a consistent pattern of failure. The KGB recruited Yuri Linov as a teenager in the mid-1950s, coached him with meticulous care, gave him a new identity and provided him with a wife to assuage the loneliness that drove many secret agents to drink. However, she could not cope with the strains of their double life and Linov was deployed in so many European countries that he achieved little, except perhaps helping to disrupt the Prague Spring in 1968. The KGB then ruled that he should become their expert on Zionism, the proponents of which it held responsible for hatching an international conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Reluctantly, Linov went to Israel, learned Hebrew and Arabic, and even got himself circumcised. But somehow Shin Bet detected him and, after his confession and incarceration, he was returned home in a prisoner swap. He continued to serve the KGB in a minor capacity, only to discover that it was bugging his house. Exchanged illegals were never trusted: Rudolf Abel, who featured in Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, was monitored on his deathbed. 

The FBI set up a special task force to track down illegals, a quest described as ‘hunting for unicorns’. It scored one notable success, unmasking a well-disguised Russian family which might have established a second generation of spies. They were betrayed by a fake defector (a ‘dangle’ in spook parlance) and, after cooperating with the FBI, given another identity as protection from KGB vengeance. Genuine traitors, such as the Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Poteyev, who was based in New York, facilitated the capture of other unicorns. Double agents such as Oleg Gordievsky and Aldrich Ames achieved the greatest coups. By the end of the Cold War, Russia’s illegals programme was in tatters. KGB tradecraft had deteriorated: one ‘British’ couple was arrested on the Finnish border in 1992 because they spoke poor English and didn’t know that the Tories had just won the general election. Gorbachev’s charismatic new head of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, complained that much of the intelligence he received from abroad was ‘informational trash that was often no more valuable than newspaper clippings’.

The world of the illegals was and is shrouded in a miasma of secrets and lies. No one writing about it can be sure of eliciting the truth, let alone the whole truth. However, Walker skilfully steers his way through the murk, basing his book on interviews, newly available documents and the most reliable printed sources, pre-eminently The Mitrokhin Archive. He concludes that the Kremlin’s campaign of subversion continues, particularly in cyberspace, with Muscovite troll factories employing ‘virtual illegals’ to pose as pro-Trump activists on social media. Putin can only see the West as a foe, its talk of democracy and human rights designed to conceal a nefarious scheme to stop Russia becoming ‘a first-tier nation’. Like Stalin, he lives in a conspiratorial bubble, which makes him liable to fantasy and miscalculation. Just as Stalin rejected the vast amount of authentic intelligence warning of the German invasion, Putin failed to appreciate that Ukraine would put up stiff resistance to his onslaught, that two hitherto neutral states would respond by joining NATO and that Europe would rearm against him. Dealers in duplicity often fool themselves.