“There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
FBI whistleblower claims he tried to get to Musk to warn him he was being targeted by Russia
The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.”
The Illegals — the Russian spies operating in the west, against the west
The Guardian’s Shaun Walker has unearthed eye-popping tales spying by agents embedded in western societies under fake identities
Published
Imagine a 16-year-old boy with a largely conventional American upbringing. Peter finds his parents a bit odd but that’s easily put down to their German background. Like most immigrants, they’ve had difficulties coming to terms with the cultural habits of the Americans.
But the boy’s likeable father has encouraged him to follow in his footsteps as a documentary maker and even takes his son on exciting foreign trips. After a tense yet exhilarating visit to Chile in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the two stop off in Lima, Peru. Gazing out on the Pacific Ocean, the father blurts out, “I have a story to tell you”. Taking a deep breath, he continues, “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi, I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.”
It’s hard to think of anything that would play with your psyche more than this. It gets worse. Rudi/Valoušek is telling his son this because he wants to recruit Peter as well.
It all sounds sufficiently outlandish, a tale that might have come straight out of The Americans, a hugely successful TV drama that imagined the lives of Russian “illegals” — intelligence operatives living “normal lives” deep undercover in the US.
But Peter and Rudi’s story is no fiction. It actually happened — as Shaun Walker recounts in The Illegals. The Guardian’s central Europe correspondent, who previously worked in Russia and Ukraine, Walker has unearthed some eye-popping stories to fashion this history of the weirdest and most dedicated Russian agents.
After interviewing a family of illegals who had been exposed in 2010, Walker believed he had hit on something unique to the Russian state’s culture of paranoia. His aim was certainly ambitious. “The more I read about the programme,” he writes in the introduction, “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 illegals programme dates back to 1919 when the Soviet Union, in its infancy, was facing collapse during the civil war between the Red and White armies, the latter receiving extensive support from the west. Felix Dzerzhinsky’s newly formed secret police, the Cheka, contacted those Bolsheviks not yet returned from exile to start up the network of undercover agents with apparently no relationship to the new Russian leadership.
One of the first notable illegals is a riotously colourful character usually known only for his role in organising an early failed assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky in the activist’s Mexican home (a later attempt succeeded). Steeped in the politics, violence and subterfuge of South America and Spain, Iosif Grigulevich, a Lithuanian Jew and passionate communist, escaped the investigation of the slow-witted Mexican police. Instead, he went further south to Argentina, Brazil and Chile. There, he morphed into Teodoro Castro, a Costa Rican businessman and entrepreneur. For somebody who had never been to Costa Rica, this showed a vigorous sense of chutzpah.
Dashing around South America and then Italy, he contrived to make himself indispensable to Costa Rica’s diplomatic and trade presence in Rome and the Vatican. Before long, Señor Castro was appointed “Signor Ambasciatore” as Costa Rica’s representative to Italy and the Holy See.
From there, he was able to build astonishing access to key political figures. But there was more. Invited to Belgrade to meet President Josip Broz Tito, his handlers in Moscow ordered him to assassinate the Yugoslav leader, a deep thorn in Stalin’s side. The faux Costa Rican was saved only by the death of Stalin days in advance of his audacious mission. Returning to Moscow, he lived out the rest of his days in relatively obscurity.
In truth, as Walker shows, there is precious little glamour to the life of an illegal. Proper jobs — whether as a mechanic or insurance salesperson — have to be held down; credible backstories, allowing for any linguistic or cultural gaps, have to be maintained. Then there was the fiddly, time-consuming work of decoding and sending messages sent over short-wave radio as blocks of five numbers. This was most exasperating when the message turned out to contain nothing more dramatic than “Long Live the Glorious October Revolution” or some other inanity from the deep well of empty Soviet phraseology.
Illegals may live out under cover. But their lives were totally controlled by Directorate S back in Moscow. Any changes in the agent’s professional or personal life required approval. Remaining undetected was paramount to the point that married illegals were instructed to avoid using Russian when having sex just in case somebody was listening in. And the bosses were never averse to using entrapment to check that illegals adhered to the code of utmost secrecy.
Much of this world came to an end when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The illegals had to largely fend for themselves; the coded messages stopped — as did the funds and ideological support.
But after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s intelligence services were newly invigorated. Perhaps the most notable example of this involved a group of 10 men and women, living seemingly ordinary even tedious lives, were reactivated. They had been dispatched on their mission to embed themselves into Canadian and American society before receiving instructions in late Soviet times. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they spent the next 10 years battling to basically keep afloat, ending up as a group of suburban couples in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts.
But just as they were about to restart their clandestine activity, with Putin in the Kremlin, the FBI swooped. The story was dominated by the presence of Anna Chapman, usually presented as a flame-haired temptress, accused like the others of espionage. She and her fellow illegals were exchanged in a spy swap in July 2010 in which Sergei Skripal, later the victim of a novichok attack in Britain, went the other way.
In his retelling, Walker goes sensibly beyond the tabloid approach and his interpretation of this remarkable story is the most sympathetic and interesting I have yet read. The strain of leading double lives over decades proved to much for some illegals. Broken relationships, bigamy, treachery and lies led several to give up or turn themselves in to the FBI.
Rudi/Valoušek wanted his son to sign up because the KGB had never nurtured an illegal who was indistinguishable from a real American. Amazingly, the teenager went for two summer-long sessions of training in Moscow and agreed to act as an agent before renouncing everything after the whole experience began provoking suicidal thoughts. Apart from his wife, Peter had never told anyone the whole story until Walker interviewed him.
The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker, Profile £22, 448 pages
Misha Glenny is the author of ‘McMafia’ and rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna
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