‘The Illegals’ by Shaun Waker review

In the summer of 1992 a senior British army officer was given the chance to visit Russia and Kyrgyzstan. His trip would have been unthinkable for most of the century then approaching its end. Now he saw up close the soldiers that until recently his forces had been ranged against on opposite sides of the Cold War. He wrote to another senior officer that it was ‘a mystery we believed the USSR to be a superpower’.

Reading some of the stories in The Illegals, you experience a similar surprise. Agents are sent abroad to live undercover and further the cause of international Marxism-Leninism. Sometimes, they end up doing remarkably little. Take Albrecht Dittrich, who gave up a promising academic career in chemistry to serve the Soviet state. His first nine months were spent working as a bicycle courier. Alongside those tales of dull routine, there are of course some big successes. Stalin knew about the US having an atomic bomb before the secret was shared with Harry Truman, who was only told after he was sworn into office.

Shaun Walker has uncovered some characters who led lives that would be dismissed in fiction as too far-fetched. Perhaps the most astonishing career is that of Dmitry Bystrolyotov (a surname that, as Walker points out, means ‘fast flier’). In the early years of Soviet power, Bystrolyotov travelled Europe masquerading as a cloth trader, a Hungarian aristocrat fallen on hard times, and a banker. This was after his pre-secret agent stints as a seafarer, gravedigger, and law student. He cultivated a disaffected alcoholic in Britain’s foreign office. Such a source was especially valuable in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations with few countries, and, in consequence, few embassies available as bases for ‘legal’ espionage.

One of the greatest risks was run by Nikolai Khokhlov and Karl Kleinjung, the latter a German communist who had left his homeland after the Nazis came to power. Their mission was to sneak into German-occupied Belarus and assassinate the governor, Wilhelm Kube. Part of their preparation for this breathtakingly hazardous mission involved being sent to a Soviet prisoner of war camp that held some of the invaders. Khokhlov was to pass himself off as an officer captured at Stalingrad. Success in the role would mean he was ready to play the part of an officer in the occupying army. The pair enter Belarus. They pass a bomb to Kube’s housekeeper, who attaches it to his bed. The mission is ‘an unequivocal success’.

One of the reasons that this was necessary at all was Stalin’s refusal to believe the intelligence that warned of Hitler’s plans to attack the Soviet Union. It was, Walker persuasively argues, a weakness of the system. ‘If the reports from the ground did not accord with how Lenin’s writings suggested the world should develop, they were discarded as incorrect.’ There were systemic weaknesses on the other side, too. Ernest Oldham – the foreign office source so profitably exploited by Bystrolyotov – had become embittered because ‘his humble origins crushed his dream of an international career in the consular service’. Consigned instead to the communications department, he copied confidential cables. To the talent-wasting class system was added a painful sense of propriety. In 1936 the British ambassador refused MI6 permission to operate from the embassy in Moscow lest their presence ‘cause embarrassment’.

Among the greatest challenges faced by the Soviet spymasters, especially in the Cold War era, was finding agents who could pass as westerners. In the early years of Soviet power, many revolutionaries had lived in exile earlier in their lives. This provided excellent training in the skills that would be needed in successful foreign intelligence service. They were practised at disguise and deception. They spoke foreign languages. They understood other cultures. In the Cold War, with travel much more difficult, and the older generation having died (some of them in the camps and prisons that Stalin set up to root out enemies, real and imagined, of his regime), training illegals to go undercover in the West became harder and harder. The stories of the experiences of those who went through the process, and whom Walker has been able to track down, is one of the book’s real strengths. It was not for everybody. Walker recounts cases of those who simply could not take the huge psychological pressure that went with living a lie in an alien land. One solution the KGB leadership found was to try to create a second generation of illegals, and Walker’s account of the ‘strange childhood’ of Peter, son of KGB agents in the United States, is remarkable.

Walker argues that ‘the history of the illegals offers a neat reflection of the story of Russia itself’. This, it seems, is true even of the chaotic 1990s, when little in a Russia reeling from the collapse of communism functioned as it should. One agent’s cover was rumbled the following decade by a supervisor on a university class he was taking. ‘The dude was so obviously Russian. His accent, his manner, it was like talking to Boris Yeltsin’, the academic later said. He had perhaps been unfortunate. The supervisor in question was Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of the Soviet leader who succeeded Stalin.

The Illegals is an impressively researched, engagingly written, and timely history of an aspect of Russia’s relations with the wider world about which we know so little. Those illegals who ended up inactive and unsuccessful did so in part because they were sent to prepare for a hot war that might follow its cold counterpart. As the tide of globalisation that has characterised the period since the end of the Cold War recedes, we are left to wonder how many of a new generation of spies – their language skills and cultural understanding indistinguishable from those of the natives of the countries they are in – may now be left on foreign shores in a similar situation. Comfortable in Manchester, Marseille, or Milwaukee, they wait patiently for orders from Moscow.

• The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West
  Shaun Walker
  Profile, 448pp, £22
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

James Rodgers’ latest book is Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow.