Books Review: “The Illégals”, by Shaun Walker

The illegals: the most daring spies in Russia and their mission of a century to infiltrate the West, By Shaun Walker

In July 2010, the FBI gathered a ring of 10 Russian coverage of profound – “illegal”, as they were known – of which many have been here for decades, living in false American identities, inhibit in places like Hoboken, the NJ for most of us, it seemed comically anachronistic, less as a crisis of national security than to discover your neighborhood.

But the timing could not have been worse. The arrests occurred just a few days after a meeting between President Barack Obama and the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, aimed at “resetting” relations. While an exasperated Obama complained to its director of the FBI, it reminded him of a novel by John Le Carré. It turned out that the FBI quietly watched these agents for more than a decade before deciding to move.

What the new fascinating and meticulously sought -after book by Shaun Walker, “The Illégals”, clearly shows is that these suburban moles were not the remains of cold war, but rather the continuation of a Russian project of a century for the infiltration of Western society. The program started in 1922, when Lenin still walked the corridors of the Kremlin and continues today under Vladimir Putin, who rarely encountered a Soviet relic that he did not want to polish.

Walker, a journalist from The Guardian, has made the kind of Spenking and deep source culture that makes nervous publishers about spending accounts. He interviewed former illegal – spies that lived with identities made as beautifully lacquered as a set of Matryoshka dolls. They were not diplomatic spies with immunity; These were ghosts that were walking among us with American accents and, probably, memberships at the Sam club.

The job has macabre elegance. In a strategy, Russian agents would paint American newspapers and cemeteries for the names of children who died young, then used their identity to create new adult lives. (Fortunately, modern security measures have made it more difficult to achieve.)