The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – Russian spies hiding in plain sight
The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling readingOne muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI”, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?” he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book, Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian who was based in Moscow for more than 10 years. Continue reading...
The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling reading
One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI”, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.
Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?” he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book, Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian who was based in Moscow for more than 10 years. Continue reading...
