Shaun Walker has written an entertaining and well-researched book on an engaging topic, the use by the Soviet and later Russian Federation intelligence services of “illegal” agents, Russian nationals operating under false identities without diplomatic immunity. The study is directed primarily at a general audience, but specialists will find it interesting as well. The early chapters are the best, in particular Walker’s discussion of the direct links between the conspiratorial techniques practiced by the Bolshevik Party during their time as an underground movement and their use of illegals once in power. From the Bolshevik perspective, resisting an array of foreign enemies was little different than subverting a repressive regime and required the same covert tactics. Walker outlines the creation of the Foreign Department (INO), the international arm of the Cheka, the first incarnation of what would eventually become the KGB and then provides a strikingly detailed account of the career of its top agent, Dmitry Bystrolyotov.

The son of an unconventional mother from an aristocratic family, Bystolyotov enjoyed a privileged life until it was upended by the Russian revolution. After an early career as a merchant sailor, he settled in Prague and joined the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which got him an invitation to Moscow and recruitment into the INO. Although fluent in several languages, Bystrolyolov’s cover identities were as a Greek refugee, and an impoverished Hungarian aristocrat, two languages he did not speak. He conducted operations all over Europe, seducing a secretary at the French embassy in Prague and serving as the contact for Ernest Oldham, an Englishman in the British Foreign Office, handing over classified documents for cash. The constant travel and multiple identities took a toll on Bystrolyolov’s marriage, and he requested to be allowed to return to Moscow and retire. But instead of retiring he was swept up in the Great Purges, arrested, accused of being a double agent for Czech intelligence and sentenced to life in the Gulag. He was released in 1954 during the Khrushchev thaw, a broken, disillusioned man.

Walker gives a similarly detailed account of the life of Yuri Linov, an illegal born in a remote village in southern Russia. After joining the INO, Linov went on to work in post-war Berlin and in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring before he was assigned to Israel, where he was caught and sentenced to prison. The stories about Bystrolyolov and Linov are the strongest and weakest parts of the book: strongest because of the impressive amount of detail Walker provides about the two men’s lives and weakest because he does not go much beyond telling a good spy story. After its successful start, the illegals program faltered, the most effective agents were recalled to Moscow and devoured by the purges, new ones were increasingly hard to recruit and even harder to place in sensitive positions in the west. The Soviets had better luck in the Untied States during the 1930s, where the illegals mostly served as handlers for American agents who did the actual work of espionage.

After the Second World War, the KGB revived the program even though it enjoyed very limited success. Walker believes that the Soviet fixation on the continued use of illegals was part institutional inertia and part the result of their lack of trust in more conventional sources. Walker recounts the career of Rudolf Abel (William Fisher), famous for being swapped for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who led a quiet life as a Bohemian artist in New York and produced very little useful intelligence. Albrecht Dietrich did even worse, spending his career as a spy working for a bicycle messenger company in New York City. The latter chapters are filled with stories of failures caused by the strain of living a covert life, and some of the hilarious misadventures of illegals sent to the US in the Vladimir Putin years. More soberingly, Walker concludes the book by recounting the dreadful effectiveness of sleeper cells of illegals sent to Ukraine in advance of the Russian invasion.