Meet Russia’s real-life ‘Americans’ — spies hiding in plain sight

Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America’s most prestigious universities and think tanks. 

But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life. 

Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by the secret Russian intelligence agency, the notorious KGB. Don, her seemingly pleasant husband, was actually Andrei Bezrukov, also a KGB agent. 

In June 2010, the couple, both illegals in the US, was arrested by the FBI.

In New York City, meanwhile, Anna Chapman also worked in real estate, but lived a far different lifestyle than Ann Foley. Voluptuous and flame-haired, Chapman had a reputation for flirting with her potential property  clients — the Big Apple’s men of power and wealth.

But the two women, Foley and Chapman, did have one commonality.

Chapman, too, was a secret Russian agent here to spy on America.

In 2010, she was arrested with nine other Russian spies, with authorities breaking up one of the largest intelligence networks in the US since the end of the Cold War.

It took decades for the FBI to unravel Russia’s most secret spy program. Now author Shaun Walker, in “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West” (Knopf), has written a riveting and revelatory history of the Soviet Union’s spy program that asks the reader — do you really know who your neighbors are?

From the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been sending spies to America and elsewhere to obtain top secret information via undercover operatives. Posing as foreign aristocrats, Persian merchants, or Turkish students — and, of course, friendly real estate agents — they used their wit, charm and sex to gather intelligence. Many went abroad as diplomats who could quickly escape by claiming diplomatic immunity. 

When the Russians were our allies during World War II, their spies slipped behind enemy lines to assassinate Nazi officials and steal Third Reich technological secrets. During the Cold War, they were sent far from home, writes Walker, “to lie low as sleepers in the West.”

In the 1950s, the KGB invested years of training to transform ordinary Soviet citizens into convincing Westerners whom they would send abroad for decades camouflaged in a foreign skin. 

The program was called the illegals — the most ambitious espionage program in history.

The KGB, according to the author, put young Soviets, like the pretend Foleys of Cambridge, through years of training in language and etiquette to transform them into Westerners, blending into their host societies.

Some performed remarkable feats, while others cracked under the strain of living a double life.

“The illegals were the only Soviet citizens allowed to move freely in the West without oversight: around 100 people, from a population of 290 million. The illegals saw and heard things that no other Soviet citizen, even those in the elites, could dream of experiencing,” writes the author.

Moscow’s illegals program advanced the concept of using a business executive or other innocent-seeming professional as a spy — sent abroad to embed themselves in Western societies to influence politics, military strategy, international affairs and global security.

“Anyone who met a Russian diplomat asking lots of questions would certainly wonder if their new contact was a spy. But who would suspect a Canadian real estate agent of being a deep-cover KGB operative,” observes Walker, who was able to track down and interview many who were part of the illegals program.

It all seemed right out of a Hollywood movie script.

And from 2013 to 2018, in fact, a popular TV series called “The Americans” — a period spy drama — explored the lives of two illegals posing as an American couple and living in a Washington, DC suburb, spying while raising their two American-born children.

In the case of the fake Foleys, KGB spotters found Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov when they were college students in the Siberian city of Tomsk, selected them for vetting and put them through “an arduous training program lasting several years, molding their language, mannerisms, and identities into those of an ordinary Canadian couple,” writes the author.

They left the Soviet Union separately, re-connected in Canada pretending they had never met and re-married as Don and Ann. They began spying for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, and moved to Cambridge when Don won a place at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He networked at Harvard while she played the role of a soccer mom by day — while by night she  decrypted radio messages from Moscow.

They never spoke a word of Russian to each other or mentioned Russia to their two sons from that day forward — until they were arrested and deported to Russia. Their son, Alex, refused to believe that his parents were spies until he was shown old photos of them wearing KGB uniforms.

“It finally sank in that his whole upbringing had been a lie,” writes Walker. “There was nothing quite like it in the history of espionage.”

Anna Chapman was an entirely different story, according to the author, who met with the buxom, red-haired spy in Moscow, but she declined to say anything about her espionage work.

Her ex-British husband later claimed he had been hoodwinked into marrying the beauty, which helped secure her a British passport. After she was arrested, he sold off marital bedroom photos and fed salacious stories to the tabloids about their wild sex life.

The author writes that there was almost no awareness of KGB illegals operating in the US until New York couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg ignited headlines when they were arrested, convicted of spying, and sent to the electric chair in 1953 — guilty of transmitting top secret information to the Soviet Union. Their sons would later claim their parents were set up during the hysteria of the Cold War and Red Scare.

In 1957, Rudolf Abel faced charges of conspiracy to transmit military and atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Abel’s real name was William Fisher, but he used the name Rudolf Abel, which belonged to a KGB colleague. He was tried, found guilty, but spared the electric chair and sentenced to 30 years in prison. This was a wake-up call for the Western intelligence agency of the possible numbers of illegals in this country, the author asserts.

Abel became a household name when he was described in a Life magazine story as “a masterful spy who had successfully slipped himself into the stream of American life.”