⬅️ Hub: History

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My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

ntioned Russia to Tim and Alex. Occasionally, Elena took a clandestine trip to South America or Canada to meet with handlers from the SVR away from potential FBI eyes, switching passports en route to cover her tracks. For her sons, she invented stories about mundane errands to explain why she had been away. Nobody Elena interacted with knew anything about her real talents and achievements. She was a trained KGB officer forced to play the role of a run-of-the-mill housewife. When we met in Moscow, I asked her if it had been hard to cope with this disconnect. She sipped her coffee and smiled faintly. People who crave external validation would never make the cut as illegals, she said. “A spy is an actor, but an actor that doesn’t need a public or a stage.” (Page 10)

We had so many stories. There was a story for our parents, a story for friends here in Russia. Stories and stories and stories. One more story, that’s not a problem for us. Unfortunately, that’s just a rule of the game.” (Page 11)

the October Revolution. The new Soviet regime had few friends in foreign governments, but could call on a wealth of cosmopolitan, well-traveled Communists, who improvised and ad-libbed their way around the world in various disguises, to help defend the revolution and spread its ideology. These virtuosic, devoted spies became known as the Great Illegals in Soviet intelligence lore. Posing as European aristocrats, Persian merchants, or Turkish students, they used cunning, charm, and sex to gather intelligence. Many of them evaded detection in the West but were arrested and executed by their own regime in the late 1930s, during Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. Later, during the Cold War, KGB officers who worked under diplom (Page 13)

it. If tension escalated to the point that diplomatic relations with Moscow were severed, illegal sleeper cells could activate and continue the KGB’s work behind enemy lines. But these long-term missions, which forced illegals to spend years isolated from their families, friends, and homeland, took a major psychological toll. Many cracked under the pressure: some had breakdowns; others defected or were caught. Few had happy personal lives. (Page 13)

ekly radio messages simply stopped coming. Some returned home; others, like Andrei and Elena, had become comfortable in their cover identities and decided to remain living in them. A decade later, Vladimir Putin became president a (Page 14)

s once more, and in Moscow, a fresh batch of operatives underwent training. Whe (Page 14)

ate enemies of the Kremlin abroad. A new army of “virtual illegals” impersonated Westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long-term illegals seemed to be over, the concepts unde (Page 14)

m the Social Democrats, a fringe party fighting the tsarist regime in Russia. “Richter” was just one of more than a hundred aliases he used during his long years in the underground. He later became known to the world under the assumed name with which he made his reputation as a Marxist theorist— Lenin. (Page 20)

stences to drum up support and raise money for the cause. In the southern city of Baku, the empire’s oil capital, Iosif Dzhugashvili, who later became known as Stalin, plotted bank robberies, kidnappings, and extortion schemes to raise funds for party coffers. He was known to most of those he encountered only by his code name (Page 23)

hrana tails, slipping in and out of back entrances and darting into courtyards as he paced the city’s avenues and canal embankments. He was arrested many times and made numerous escapes from Siberian exile using forged papers. He fled one settlement by steamboat, disguised as a woman in a long dress. For travel outside the Russian Empire, Stalin used an array of different documents, and in the space of a few months he could surface across Europe posing as a Russian, a Persian, or an Armenian merchant.[7] Other Bolsheviks lived extended illegal lives right under the (Page 23)

eka again repurposed this legacy. Lenin’s concept of combining legal work with the extensive use of illegals would become the defining feature of how the new Soviet state ran its intelligence services for decades to come. The man who first put these ideas into practice, the father of Russian foreign intelligence, knew all about the importance of illegals. For more than a decade, he had been one. (Page 25)

In late 1906, living on illegal papers in the city of Vyborg, he audacious prison break, which involved drugging the prison guards at a celebratory ball, stealing the keys, and setting the inmates free. The Okhrana apprehended him in 1907, and after a long interrogation and (Page 27)

There was no time to organize personal (Page 29)

infant daughter to crawl around their hotel room unattended. One day, the over-curious child pulled a vase of flowers from the table and drank the stale water from it. She contracted dysentery and died soon after. The couple mourned their daughter, but told themselves that this was not the moment for personal emotions. The success of the revolution was hanging in the balance. [8] (Page 30)

to return home soon. goals, and the INO was key to both. The first, as Lenin and his comrades became more secure in their hold on power at home, was to protect the country against attacks from abroad. The Whites had been defeated on the battlefield, but tens of thousands of tsarist sympathizers were still alive and determined In Paris, Prague, Harbin, and Constantinople, there were sizable communities of Russians who believed Communism was merely a brief aberration in the sweep of history. Western European governments were investigating how best they could help the remnants of the White forces regroup. Trilisser’s department was tasked with intercepting and sabotaging these plans. The INO’s second task was to help facilitate global revolution. Lenin believed a lone socialist state would not last long surrounded by capitalist foes. The Bolsheviks instructed foreign Communist parties to set up parallel illegal networks alongside official party structures, to help them seize power when the inevitable revolutionary moment arrived. (Page 31)

t in the Bolshevik underground movement, and early Soviet debates on female empowerment were more progressive than those in the West. But the plan for gender equality went the same way as the belief that state structures would wither away in the new socialist utopia. From the beginning, the Soviet political elite was dominated by men, and the Cheka was even more so.[12] In this macho environment, Trilisser had the reputation of being on (Page 32)

military intelligence operative who had grown disillusioned and gone into hiding abroad. Two illegals tracked Nesterovich down to the German city of Mainz and poisoned him as he took his morning coffee in a local café. When they reported back details of the mission, Trilisser sent another order: “You must remove witnesses, especially the daughter of the restaurant owner.”[14] Nobody had promised the revolution would be bloodless. The top echelons of the government gradually beca (Page 32)

f the decade was in full control. Trotsky, his most serious contender for the mantle of Lenin’s heir, was forced into exile. Stalin championed (Page 34)

Using special machinery to drill through doors, they found a secret room, where workers were hurriedly burning classified documents. The home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, called the (Page 34)

to meet.”[18] As a result of the scandal, Britain severed diplomatic ties with the Sovie (Page 35)

As a result of the scandal, Britain severed diplomatic ties with ion. Although relations would be restored in 1929, the episode underlined the fact that Moscow could not rely on legal agents posted in embassies, or even those working under the thin cover of trade emissaries. Trilisser launched a renewed drive to send illegals, who had no discernible Soviet links, to major European capitals and farther afield. Trilisser’s roster of illegals included the flamboy (Page 35)

endure in one form or another for the next century. Among this group of devoted, talented actor-spies one man stood out for both the ingenuity of his methods and the impressiveness of his results. He took on the roles, at various times, of the Hungarian count József Perelly, the Canadian timber merchant John Wento, the Greek businessman Alexander S. Gallas, the Dutch artist Hans Galleni, and the British aristocrat Robert Grenville. His real name was Dmitry Bystrolyotov, and he w nted illegal in the history of the program. (Page 36)

ly became one,” he later remembered.[4] Dmitry gave up seaf (Page 39)

nty-nine-year-old secretary at the French embassy in Prague. Dmitry made her acquaintance, and the two began an affair. He told her he would soon be posted to the Soviet embassy in Washington. After some time, he proposed, and she eagerly accepted. But not long after, he came to her in devastation, saying his Soviet superiors had vetoed his marriage to a foreigner, unless his fiancée could prove her loyalty to the Soviet cause. He suggested she provide documents, ciphers, and codes from the French embassy. Marie was wary of betraying her country, but devoted to her dashing lover, and she eventually produced the information. For two years, Dmitry extorted ever more information from her, explaining every time that the couple’s marriage and departure for Washington had been slightly delayed but was imminent. During the sa (Page 42)

opined, rather charitably to himself, years later. When Dmitry’s spymasters told him they no longer needed the Fre (Page 42)

uous psychological preparation. For Dmitry, it was second nature. His life had already transformations of his beliefs as circumstances dictated. He had lived as an aristocrat and a refugee; he had been a bookish student and a manual laborer. He had supported the Whites involved numerous (Page 43)

Czech. And he was still only twenty-eight years old. (Page 44)

He spent several evenings observing ns in the elegant villas of Buda and inside the lively coffeehouses of Pest. He acquired a collection of books on Hungarian history, literature, and art. He ordered suits and hats from local tailors and a set of smoking pipes embossed with what was supposedly the Perelly coat of arms. He had several photographs taken in front of notable landmarks on both sides of the Danube. During a religious procession through the streets of the city center, he accosted the cardinal of Hungary and asked for a photograph together. When the picture was developed and printed, he tucked it into his passport jacket and was able to claim the cardinal as a distant relative. It was the perfect cover, and one he would be able to use for many years to come. The one issue was that he had to avoid encountering any real Hungarians, (Page 45)

her dress, opened her legs and begged him not to waste any time.”[22] Dmitry, when he told the story years later, claimed he was flushed with sweat and shame after the act, locking himself in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror in disgust, and wondering what on earth he had done. Both his surprise and his horror seem a little forced; he had, after all, played the charming foreign cad enthusiastically with Lucy from their first meeting. Dmitry now had Ernest in his pocket and Lucy in his bed. Once (Page 50)

tain’s Secret Intelligence Service by now had overseas stations, with numerous agents working under diplomatic cover as passport control officers, but their work was limited in scope. In 1936, the British ambassador to Moscow refused to open an MI6 station in the embassy there for fear it could “cause embarrassment.” The American embassy in Moscow, which finally opened in 1933, also housed no spies, because the United States did not yet (Page 57)

roamed Europe at will. An antiquarian bookseller in The Hague, a fishmonger in Paris, and an Ameri (Page 58)

the 1930s. In Nazi Germany, he acquired top-secret Wehrmacht procurement documents by seducing a secretary in charge of guarding them, whom he described as a “bloodthirsty dog” with a grotesque appearance. Between European missions, he took long trips to Africa, where he liv (Page 58)

is biography sketch out one of t (Page 59)

place he had visited in 1925. Stalin had launched a push to industrialize the country at breakneck speed and paired this with the brutal collectivization of agriculture, which led to millions of deaths by starvation and the forced resettlement of millions of so-called rich peasants.[1] For others, the regime offered dizzying levels of social mobility as it aimed to promote those with proletarian or peasant backgrounds. Moscow, the Soviet capital, was “the cauldron in which a new life is being created,” as the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov put it.[2] During Dmitry’s time abroad, black sedans had gradually replaced the old pony traps in the central streets, many of which had been renamed after leading Bolsheviks or foreign Marxists. The roomy apartments of the prerevolutionary merchant class had been divided up into so-called kommunalki, housing new arrivals from the countryside, one family to a room. In 1931, the gold-domed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which had dominated the Moscow skyline since 1883, was blown up using seven tons of explosives. Hundreds of smaller churches were also destroyed as part of the government’s atheism drive.[3] A new ten-year General Plan, launched in 1935, broadened central roads and gave the city an even more monumental feel. The same year, the first line of the city’s metro system opened. Deep underground and filled with grand socialist realist sculptures and mosaics, the stations were subterranean cathedrals of the new Soviet reality. The metro was the fastest and busiest in the world, according to a massive Soviet (Page 60)

formation of the new man.”[4] Stalin was close to amass (Page 61)

essions saw Stalin lauded with endless rounds of applause and toadying speeches. But when there was a secret ballot to confirm his role as general secretary, three hundred votes, nearly a quarter of those present, went against him. Stalin took it as proof of a secret conspiracy. In August 1936, Grigory Zin (Page 61)

mpeachable comrades were unmasked as supposed fascists and enemy spies. The illegals, with their long years of work abroad and malleable, cosmopolitan identities, were easy targets. Boris Bazarov, who had worked with Dmitry in Berlin, was recalled to Mo (Page 62)

ss there was an obsession with formal paper trails to retain the appearance of due process. On occas (Page 66)

worked in Europe during the 1930s, sometimes posing as an American businessman, was so horrified by the news he read coming out of the Soviet Union that he quit in the summer of 1937 and wrote an open letter to French newspapers denouncing Stalin’s policies as a betrayal of socialism. It took just six weeks for a team of fellow illegals to locate his hiding place in a Swiss village and lure him into a trap, disguised as a friendly meeting with likeminded comrades. His body was found riddled with bullets, dumped at the side of the road just outside Lausanne.[12] Other illegals who decided to stay in the West met similar fates. There was no mercy, eith (Page 67)

spent several years locked away in a tsarist prison and several more in icy Siberian exile. After the revolution, he had built the INO from scratch into a formidable intelligence service. Now he sat awaiting execution in a dark and lonely prison cell, after “admitting” to the absurd charge that the brilliant network of spies he had put in place was designed not to benefit the Soviet Union but to destroy it. (Page 68)

the Great Terror, one of the twentieth century’s most puzzling crimes. More than 680,000 people were shot as enemies of the state during a two-year period, including many of the oldest and most respected Bolsheviks and the majority of the leadership of most government institutions. Several reasons coalesced in 1937 to make the pu (Page 68)

would surely also be employed by the Soviet Union’s enemies.[17] He certainly knew some of his victims were innocent of the charges against them, but it seems he genuinely believed many were not. He saw enemy illegals everywhere, plotting to bring down the Soviet Union even as they pretended to serve it, operating as stealthily inside the Soviet Union as Dmitry had done when he played the role of Joe Perelly in London. Seen through the eyes of a regime that trained illegals to spend years hiding their real allegiances and intentions, the idea that the Soviet elite was riddled with similar turncoats morphed from paranoid fantasy to plausible concern. (Page 69)

ce received by so many of his former colleagues and bosses, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. When he was eventually released, in 1954, he emerged disillusioned and broken, a very different person from the twinkle-eyed illegal who for a decade had seduced women and fooled men across Europe. (Page 70)

nched a massive industrialization drive in the Soviet Union. “Technical intelligence in the USA is the main focus of our work,” the Center declared in 1934, urging Markin and others to recruit sources who could provide access to America’s scientific and technological secrets.[5] Markin adopted the name Irving Steppin and used th (Page 75)

ting more than three hours. The illegal urged his source to focus on the bigger global picture. Fascist Germany was plotting to unleash a terrible imperialist war, he said, and by helping the Soviet Union, Duggan was aiding not only Moscow but the whole of progressive humanity. For many concerned sources this was a persuasive argument. However grim the news coming from Soviet Russia might be, the stated goals of Communism remained noble and emancipatory. Hitler’s increasingly menacing posturing was the greater threat. (Page 82)

m a joint front with Moscow against Germany, leaving the Soviet Union with no choice. But the optics were horrific, both at home and abroad. For years, the raison d’être of the Soviet state had been to stand against fascism and imperialism; moreover, tens of thousands of Soviet officials had recently been executed for supposedly helping fascist Germany. Now Stalin himself had made a deal with Hitler. Duggan was moody and (Page 83)

his target’s sweet tooth and blew him up with a booby-trapped box of chocolates in a Rotterdam café.[1] Sudoplatov had survived the purges, but numerous accusations of h (Page 85)

sts of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the couple’s Blue House. Trotsky and Kahlo soon embarked on a brief affair, which led to tension between Trotsky and Rivera and created problems for Trotsky in his own marriage. In the end, he and his wife moved out, to a nearby villa on Avenida Viena. (Page 86)

lin’s number one enemy. A small article on page 3 of Pravda noted that Trotsky had been killed by someone from his close entourage. Stalin drafted the article personally and headlined it “The Death of an International Spy.”[5] (Page 91)

Hitler, Stalin remained convinced that his new ally would not dare break their agreement and attack the Soviet Union. He was sure the Nazis would wait to conquer Britain before turning their attention eastward, believing Hitler would not make the same mistake as Germany had during World War I and open two fronts simultaneously. Stalin received reports, many of them via illegals, that gave ample warning of Hitler’s real plans. But his obsession with konspiratsiya led him to assume they were part of a deception game, and in the system he had built, there was nobody left who was brave or stupid enough to express even mild disagreement when the Great Leader was wrong. So it was that Stalin, the man who saw anti-Soviet conspiracies everywhere, managed to miss the biggest plot of all. (Page 92)

cials to pass on secrets to Soviet sources, through networks developed before the purges. In late December 1940, the führer signed top-secret Directive 21, which ordered that even before Britain was defeated, German forces should be prepared to “annihilate Soviet Russia in a swift campaign,” code-named Operation Barbarossa, with a provisional date set for mid-May 1941. Only a few people at the top of the Nazi military command knew about the order, but Soviet agents soon received chatter about it and forwarded news of the directive to Moscow. Over the next months, the (Page 93)

an attack on the Soviet Union that he bypassed protocol to write directly to Beria, who dismissed the warning as scaremongering. Fitin, the young head of foreign intelligence, did his best to convey the sense of alarm coming from agents across Europe, forwarding more than a hundred warnings of a German attack to Stalin, who mostly ignored them.[2] Military intelligence also continued to receive detailed intelligence from Sorge. On June 1, he cabled back to Moscow: “Berlin informed Ott that the German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95% certain that war will commence.” A summary of the cable ended up on Stalin’s desk. “Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations,” Stalin scrawled on it in pencil.[3] Stal (Page 95)

cific information about the upcoming Nazi invasion from Tokyo and Berlin. But it was all wasted on Stalin. After dismissing Fitin and Merkulov, he looked again at the report they had brought with them outlining SchulzeBoysen’s intelligence. He scrawled a response, in pencil, on the first page: “Send your source from German aviation to his fucking mother.” (Page 96)

particularly pronounced in Soviet Russia, where the political elite were convinced the world functioned according to the strict laws of MarxismLeninism. If the reports from the ground did not accord with how Lenin’s writings suggested the world should develop, they were discarded as incorrect. The brilliant and inventive tradecraft used by illegals to gather intelligence was rarely matched by the ability to analyze the resulting information properly. This (Page 96)

ing the first three years of the war. Some of them formed a network that became known as the Red Orchestr (Page 101)

ry act of sabotage fifty men would be picked at (Page 105)

random and shot. Any suspicion of sympathy for the pro-Soviet underground could prove fatal. The occupying forces erected gallows throughout the city, and often bodies were left hanging for weeks, with signs identifying them as enemies of German rule. The fifty-three-year-old Kube, appointed (Page 106)

war years, Sudoplatov later estimated, and between them they were responsible for the assassination of eighty-seven high-ranking Nazis. Many of these operatives were disguised as Germans. Nikolai Kuznetsov, who posed as Oberleutnant Paul Siebert and killed at least six Nazi officials before he was captured and killed, later became one of the most celebrated Soviet war heroes. The assassination of Kube was perhaps the most spectacular hit of all, (Page 112)

mos, New Mexico, where scientists worked on developing a nuclear weapon. The NKVD learned about the so-called Manhattan Project within a month. Before long, there was a network of informers providing Moscow with technical and scientific intelligence, which the Soviets then repurposed for their own atomic program. Iskhak did not handle these sources directly, but a lot of the intelligence went through him: in 1945 alone, he sent nearly two thousand rolls of microfilm to Moscow.[4] While Stalin was receiving reams of (Page 115)

tain and America, neither London nor Washington had a single agent close to power in Moscow. This meant that at the “Big Three” meetings in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, where the fate of postwar Europe was decided, Stalin was much better briefed on his supposed allies than they were on him. When the new U.S. president, Harry Truman, tried to impress Stalin at Potsdam with news that the Americans had acquired “a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” he was confused as to why Stalin appeared unfazed. In fact, Stalin had found out about the bomb much earlier than Truman, who was only inducted into the secret when he was sworn in as president. (Page 115)

hed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, a defensive military alliance. To bolster weakened economies and prevent impoverished populations from choosing Communists at the ballot box in countries such as Greece and Italy, the United States launched the Marshall Plan, a huge recovery spending program for Europe. In theory, it was open to countries in the eastern half of Europe too, but assuming the money would come with political strings attached, Stalin ordered Czechoslovakia and Poland to refuse participation. A major new arm of Am (Page 116)

By the end of 1950, the United States had more than three hundred operational atomic bombs, while the Soviet Union had only five. But the fundamental principle underpinning the Cold War, whereby one side would never be able to launch a nuclear attack on the other without risking the decimation of the whole planet, was in place.[6] (Page 117)

Communism was an existential threat to the country. “Communism, in reality, is not a political party,” he told Congress in March 1947. “It is a way of life, a malignant and evil way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic, and like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.” Under pressure fr (Page 117)

viet spies had operated with relative ease in America. The Red Scare would put an end to that. The FBI expanded dramatically during the war years, growing from 2,280 to 15,000 employees between 1941 and 1945.[8] During the later stages of the war, Julius Rosenberg, an army engineer with Communist leanings, had been able to meet more than fifty times with his Soviet handler, Alexander Feklisov, posted in New York under diplomatic cover. The pair would chat in restaurants or arrange the handover of documents in dark cinema halls. Rosenberg was arrested in 1950 and sent to the electric chair together with his wife, Ethel, in 1953; by then, it was unthinkable that a Soviet legal officer would casually stroll into a restaurant to meet a sensitive agent like Rosenberg. All Soviet intelligence officers knew they would be subjected to intensive surveillance the minute they stepped out of the embassy. (Page 118)

forty-nine new illegals. Gradually, the Center began sending them abroad.[10] Korotkov understood that the new Cold War conditions required a change of tactics; no longer could illegals operate in the West as Iskhak had before the war. These days, a man calling himself Michael Green who spoke with clipped Slavic consonants and set up meetings with U.S. government employees was likely to come to the attention of the FBI very quickly. To withstand the increased vigilance, the new illegal would need to be equipped with a watertight cover story and receive thorough training. (Page 119)

igned him his first major task: to act as controller for Kim Philby, who by now was Moscow’s most valued agent.[11] Philby had been posted to Washington as the head of the MI6 liaison (Page 120)

nothing to do with a trade deal. The man Tito met that morning was a genuine, accredited Costa Rican diplomat, but his real name was not Teodoro Castro and he had never even been to Costa Rica, despite his ability to spin lengthy anecdotes about his supposed homeland. His real name was Iosif Grigulevich, and he was a Soviet illegal, the same one who had posed as the Frenchman “Felipe,” and run the first, unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico City. A few months before this meeting, Stalin had given Grigulevich an important mission: not to sign an economic deal with Tito, but to kill him. (Page 125)

War. The defeated Axis state was firmly within the Western sphere of influence, but large swaths of the country’s impoverished population supported the local Communist movement. A critical election approached. In April 1948, a U.S. State Department adviser warned that “if Italy goes Red, communism cannot be stopped in Europe.”[7] The Christian Democrats won the vote that year, with rhetorical help from the pope and financial backing from the newly founded CIA, but the local Communist Party retained a strong presence. Iosif and his (Page 128)

n code, parachute training for the moment of infiltration, and a detailed primer on life in the Soviet Union, covering aspects that the émigrés might have missed since they left. There was also a focus on self-defense and physical fitness, with training in hand-tohand combat and long runs each morning before breakfast.[9] After being dropped in the forests of Soviet Belarus, the men were to hea (Page 152)

Soviet Union controlled the life and movements of its own citizens with intensive paperwork requirements and rigorous checks. It was simply much harder for CIA illegals to infiltrate a rigid police state without detection than it was for Soviet illegals to enter the freer atmosphere of the West. The project was officially terminated in October 1959.[11] (Page 153)

ave your cover blown; it was better to make tiresome checks to ensure nothing could go wrong than to cut corners. Yuri continued to inform on his friends and fellow students, telling (Page 163)

tage, using busy subway stations and streets to blend into the crowd and emptier areas to force anyone who was still watching either to hang back and risk losing him or expose themselves by keeping up. Detecting a well-trained surveillance team was not (Page 167)

lance, so Yuri had to monitor everyone in the vicinity, but make sure these visual scans remained inconspicuous. Different watchers would rotate in and out of position; in the intervals they might also change their clothes. They would rarely have time to switch their footwear, though, so Yuri was taught to keep an eye on the shoes of those around him. One day, one of Yuri’s trainers arrive (Page 168)

s not recruitment, but to engage in seemingly innocent friendly chatter, sounding out the subject’s political views, personal circumstances, and quirks. This could then be used in a recruitment pitch by a different agent. Was the person having marital problems? Did they feel overlooked or undervalued at the workplace? Were they vain and susceptible to flattery, or perhaps lonely and looking for love? Yuri spent long hours painting psychological portraits of different kinds of people for the trainers, who taught him how to spot vulnerabilities in a target. There were also more (Page 169)

ossible. Instead, the KGB trained illegals in “working class” professions. Yuri spent a few weeks learning how to pull apart and put back together a typewriter in a workshop in a suburb of Kyiv, before spending some time in the KGB garage mastering the basics of fixing cars. It was quite a change from the years of instruction in German literature, foreign languages, Marxism-Leninism, and espionage tradecraft. He had to get his soft, intellectual hands oily. Before deployment, Yuri called in at a m (Page 171)

ri was often being tested without realizing. When his parents came to visit him in Kyiv for a weekend, the KGB bugged the flat, to check whether he would give anything away to them. More than two hundred pages of handwritten transcripts of Yuri exchanging mundanities with his parents made it into his training file. Importantly, he never said a word about the KGB, sticking to the story that he was working in Kyiv for a scientific institute.[14] (Page 172)

man living in the capital he wanted to look up, but he had nowhere to stay in the city and couldn’t afford a hotel. Perhaps his new friend could put him up for a few days? Yuri’s heart sank: it was out of the question. His destination in Moscow was a KGB konskvartira, where he was due to write up a full report of his year abroad. To buy time, Yuri assured the pilot that he would be happy to host him, but when the train pulled in to the station, he slipped away. Recalling the story nearly six decades later, Yuri still felt guilty about leaving the pilot in the lurch, despite feeling little remorse about later betrayals that were part of the routine work of an illegal. Back in 1963, he was not yet used to the feeling. Deceit and subterfuge, his (Page 177)

to transform the language, manners, and bearing of a Soviet citizen into those of a Westerner. But it also took a lot of work to mold the paradoxical psychological makeup of the illegal: someone who was simultaneously a slippery, virtuoso maverick and slavishly loyal to the Soviet state. (Page 178)

mbark on a serious romance abroad, or to reveal their real identity to a woman. They knew that a prolonged affair could lead to disastrous consequences, as had happened in the early 1950s, when Evgeny Brik fell in love and confessed everything to a Canadian sweetheart. Directorate S drew conclusions from Brik’s failure. B (Page 179)

itude for languages, an unflappable personality, and an impeccable family background. Yuri’s KGB file reveals that the search for this ideal bride started just after he (Page 180)

t decade of her life into an extended ordeal of misery. (Page 182)

KGB meant subordinating his desires to the good of the organization. Tamara would have to do so too. Deep down, he had doubts about her character. She seemed too emotional, too fragile for the work, tearing up over the idea of leaving her infant behind. Had he made the wrong choice? He hoped the rigorous training in Kyiv and the time in Erfurt would toughen her up. (Page 188)

ppost on a street just outside the park. A Line N officer would later drive past on a regular monitoring run; if he spotted a chalk mark, it meant Yuri would be leaving a drop the next day. An hour before the agreed drop time, having spent several hours making sure he was not being followed, the Line N man would discreetly brush a light blue chalk mark onto a bench in a different part of the park, a signal to Yuri that he was ready to accept the drop. Yuri, after several hours of walking through the city to throw off any potential surveillance, left his letter, crumpled up and stuffed into an old cigarette packet, at the dead drop site. He then returned to the lamppost where he had left the original signal and wiped it off, to indicate he had made the drop. Soon after, the Line N officer took a stroll through the park. Even if he was under surveillance, his watchers would only see him stop by some steps and bend down to tie his shoelace. They would not notice that with a barely perceptible move of the hand he had grabbed the cigarette packet from under the steps and shoved it in his pocket, before continuing on his way. On (Page 193)

bench, and as he stood up, would wipe off the chalk mark. When Yuri did his final checks, if the chalk mark was still present, it meant there had been a problem. In that case, he would retrieve the package and start the whole process again on an agreed-upon reserve day. This was the life of an illegal— time-consuming en passant interactions, carefully choreographed thousands of miles away in Moscow, to make sure there was no face-to-face contact between an illegal and a support officer.[9] (Page 194)

brought her into. She was polite, kind, and naïve, all the wrong qualities for the job. She had also developed a streak of paranoia. Sometimes, she begged him not to go out, convinced he would be caught. When he told her about the incident with the gay man in Brussels, she was sure it was a setup. After six weeks together, Yuri prepared a letter to the Center, informing the handlers that Tamara was unfit to work abroad. (Page 199)

Soviet Union across the globe. Even for supporters, it was painfully clear that the official rhetoric around the events in Czechoslovakia was a shabby inversion of the truth. The Soviets had crushed a genuine reform movement, not liberated the country from reactionaries as they claimed. It also marked the end point of the weak hope among dissidents within the Soviet Union that the post-Stalin “thaw” might blossom into real reform. The invasion caused “a nervous breakdown for the whole generation,” said the novelist Vasily Aksyonov.[25] For Dir (Page 211)

cess. In the space of a year and a half, the KGB sent twenty-seven illegals to Prague, many on multiple trips. They had provided analysis of the situation on the ground and served as an early warning system against potential threats. Importantly, none of them were uncovered and none lost their nerve, whatever misgivings they might have harbored privately. (Page 211)

re proactive kind of espionage. It prompted the KGB to strengthen the Seventh Department of Directorate S, which ran a group of Moscow-based illegals who were sent on short-term missions to handle crisis situations. These spies could handle agents and focus on immediate espionage needs, while sleeper illegals would play the long game, blending into Western society and waiting to be activated should war break out. Before long, the Seventh Department had thirty-nine active illegals on its books, ready to travel on missions at short notice.[27] Their primary focus was the capitalist world, but Prague had shown that illegals could also be useful inside the Soviet bloc. Operation Progress was expanded to cover even those socialist countries with which the Soviet Union ostensibly had close relations, and short-term missions continued for the next two decades. In Hungary, the Center was obsessed with supposed “Zionist” influence among the party and intellectual elite. In Yugoslavia, illegals traveled to Kosovo to investigate tension between Serbs and Albanians. In Poland, illegals took a particular interest in the Catholic Church. They attempted to get close to several influential religious figures, including the circle of Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, who would later become Pope John Paul II.[28] Other Seventh Department illega (Page 212)

the plan to send him to America. But Yuri Drozdov, the deputy head of Directorate S, had other ideas. He wanted Yuri to become the KGB’s leading specialist on “the Zionist question,” working in Israel and on Jewish issues elsewhere. Drozdov told Yuri he needed to learn Hebrew and Arabic; he gave him audiocassettes and books on the two languages and a deadline of three months to be fluent in both. “I’ve got a wife and kids (Page 214)

to spend a week in the country, getting his bearings. The espionage would come later. The trip came at a time of crisis for Soviet-Israeli relations, which had been slowly deteriorating over the past two decades. When Israel was founded in 1948, Stalin had expected the Jewish state to be a natural ally due to the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and due to the sizable contingent of leftists among the early Zionists. Stalin also ensured that there were numerous KGB informers among the first Soviet Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union and immigrate to Israel.[1] In a sign of friendship, Golda Meir traveled to the Soviet Union in 1948 using the first ever Israeli-issued passport to open the embassy and join a crowd of fifty thousand people at the Moscow synagogue on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. [2] But before long, Israel’s growing links with the United States, combined with the clamor for emigration among a population of more than two million Soviet Jews, ended the friendly relations. Stalin became paranoid about supposed Zionist influence. In December 1952, he told a meeting of the Central Committee that “every Jew is a potential spy for the United States.” Soon after, many Jewish doctors were arrested, accused of being part of a “corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalist organization” and planning to assassinate the Soviet leader. After Stalin’s death, the (Page 215)

ories faded but did not disappear. Numerous Operation Progress missions (Page 215)

elements.”[3] At the same time, the Soviet Union courted the Arab states. The anti-Zionist obsession increased in intensity after the Six-Day War in 1967. One Soviet book published in 1969 described the basis of Zionism as “bellicose chauvinism and anti-Communism” and claimed the movement was driven by “the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie closely allied with monopoly capital in the United States and other imperialist countries.”[4] Moscow feared Israel’s supposed influence across the glo (Page 216)

usalem Post each morning, and he attended public lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Once a week, he drafted a report on Israeli politics. He befriended some Sephardic Jews and noticed a resentment among many of the darker-skinned Israelis against the Ashkenazi majority. He wrote one of his reports about Ovadia Yosef, the chief Sephardic rabbi, suggesting the Center play on these feelings of resentment and try to recruit him under a false flag. (Page 221)

ale voice sounded from the corridor; there was a problem with the plumbing, she said, and a handyman needed to check the pipes. “One minute,” Yuri called out. He grabbed the tiny onetime p rted flushing them down the toilet. At the sound of the flush, there was an almighty crash. The door was kicked open, and operatives from the Shin Bet, Israel’s counterintelligence service, stormed into the room.[14] (Page 227)

His training in Moscow had been quite at or drink anything offered when under interrogation. Yuri’s wal (Page 228)

ey “peeled him like an onion,” recalled one investigator, until he started to reveal all kinds of useful information about the KGB. Yuri remembers it differently. It was obvious from the Helsinki photograph that the Israelis knew he was a spy, so he admitted it, but he did not reveal anything the Israelis did not know already. He was only cooperating to help secure his release, he claimed. There was a two-day period during the interrogation that was a black hole in his memory, though, during which Yuri suspected he might have been drugged. Israeli sources say this is merely the excuse of a spy embarrassed to admit that he broke so quickly. With the Israeli archives still closed, the truth is hard to divine. Any insight i (Page 228)

en a job in an institute for international affairs, and he continued to work for the KGB on the side, preparing Soviet Jews who had shown willingness to cooperate with the KGB ahead of their emigration to Israel. He also worked as a guide on cruises for foreign tourists on the Dnipro River, writing reports on promising targets for KGB recruitment. He was banned from telling anyone about his former life as an illegal, even his new KGB colleagues in Kyiv. Four years after the move to Kyiv, he was trying to fix a broken radiator in the marital bedroom when he found a listening device attached to the wall behind it. The KGB still didn’t trust him. (Page 232)

al officers, stationed under diplomatic cover, to such intense surveillance that carrying out any kind of espionage in the United States was almost impossible. In Moscow, pervasive KGB surveillance sent many CIA operatives stir crazy. They thought up ever more elaborate schemes to shake off their watchers, such as leaving the embassy in a van with two officers sitting in the front, one officer jumping out as the van turned a corner, and then a pop-up mannequin appearing in his place. Even with these innovative tactics, the Moscow environment was usually too risky for meetings with sources or making recruitment pitches. One consequence of it being difficult for both Mo (Page 245)

Tokyo, Singapore, Beirut, Kabul, Addis Ababa, and Monrovia, with the sole purpose of recruiting Americans. In Scandinavian embassies alone, there were fifteen KGB officers working fulltime on Americans.[1] A KGB guide set out some basic elements of the American psyche (Page 245)

A KGB guide set out some basic elements of the the officers who would be making approaches. “Americans have strong chauvinist tendencies, are self-confident and dismissive of other nations, they believe in the superiority of the American way of life and are proud of American ‘democracy,’ ” it noted. The KGB was also unimpressed with the “low cultural level” of average Americans, noting that they got most of their intellectual intake from the cinema and television. “They will speak about loving Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, but few of them have actually read these authors.”[2] Americans, the report concluded, had a free attitude to sex and “measure success only in money.” The CIA also produced guidelines for its officers on how to reel in potential Soviet sources, and beefed up its stations in third countries, where keeping an eye on the (Page 245)

tasks. Most of the delicate recruitment dances performed by spies from both sides took place during cocktail parties, badminton games, and morning walks in neutral countries across the globe, not in Moscow or Washington, D.C. T (Page 246)

eratives for long-term clandestine missions. In one case, a young man was permitted to spend four years building his cover in a target country, attending university there and establishing himself as a salesman, but by the time he was ready to be activated, he had lost interest in working for the CIA. In other cases, an internal report into NOCs found, the cover identity was simply not convincing enough: “There have been too many salesmen who did not sell, students who did not study, consultants who were not consulted, some of them living on a generous scale with large families, deluding themselves that all was well until perhaps the chief of station was queried by his cover boss, ‘Is so-and-so one of yours? He looks as phony to me as anyone I’ve ever seen!’ ”[4] The (Page 247)

uments for new illegals, as well as to keep them productive and sane once they arrived in the West. Many illegals originally earmarked for deployment to the United States, like Yuri Linov, were eventually moved to other parts of the world as the work required to infiltrate them became too complicated. At least four illegals did manage to enter North America in the 1960s, all of them using a route via East and West Germany. But once they arrived, the counterintelligence capabilities of the FBI, plus the psychological pressure of illegal life, led to most of their missions being aborted. In February 1965, Gennady Blyabin and his wife (Page 248)

lives of the family it was “rarely possible dim Kirpichenko, the head of Directorate S in the late 1970s, admitted that illegals to solve satisfactorily.”[6] Yet it was taken as a given that the human emotions around children should be a secondary concern. Operational requirements took precedence. Children who had learned even a few words of Russian were banned from foreign assignments, so illegal couples who gave birth before departing for a mission had to leave them with relatives or deposit them in a KGB orphanage. One illegal couple returned to Moscow for a visit, with a one-year-old son born while they were abroad. They left the infant with his grandmother while they took a vacation at a Black Sea sanatorium. During that month, the child picked up a few phrases in Russian, which meant it would be too dangerous to return with him. They left him behind and, when they returned to their deployment country, announced to their friends that he had been killed in a tragic accident.[7] Many illegals, like Rudi, had ch (Page 258)

embassy. These operatives filled and retrieved dead drops with instructions or important packages from the Center for illegals, but they did not, as a rule, know their cover names or exact addresses. The Line N men were the most secretive of all the KGB officers in the mission. “They could be out at eight in the morning on a Sunday shaking off surveillance for six hours, and then at the end of it all, go shopping with their wife, just to mess with you,” recalled one former squad member. The FBI men hoped that if they followed the Line N operatives diligently enough, they might eventually catch the scent of an actual illegal, but this was a long shot. They described their work as “hunting for unicorns.” So when news came, some (Page 271)

eration might have put the FBI onto the trail of an illegal, a wave of excitement swept through the office. Dangles were fake defectors, used (Page 271)

adversary. The FBI selected its dangles carefully, analyzing records of real turncoats and realizing they tended to be low-ranking, disgruntled men with an ax to grind. They also noticed that the KGB sometimes proactively approached émigrés or second-generation immigrants from the Eastern bloc, especially those who still had family behind the Iron Curtain. The FBI searched for someone who fit the bill and found Ralph Sigler, an army radio technician who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia as a child and could still speak Czech, German, and some Russian. After coaching by the FBI, Sigler walked into the Soviet embassy in Mexico City in 1966. Expressing frustration with his army career, he offered to spy for the Soviets. The KGB took the bait, and over the next decade they paid Sigler handsomely for a stream of information that was actually a curated mix of fairly unimportant intelligence and FBI misinformation. In 1975, the army transferred Sig (Page 272)

KGB handlers told him to communicate with them using two dead drops in the vicinity. These, apparently, were the drops that Rudi had selected, putting the FBI onto him in the process. The dangle had led to a real, live unicorn, although some sources claim the whole story was invented to throw the Soviets off the real reason the FBI found Rudi. Either way, the Americans had found a Soviet illegal for the first time since Abel two decades previously. [15] (Page 272)

the 1990s, Putin had been a lowly KGB case officer, stationed in the relative isolation of Dresden as the Communist bloc collapsed. His upward trajectory began soon after his return to the Soviet Union. He left the KGB and worked as an aide to the new, liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. In 1996, Sobchak lost his reelection bid, and Putin was called to Moscow to work in the presidential administration. Two years later, he was appointed to run the FSB, as the domestic arm of the former KGB was now called. It was a meteoric rise, from provincial cog to the director’s office in Lubyanka, in just eight years. The next year, Yeltsin made him prime minister and a few months later nominated him as acting president. (Page 320)

werful groups that supported Yeltsin. One high-level banker described him as being “as obedient as a dog.”[2] Still, there were early signs that he was made of steelier stuff than his detractors believed. Putin’s KGB background was a key part of his public image. He made his first ever television appearance in 1992 “in character” as Stierlitz, the illegal who goes undercover as a Nazi in Seventeen Moments of Spring. In a television documentary about the St. Petersburg administration, film producers played the theme song of the series to images of Putin driving his Volga through the city’s streets.[3] Stierlitz, the disciplined and ascetic patriot, was a popular figu (Page 321)

rman and the wall of secrecy that surrounds his time with the KGB. His wife was also fluent in German and Spanish, suggesting they could have been considered for a life abroad as an illegal couple. It is certainly probable that someone from the Third Department of Directorate S, which kept an eye out for potential illegal recruits, had Putin monitored. But it was not to be. Putin (Page 321)

year-old lieutenant Putin took part in arresting two dissidents who hung a huge banner in St. Petersburg that read, “The human soul knows no chains.” The pair received lengthy jail terms.[6] Later, Putin ended up part of a (Page 322)

h the other KGB officers stationed there. He took with him a twenty-oneyear-old washing machine donated by neighbors, a small stack of savings in U.S. dollars, and a gnawing bitterness at how the superpower he had served had crumbled before his eyes.[9] Less than a decade later, he was president of the new Russia, with a burning desire to right the wrong of the Soviet collapse. He wanted Russia to be a “first-tier nation,” as he put it in a newspaper article he authored in 1999, a status he felt the country was at risk of losing. Initially, he entertained the thought that the restoration of Russian prestige could be possible through cooperation, a new era of warm relations with the West. He suggested that perhaps, one day, Russia might even join NATO. Man (Page 322)

States, Poteyev’s information had put the FBI onto them.[22] A huge team was put in place to monitor every aspect of the couple’s lives. Agents sifted through Andrei and Elena’s trash, tapped their phones, and followed them around Cambridge. One evening every week, an FBI agent would stroll past their building on Leonard Avenue, eyeing which lights were turned on in their apartment. Meanwhile, another agent sat in a Dodge Intrepid parked nearby, clutching a shortwave radio and listening in to the same coded broadcasts that Elena was transcribing inside. An FBI team broke into the family’s home while they were away; they conducted a search and installed bugs. When Andrei and Elena brought their car to a garage for maintenance, the FBI planted a bug there too. All this was done with extreme caution: the couple were trained to watch for unusual activity, and they would have fled immediately at the first sign of surveillance. On a quiet Tuesday night in January 20 (Page 329)

portant documents, valuables, and some personal mementos from the past were exactly the sorts of items a normal family might keep locked away. It was only much later that the FBI discovered that the real Donald Heathfield, son of Howard and Shirley Heathfield of Burlington, Ontario, had died as an infant, proving that the man now calling himself Don Heathfield had appropriated the identity. But the photographs of Ann Foley contained a more immediate clue. The greenery in the background could have been anywhere, but there was one thing that stood out. On the bottom edges of each of the negatives, a small area of film had been cut out at regular intervals. Just one of the negatives had been left unsnipped. There was a word on it, printed in tiny letters: TACMA. None of the FBI agents knew what this meant, and research did not uncover anything. But then someone posited the idea that the letters could be Cyrillic. In Russian, the word read TASMA, which they quickly realized was one of the main producers of film in the Soviet Union. Elena had item that could link them to the Soviet Union, however small. Perhaps she had somehow retrieved the negatives from Russia during the 1990s, when the couple had considered leaving intelligence work. Starting a new life as Ann Foley, maybe Elena wanted to bring one small reminder of her former life. Buried in a safe to which only she had the key, deep inside a secure bank vault, the negatives must have seemed safe from any prying eyes. But those five letters were the undoing of all the years of training, the careful subterfuge, and the lies they spun even to their own children. Poteyev’s tip-off had been right. The FBI had found their smoking gun.[23] (Page 330)

980s, where his KGB opposite number was a suave young officer called Sergei Ivanov. The pair struck up a friendship, and even visited each other’s homes for dinners, but it transpired that Ivanov had used one of these dinners to spray his American opposite number with an odorless, colorless dust marked with a special chemical tag. The KGB would then screen the belongings and clothes of Soviet diplomats for traces of the tag, and anyone who came back positive would be suspected of traitorous contact with the CIA. Ivanov was now Putin’s defense minister, one of many former KGB officers running the country. In the CIA’s Russia team, there was deep skepticism that Moscow could ever be a true ally while these people were in charge.[26] But Tenet and the CIA’s leadership dismissed these concerns; all energies were to be redirected toward the so-called War on Terror, in which Russia was to be an important ally. Within a week, a delegation of senior CIA officials was bound for Moscow, (Page 332)

ited States. Despite the FBI’s reduced budget for work on Russia, a small team kept track of Andrei and Elena over the next few years, listening in to their conversations and sifting through the family trash. The FBI also bugged the Yonkers home of Mikhail Vasenkov and his Peruvian wife, Vicky Peláez, though they found the work of the longest-serving illegal in the United States distinctly unimpressive. In 2002, the bug picked up Vasenkov complaining that the SVR was not happy with the intelligence he was providing. In 2004, he officially retired, apparently preferring to live the remainder of his life in his cover identity rather than return to Russia. The only operation he carried out thereafter was to pick up cash from a handler once a year.[1] Poteyev also had some surprising news to share with the F (Page 333)

rtment while they were out. Inside a shoebox, they found floppy disks, a (Page 334)

character password. It did not take the FBI operatives long to put the puzzle together. The FBI cloned the computer’s hard drive and found a list of websites where the illegals uploaded encrypted messages hidden inside innocent-looking images. The bureau was now able to decrypt earlier messages to and from the Center and keep abreast of new ones. Electronic communications, as convenient as they were, were no match for old-school methods when it came to security. Still, leaving the disk out, with the password and instructions on how to enter it, was shockingly poor tradecraft. (Page 335)

x grew older, they became close. Tim’s babyish features, together with his brother’s serious demeanor, blurred the four-year age gap between them. Andrei and Elena disagreed sometimes on how best to raise the kids. Elena wanted to be a caring and supportive parent, aware that the children had precious little else by way of family support, while Andrei felt that letting them fend for themselves would aid their emotional development. But they rarely argued over household chores or other more mundane matters. “Maintaining a relationship is easy when people are not just a romantic couple but when they have a common task,” Elena later said. “People start having fights when they take insignificant things, dwell on them, and try to change the other person. We never did that.”[5] The internet made it much easier to kee (Page 336)

information he provided meant Operation Ghost Stories, as the FBI’s monitoring of the illegals was called, was constantly expanding. He told them about yet more arrivals: Michael Zotolli and Patricia Mills, whose real names were Mikhail Kutsik and Natalia Pereverzeva, came separately in 2001 and 2003, married in 2005, and settled in Seattle. Like Richard and Cynthia, their cover stories left a lot to be desired. Zotolli said he was born in Yonkers and had spent his childhood in Taiwan; Mills said she was Canadian. Both had obviously Slavic accents. Poteyev also alerted (Page 337)

rismatic redhead whose father had been the SVR’s legal resident in Zimbabwe. She had a well-calibrated mix of studied naïveté and suggestive sensuality that certain men found irresistible. In New York, she ran a real estate website aimed at helping rich Russians find property. She handed out business cards with “Explore Your Possibilities” written on them, and she flirted her way around Manhattan parties. She was a more natural networker than any of the fully trained illegals, and she made numerous contacts in the financial world that would have been of interest to the SVR. The fact that she was open about being Russian didn’t matter. In the 1980s, an influential American man meeting a beautiful woman recently arrived from Moscow would immediately suspect she was with the KGB. In the post–Cold War world, Anna was just another ambitious young woman in New York, having fun and trying to get rich quick. Every week, Anna sat in a c (Page 338)

carrying a Line N employee with his own laptop would drive slowly past. The two computers linked up over a private network—a clever way of transmitting information, and almost impossible for outsiders to detect. Luckily for the FBI, Poteyev was updating them on the SVR’s latest tricks. If not for him, real-name illegals like Anna could have caused huge damage to national security. (Page 338)

eign intelligence services were recruiting inside Russia to destabilize the country. In 2007, Patrushev claimed that over the previous four years, the agency had uncovered more than 270 active officers and 70 foreign agents operating in Russia.[8] This spy-mania may have been vastly exaggerated but it was not entirely invented. After all, Alexander Poteyev was still working undetected in the very heart of the SVR, passing secrets back to Washington. In 2006, the former GRU officer Sergei Skripal was sentenced to thirteen years in prison on charges of spying for MI6. The same year, Russian television broadcast a sensational story about a “fake rock” that MI6 had supposedly placed in a Moscow park. The FSB alleged that the rock concealed a small computer and transmitter, allowing Russian recruits to walk past it without drawing attention and transfer data to the rock, which could later be retrieved by MI6 handlers. At the time, many dismissed the rock story as propaganda. It turned out to be real.[9] Life for Alexander Poteyev was one lon (Page 339)

ys to discern U.S. thinking than it had possessed during the Soviet period. There were dozens of Russian diplomats, analysts, and academics who could have provided well-sourced information. Richard Murphy, meanwhile, was a stay-at-home dad and Cynthia was an MBA student and tax consultant. Andrei had much better contacts, but he was still unlikely to have access to meaningful insider information. But Putin, and the other former KGB hands among the country’s leadership, inherently respected information obtained through clandestine methods. When Putin received his daily briefings in the Kremlin, he was likely to pay more heed to the Murphys’ stabs in the dark, packaged in a top-secret red folder and sourced to deep-cover agents planted inside the United States, than to reports based on official conversations in Washington. (Page 342)

for years, at enormous cost to the FBI. Mostly, the illegals were not up to much that would trouble U.S. national security interests. But they were always one encounter away from causing significant harm. The FBI had noticed that Andrei was sniffing around people with sensitive jobs in the nuclear industry. Elena had recently got a job at a real estate start-up whose clients were frequently interesting people in the worlds of tech, business, and politics. Her new job provided her with an easy way to get inside their homes. Cynthia Murphy was managing the tax affairs for Alan Patricof, a Democratic fundraiser and friend of Hillary Clinton’s. When the signal came in 2010 that Poteyev wanted out, it seemed a good time to round them up. (Page 342)

forever. Do not turn the children against me.”[13] (Page 344)

faced in public, but when asked about the person who had betrayed the illegals, Putin could hardly conceal his rage. “How will he be able to look into the eyes of his children, the pig? Whatever he got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver he was given, he will choke on them. Believe me.”[16] Later, a military court in Moscow sentenced Poteyev to twenty-five years in prison in absentia, but that was just the formal punishment. A Russian news outlet published a quotation from an unnamed Kremlin source. “We know who he is and where he is…. And there’s no doubt that a Mercader has been (Page 346)

Trotsky more than seventy years before.[17] (Page 347)

than ever at home and angrier with the West than he had been at any time since he took office. In 2011, he had dashed the already faint hopes for a new, more liberal Russia under a second Medvedev term, when he announced his plan to return to the presidency. In response, a wave of protests erupted in Moscow and other major cities. The crowds were mostly made up of disaffected middle-class Russians who had traveled abroad and wanted to see changes at home. The folders of carefully sifted intelligence Putin received each day reinforced his belief that the Americans were fanning the flames of protest inside Russia. In his mind, Washington was once again the Main Enemy, determined to bring Moscow to its knees. “We are all grownups here. We all understand the organizers are acting according to a well-known scenario,” he said bitterly. The protests culminate (Page 350)

ressive at home and emboldened abroad. When, in 2014, a revolution in Kyiv deposed Russia’s preferred choice of Ukrainian president, Putin responded by annexing the Crimea peninsula. Partly, he was channeling a Russian imperialist mindset, believing Ukraine was not a real country and that large parts of it were historically Russian. But there was also something else at play. Putin was certain that Western appeals to freedom, human rights, and democracy were a cynical smoke screen for geopolitical power games. He believed the revolution in Kyiv was directed from Western capitals, which were readying Ukraine as a launching pad for an eventual assault on Russia. This fanciful thinking was shared by his spy chiefs and close advisers, most of whom had also been schooled in the paranoid logic of the KGB. If the West, and particularly the Americans, were utilizing all kinds of nefarious tools to interfere in Russia, thought Putin, there was no reason why he should not do the same in reverse. The hierarchies (Page 351)

mputer and turned on a VPN to hide their IP address. They signed in to various fake social media accounts. In one office, trolls worked in teams of three: the first would leave a complaint on a comment forum about a local problem; then the other two would chime in, referencing links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites to show that the authorities were aware of the problem and handling it. On forums with international news stories, the trolls posted memes extolling Putin and castigating Barack Obama. Other departments created full-fledged online characters. Each member of the team handling LiveJournal, a blogging platform still popular in Russia at the time, crafted several sophisticated online personas. “We had to write ‘ordinary posts,’ about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but every now and then (Page 352)

of the workers, who was paid around $800 a month for working full-time at the troll farm.[2] When Puti (Page 353)

English-language team. Initially, the new department focused on the comment forums of Western newspapers and other media outlets, churning out a diet of pro-Kremlin messaging. Every day, the workers received a sheet of “technical tasks” that outlined the main talking points. Usually, they involved praising Putin, calling out the hypocritical moralizing of Western leaders, and denouncing Ukrainian politicians as neo-Nazis. When leading English-language outlets wrote stories about Russia, the comment threads underneath the articles online would quickly fill up with dozens of contributions from readers with usernames like “OklahomaRay” or “ManUtdFan1982” who would claim, with dubious English syntax, to be ordinary Westerners who were disgusted with the United States and NATO and admirers of Putin. A large proportion of these posts could be traced back to the IRA. It was a crude operation, but Prigozhin soon devised a more sophisticated plan. Instead of trying to persuade Americans to respect Putin, the IRA’s trolls were to focus on exploiting the divides inside America, turning Americans against each other and fanning partisan divides as a bitter election campaign got under way. (Page 353)

ked with contacting real Americans to boost the Trump campaign. His Being Patriotic page was also run out of St. Petersburg, despite claiming to be a grassroots American initiative. The IRA had ma (Page 354)

and posts during and after the election, which were directly seen by 29 million (Page 354)

shares were counted.[4] It is impossible to (Page 355)

create virtual illegals, but it also made it easy to find them. The IRA’s actions initially went undetected, even as rumors swirled that Putin wanted Trump to win. But the factory was just one part of Putin’s 2016 election interference operation, which also involved hacking operations run by Russia’s intelligence agencies and numerous other initiatives. Some parts of this multipronged effort were brilliantly executed, while others were slapdash and clumsy. When the evidence of Russian meddling became too great to ignore, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate. By early 2018, his team had put together an indictment of the IRA, naming Prigozhin and twelve other individuals. (Page 355)

ried out assassinations, explosions, and arson attacks across Europe. The illegals from Unit 29155 did not use complicated foreign identities that took years to learn; instead, they posed as Russian tourists, or else used passports from former Soviet countries.[5] In 2014, two weapons contractors traveling on Moldovan and Tajikistani passports appeared in the Czech Republic, as part of a mission to blow up an arms depot the GRU believed was being used to funnel weapons to Ukraine. Four years later, the same two men resurfaced in Britain posing as holidaying Russian vitamin salesmen. They traveled to the cathedral city of Salisbury, where they attempted to poison the former GRU defector Sergei Skripal with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent. Skripal had arrived in Britain in 2010, after being released as part of the swap deal that saw Andrei, Elena, and the other illegals betrayed by Poteyev return to Russia. Later, a kill squad was sent to the United States to find Poteyev, but the FBI was able to move him to a new location before the assassins got to him.[6] The (Page 356)

ion technology; widespread corruption in the country had led to a flourishing black market in access to all kinds of personal data. The search provided a match: Maria Mayer was Anna Dultseva, born in the city of Gorky in 1981. Her husband, Ludwig, was Artem Dultsev, born the same year. Domesti (Page 368)