The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – gripping true stories of spies who lived deep undercover

An eye-opening account of the old Soviet tactic of embedding secret agents where you’d least expect them

One of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The& Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By& day they seemed to be& a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors& and assassinated enemies.

That story was based in part on the& real-life pair of “illegals” – as spies living under deep cover in civil society& are called – Elena Vavilova and& Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren’t so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage.