The spy next door: Moscow's century-long plot to infiltrate the west

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In 2010, the world was stunned when the United States exposed a covert Russian spy network operating on its own soil. Seemingly all American families living in white picket-fenced suburbia were in fact deep cover Russian agents. Many had been living under assumed identities for decades, lying even to their own children. In this episode, journalist Sean Walker speaks to Danny Bird about Moscow's long-standing illegals program.

He reveals how the roots of this operation reached back more than a century to before the Bolshevik Revolution, how the Soviet Union deployed it against supposedly friendly states, and how today's Russia reveres these spies as national heroes. Sean, to kick us off, Could you briefly explain what exactly an illegal refers to in this context? Illegals in the most basic sense, what the Russians call their spies who don't operate under diplomatic cover. So the most basic form of a spy is that they're sent out, they work from the embassy, and they pose as an ordinary diplomat while actually doing espionage work.

Many agencies use spies with deeper cover. They might be posing as business people or consultants. But uh what the Russians do, which is quite unique with their illegals, is that they actually spend years training them to impersonate foreigners so that they then go abroad without any obvious connection to Russia at all. And can you give us a brief sketch of how long that program takes in terms of training up somebody to be in illegal? From the sort of later Soviet period and and up to now, it's probably, I would say, the the most intensive and comprehensive training period that there is in any espionage program.

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