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The Illegals: Double Lives of the Cold War's Most Secret Agents
A post-Cold War spy book.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 1, 2024
For those of us who know not much of the KGB's intent on filling Western countries with illegals, the author puts a little meat on the bone.
I found this hard going - not an easy read - at times it I felt as if I was reading police records rather than an account of how the game was being played.
I found this hard going - not an easy read - at times it I felt as if I was reading police records rather than an account of how the game was being played.
March 14, 2022
'Establish yourself unobtrusively in your host community and await the call. It may be some years, but you may be sure the call will come.' The illegal agent has been something of a Russian speciality, and the FBI's Operation Ghost Stories showed that it still is as it came to fruition in 2010. The agent working under deep cover with genuine-yet-false papers and a carefully-cultivated 'legend' is virtually undetectable, and uncovered traditionally by defectors rather than by investigation.
This study was published in 1993, so obviously things will have changed somewhat over the last thirty years (almost). But still it provides a very valuable insight into the development of the concept of the illegal agent. West begins in the inter-War period and takes us through to the end of the Cold War, and indeed assesses the post-Cold War situation. As he does he charts the development of the approach to the cultivation and deployment of the illegal.
This is a concentrated book, packed densely with stories. If you're expecting in-depth analyses of character and exciting plotlines, you're approaching the book wrongly and will be disappointed. West is an intelligence expert, and this is a thorough review of the subject. So the study's focus is how Soviet intelligence learned new ways of making use of illegals.
Beginning by making use of the Soviet diplomatic network and seeking to recruit from local Communist groups, the KGB and GRU learned the benefits of placing deep-cover agents who had no visible connection with political activity. Provided with false life stories, or 'legends', and genuine papers based on false identities - often those of dead children - these agents would be acclimatised to their new lives before being deployed.
Another interesting thing I took from this study is the amount of defections. Dissatisfaction and disillusion were obvious reasons to defect, and of course blackmail was brought to bear. But then there were those who defected because they'd made a mistake and feared interrogation and punishment if taken back to Moscow. There were the walk-ins, and the agents who were 'turned' after having been betrayed to the West by fellow agents, and indeed handlers.
The delicate handling of arrests in order not to compromise double agents working inside Soviet intelligence is a reminder of how fragile operations could be. Those agents betrayed to the FBI by Polyakov for instance couldn't be picked up until it could be made to look like they'd come to notice in other ways. Similarly the Portland spy ring couldn't be arrested until it was certain that Goleniewski had defected.
Given the layers of cover adopted by these agents this is a remarkable work, gathering so much material together and presenting a bewildering array of activities. Be prepared to make use of the index, and also ensure you set aside time to read it. It's not something you can take in small chunks on the bus, unless your powers of concentration and recall are very well developed. But if you want to understand how a vital espionage method has developed and how successfully it has been deployed, this is for you.
This study was published in 1993, so obviously things will have changed somewhat over the last thirty years (almost). But still it provides a very valuable insight into the development of the concept of the illegal agent. West begins in the inter-War period and takes us through to the end of the Cold War, and indeed assesses the post-Cold War situation. As he does he charts the development of the approach to the cultivation and deployment of the illegal.
This is a concentrated book, packed densely with stories. If you're expecting in-depth analyses of character and exciting plotlines, you're approaching the book wrongly and will be disappointed. West is an intelligence expert, and this is a thorough review of the subject. So the study's focus is how Soviet intelligence learned new ways of making use of illegals.
Beginning by making use of the Soviet diplomatic network and seeking to recruit from local Communist groups, the KGB and GRU learned the benefits of placing deep-cover agents who had no visible connection with political activity. Provided with false life stories, or 'legends', and genuine papers based on false identities - often those of dead children - these agents would be acclimatised to their new lives before being deployed.
Another interesting thing I took from this study is the amount of defections. Dissatisfaction and disillusion were obvious reasons to defect, and of course blackmail was brought to bear. But then there were those who defected because they'd made a mistake and feared interrogation and punishment if taken back to Moscow. There were the walk-ins, and the agents who were 'turned' after having been betrayed to the West by fellow agents, and indeed handlers.
The delicate handling of arrests in order not to compromise double agents working inside Soviet intelligence is a reminder of how fragile operations could be. Those agents betrayed to the FBI by Polyakov for instance couldn't be picked up until it could be made to look like they'd come to notice in other ways. Similarly the Portland spy ring couldn't be arrested until it was certain that Goleniewski had defected.
Given the layers of cover adopted by these agents this is a remarkable work, gathering so much material together and presenting a bewildering array of activities. Be prepared to make use of the index, and also ensure you set aside time to read it. It's not something you can take in small chunks on the bus, unless your powers of concentration and recall are very well developed. But if you want to understand how a vital espionage method has developed and how successfully it has been deployed, this is for you.
November 20, 2020
Page after page of run-on sentences did nothing to enlighten me about the double lives of the cold war’s most secret agents, as the book jacket suggests. The book reads like an endless collection of uninteresting police surveillance reports. The writing was as dry as a soda cracker, although I suspect that is an insult to soda crackers as I am sure reading the cracker packaging would have been more fun than slogging through this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews