The Illegals Quotes

“that spy books and movies had taken hold of his imagination. “What amazed me most of all was how one person’s efforts could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people,” said Putin.[3]”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Stierlitz, the disciplined and ascetic patriot, was a popular figure of nostalgia during the chaos of the 1990s, and endless repeats of Seventeen Moments on Russian television kept him alive in the cultural imagination. In May 1999, a survey organized by the weekly magazine Kommersant-Vlast found that Stierlitz was Russia’s favorite hero.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Rudi thought creating a second-generation illegal would kill two birds with one stone: it would save his son from becoming an ordinary American capitalist and being ripped away from him in the process, and it would provide the KGB with a new and much more promising kind of operative.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Yet it was taken as a given that the human emotions around children should be a secondary concern.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“those in Putin’s inner circle had started to believe their own propaganda that Ukraine was being dragged unwillingly away from Russia by the West. They were shocked when an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians stood defiantly against Russia’s occupying forces. Like in 1941, when Stalin miscalculated before Hitler’s invasion, Putin had ignored a mountain of evidence because it did not fit his worldview.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Every now and then, illegals still managed to pull off something that justified their long years of training. Often, they worked as handlers for sources too sensitive to risk being seen with legal KGB officers, and flying illegals carried out missions that normal intelligence officers could never have managed. But the available evidence suggests that, for all the ambition, the program routinely failed to deliver. For every illegal who achieved something useful for Moscow, there were a dozen living frustrated lives that bore little espionage fruit. —”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“During the Cold War, illegals were often useful, but mainly because the Soviet Union was a closed state that did not allow its citizens to travel. Creating fake foreigners who could visit the West without raising suspicion was the only way for the KGB to access relatively basic information about its adversaries.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Schools focused on patriotic tuition, and it became a criminal offense to suggest similarities between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Putin’s core mission, ever since he took office, had been to restore in Russians a sense of pride about their country’s history and a feeling that they were part of a great nation.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“the West was out to weaken Russia, just as it always had been. The Cold War had little to do with capitalism versus Communism, Putin now claimed. It was just one of the many iterations of the West’s centuries-long quest to destroy Russia, which continued today with NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and hostile rhetoric about democratic backsliding in Russia.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“It is impossible to know how many of those 126 million might have been swing voters. But the fact that a Russian influence operation could stealthily reach millions of Americans, and secretly arrange protests on domestic issues without any outward sign of Russian participation, was remarkable.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Facebook estimated that 120 fake Russia-backed pages wrote eighty thousand posts during and after the election, which were directly seen by 29 million Americans and reached as many as 126 million people when reposts and shares were counted.[”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Measuring the real-world impact of these troll-illegals is difficult. Did they change anyone’s mind, or alter the outcome of the election?”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“By the end of August, these virtual illegals had contacted more than a hundred real Americans and organized dozens of rallies, usually by appointing a real person to help with coordinating an event on the ground. Then the organizer would make an excuse for why they could not attend the event on the day.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Why did the KGB stick so doggedly to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort it demanded? Partly, the institutional memory of the successes during the early Soviet period and the roots in the Bolshevik underground kept the organization wedded to illegal work as a key part of its internal mythology.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Yet as the 1970s went on, instead of scaling down the illegals program, Directorate S continued to expand it.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Directorate S had come to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine. Its convoluted, sprawling networks supported operatives in the field whose espionage returns were increasingly limited. The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that the use of illegals, such a brilliant solution to the Soviet Union’s intelligence-gathering requirements in the 1920s and 1930s, no longer made much sense.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“By the late 1960s, few people in the West were willing to risk everything to spy for the Soviet Union out of ideological conviction.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“This lack of compassion was characteristic of the KGB, where little attention was paid to the human cost of illegal operations.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“The candidate should be reasonably good-looking, but not attractive enough to stand out in a crowd. They should be ideologically reliable, analytically brilliant, and show potential for living a life of deception without being tortured by pangs of conscience.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“To mitigate loneliness and prevent dangerous affairs, the Center decided to train female illegals for the first time. From now on, illegals would be paired up and sent abroad as couples, to provide companionship and to keep a watchful eye on each other.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Nevertheless, the KGB gave no serious consideration to abandoning the illegals program. With an unpredictable Cold War under way that could turn hot at any moment, having operatives who could remain behind enemy lines should diplomatic relations be cut off was more important than ever. The Center decided the challenges would be surmountable if enough resources”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Many of the illegals posted to the West after the war crumbled under the pressure. They took to drink, had ruinous affairs, and in the cases of Brik and Hayhanen turned themselves in to the enemy.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Added to these operational pressures was the burgeoning evidence that the solitude and psychological contortions inherent in illegal life were too much for most people to take.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“In fact, far from producing a conveyer belt of perfectly trained faux Westerners, the KGB’s illegals program was in crisis by the early 1960s.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Everything Hutton wrote about Gaczyna was nonsense. There was nothing even approximating such a facility in the Soviet Union.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“In 1961, the same year as Molody’s trial, a book named School for Spies by J. Bernard Hutton promised Western readers an insight into the stunning ambition of the Soviet illegals program.”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“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]”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

“Later, he traveled the length of the U.S.-Canada border, looking for the best places to make clandestine crossings.[29] Other illegals left hidden caches of weapons and explosives outside European cities.[30]”
― Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West