Spies who stayed out in the cold

Amid a welter of spy stories, two new books highlight the toll on agents playing the long game between East and West.

- BY PETER GRACE

If it’s a good time to be a spy, and by all accounts it seems to be, then it may be an even better time to be writing spy books. In nonfiction alone, recent titles abound. Kevin Riehle’s Soviet Defectors from 2020 looked at Moscow’s’ evolving perception of security threats from 1924-54, and its publisher, Edinburgh University Press, this year released Luca Trenta’s assassination book, The President's Kill List. Late last year, Georgetown University Press put out Emrah Gürkan's Spies for the Sultan, on Ottoman intelligence during its 16th-century rivalry with Spain, and Richard J Aldrich and Rory Cormac’s Crown, Cloak and Dagger, and will very soon release my own The Intelligence Intellectuals, about social scientists and the making of the CIA. British historian Helen Fry has a bookshelf to herself with The Walls Have Ears, The London Cage, MI9 and her most recent, Women in Intelligence (Yale University Press).

Now come two somewhat complementary books: Shaun Walker's The Illegals and Douglas Waller's The Determined Spy. They are complementary because they show how “illegal” operations were employed by both sides and, perhaps more interestingly, because they illustrate the often tragic human cost of spying.

British foreign correspondent Walker spent 10 years reporting from Moscow. He became interested in the Soviet illegals when he read of Elena Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov, who as Tracey Foley and Don Heathfield led pretend lives in Massachusetts from 1987-2010. When finally exposed, they were returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange, taking their two teenagers with them. Their sons learnt the truth only when the plane touched down in Moscow and Vladimir Putin greeted the family as heroes.