‘The Illegals’ by Shaun Waker review
Review The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker sheds light on the Soviet Union’s undercover intelligence gathering. James Rodgers | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 6 June 2025 ‘If this is freedom, then what is prison?’, Soviet propaganda poster by Viktor Koretsky, 1968. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. Public Domain. I n the summer of 1992 a senior British army officer was given the chance to visit Russia and Kyrgyzstan. His trip would have been unthinkable for most of the century then approaching its end. Now he saw up close the soldiers that until recently his forces had been ranged against on opposite sides of the Cold War. He wrote to another senior officer that it was ‘a mystery we believed the USSR to be a superpower’. Reading some of the stories in The Illegals , you experience a similar surprise. Agents are sent abroad to live undercover and further the cau...