Článek
Vladimir Putin has celebrated them on several occasions as the greatest spies, as something uniquely Russian that nobody else has. But there are also severe psychological costs to being an „illegal“, as these deep undercover sleeper agents planted in the West are known, and these are not meant to be publicly discussed in Russia.
Few people are more knowledgeable on this matter than Shaun Walker, The Guardian's correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe who has spent years reporting from and on Russia. He has a new book out, called „The Illegals: Russia’ s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West“, and he shared some of his findings with the 5:59 podcast.
Listen to the full interview with Shaun Walker in English:
Rozhovor ve verzi s českým dabingem si můžete poslechnout zde.
He first came across the illegals in 2010 when a spy exchange between Russia and the US took place which involved some of the sleeper agents. Six years later he got to interview a son of a Russian couple who had no idea his parents were not ordinary Canadian Americans until the FBI agents knocked on the door of their house in Boston. From the moment Walker heard this story, it became something of a personal obsession for him, he confessed.
„I just tried to find out as much as I could about this, tried to track down as many former illegals as I could, tried to look into the archives that are available. And it sort of spiraled into this giant project that's took me nearly a decade,“ the seasoned reporter intimated.
Shaun Walker, reporter and author of a new book The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West.
„On the one hand, it's a collection of really amazing personal stories and these extraordinary transformations and the psychological effects that they had. And on the other hand, it - I hope - functions a bit like a shadow history of Russia, because this project originated actually in the Bolshevik underground before the Russian revolution (in October 1917). And at every stage of the way over the next one hundred years, it felt to me like it told us something interesting about Russia and its relations with the rest of the world,“ says Shaun Walker of his new book.
How open were the former illegals about their own experiences when approached by Shaun Walker? What did the journalist find out about the role the Soviet illegals, usually operating in the West, and not in the former eastern bloc, played in Prague in 1968 and 1969? Find out by listening to the full 5:59 podcast in the audio player above.
Sound design: David Kaiser
Hudba: Martin Hůla
Podcast 5:59
Zpravodajský podcast Seznam Zpráv. Jedno zásadní téma každý všední den za minutu šest. To nejdůležitější dění v Česku, ve světě, politice, ekonomice, sportu i kultuře optikou Seznam Zpráv.
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