Illegals are intelligence officers operating abroad under false identities and nationalities, without the protection of diplomatic immunity. Posing as ordinary citizens of other countries, these officers maintain fake identities, spending years building normal lives while spying. In front of other spies, these officers have no diplomatic protection: if they are discovered, they go to prison.
Soviet intelligence maintained an extensive program of illegal agents, with very high activity. Although probably reduced, these programs and activities have continued into the Russian era. KGB’s First Chief Directorate was responsible for foreign intelligence. Inside this Chief Directorate, Directorate S oversaw illegals, among other responsibilities such as physical sabotage. Illegals were the elite inner core of the KGB, and they even retained a curious mystique within the Service. The former KGB First Chief Directorate is now the SVR, in charge of Russian external intelligence, and it still maintains illegals around the world. In fact, the most famous illegals of this century belonged to the SVR, and they were unveiled in the so—called “Illegals Program”. In June 2010, ten Russian nationals posing as US citizens were arrested by the FBI. They had ordinary lives as a masquerade to get access to valuable intelligence, penetrating US academia, industry and politics. The operation, including the fake and real identities of the spies, was so notorious that they inspired “The Americans” TV series, and even different books about this story were written. Perhaps, the most famous one is “The woman who can keep secrets”, written by Elena VAVILOVA as a semi-autobiography. Together with her husband, VAVILOVA was one of the ten Russian illegals arrested by the FBI, with the fake identity of Tracey Lee Ann Foley.
Most Soviet illegals belonged to the KGB, and most Russian illegals belong to the SVR. It seems clear that the GRU has not exploited long–term illegals as an operating technique as much as the KGB or the SVR. For this reason, most references related to Soviet or Russian illegals focus on the work of the KGB and the SVR. Even Shaun Walker’s “The illegals”, one of the main recent references, only refers to the GRU few times. However, the GRU has maintained its own illegals program for more than 100 years.
During WWII the GRU deployed illegals in all geographic areas relevant to the conflict. The best known, and the most successful GRU illegal ever, was Richard SORGE, operating in Japan. SORGE has been defined as “the greatest spy of the century”. Ian Fleming stated that SORGE was “the man whom I regard as the most formidable spy in history” and John Le Carré called him “the spy to end spies”. Before and during WWII, SORGE penetrated the German embassy and the Nazi inner circle in Tokyo, thus providing STALIN with valuable intelligence about the Nazi movements targeting the Soviet Union. This operation, known as the “Tokyo Spy Ring”, was the most written-about GRU operation in the past century.
Also in WWII time, the Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle) was established as a spy network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Although the Red Orchestra was a GRU operative, it was formed by a heterogeneous collection of people with a common denominator: the hatred of Nazism. The Red Orchestra managed clandestine cells for organizing agents, and the network, or at least part of it, was headed by the GRU officer Leopold TREPPER. TREPPER was an illegal himself, and different members of the network were also GRU illegals. Using modern technologies (in WWII time), mostly advanced radios, the Red Orchestra was able to deliver high-quality intelligence to the Soviet military. In fact, it was the use of these radios what lead to the detection and neutralization of the network.
In addition to Japan and Europe, the GRU also operated illegals in the US during WWII. This is the case of George KOVAL, who infiltrated the US Manhattan Project, providing the Soviet intelligence with critical information for the development of nuclear weapons. KOVAL passed away in 2006, and in November 2007, Vladimir PUTIN posthumously awarded him with the Hero of the Russian Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In the associated press release, PUTIN noted that KOVAL “provided information that helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own”.
After WWII, little information related to the GRU illegals activities in the Cold War period can be found on open sources. Perhaps, in this period the GRU switched to other operating techniques, abandoning long-term illegals as a core method and leaving that mission mostly to the KGB. Or, simply, the GRU illegals worked so well that nobody even noticed their legends. However, the GRU degressive illegal activity trend seemed to change in PUTIN’s Russia. In 2018, Olga KOLOBOVA, alias Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, travelled from Italy to Moscow with a Russian passport and evaporated. KOLOBOVA was allegedly a GRU illegal with posing as Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, a Peru-born socialite who acted a successful jewelry designer for years. She was trying to approach the NATO offices in Naples.
Recently, global arrests of GRU illegals (also of SVR ones) after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine came to public light. One of them was the case of Pavel RUBTSOV, well known in Spain. With him, another GRU illegal, Mikhail MIKUSHIN, was exchanged during the US-Russia prisoner exchange on August 1, 2024. MIKUSHIN posed as a Brazilian academic at a Norwegian university and was detained in October 2022 by Norwegian authorities as he was considered “a threat to fundamental national interests”.
Also in 2022, Sergey CHERKASOV was detained in Holland while trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court in The Hague. CHERKASOV was a GRU illegal operating under a fake Brazilian identity, Victor Muller Ferreira. As Dutch authorities prevented CHERKASOV from entering the country, he was returned to Brazil, where he was arrested. At least Sergey CHERKASOV and Olga KOLOBOVA were identified by an OPSEC failure in the GRU tradecraft. After the identification of the two GRU operatives involved in the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia SKRIPAL in Salisbury, Anatoly CHEPIGA and Alexander MISHKIN, investigative journalists found that the GRU had furnished their spies with consecutively numbered passports. Both the passports of CHERKASOV and KOLOBOVA were close to those of CHEPIGA and MISHKIN.
Soviet intelligence relied extensively on illegals. Although technology has made clandestine human intelligence operations increasingly risky, Russian interest on illegals is almost certainly still alive. However, the exploitation of illegals is a long-term working plan with unclear benefits, and almost certainly nowadays Russia needs to defeat most of its enemies more quickly. For this reason, perhaps the maintenance of Russian illegals program is today closer to an emotional reason than to a practical one. In any case, it seems clear that nowadays the GRU still maintains its illegals program, active since its foundation more than one century ago.
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