The Russian illegals program
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The Russian illegals programme is the practice John Kiriakou identifies as the principal difference between Russian and Western human-intelligence tradecraft: the recruitment of people, in some cases as children, who are trained, inserted into a target country under a manufactured ordinary life, and left there.

Children as recruits

Asked whether children are ever recruited as intelligence officers, Kiriakou's answer is that there most certainly is such a world, "not in the United States, not anywhere in Western Europe even or the Western world, but the Russians have long had a program where children are recruited as part of what are called the illegals program."

The defining feature is dormancy. "They just sit for years until their expertise is needed." He rates the television series The Americans as an accurate depiction, "100% true to life in following a family in the illegals program", including the point late in the series at which the children, then sixteen or seventeen, are finally activated. His summary of the asymmetry: "we wouldn't do it in the United States. At the same time, the Russians absolutely do."

The Arlington network

Kiriakou places one such network in his own neighbourhood. A group of illegals in Arlington, Virginia was broken up by the FBI, he says, about two years before he spoke; they were arrested, charged with espionage, and then traded for American spies, "kind of like the old Bridge of Spies idea from the Cold War."

The sleeper who would not go home

The case Kiriakou tells at length is of a former illegal he knows personally. The man was trained in East Germany and sent to the United States as a sleeper. He settled in Brooklyn and lived there for twenty years, doing what he was supposed to do, taking an ordinary job, speaking without any accent.

Then he fell in love. He married, and they had a daughter. In Kiriakou's telling, the man said that the first time he saw the baby he knew he could never go back. When the activation came, he did not respond to it.

The answer came on a subway car with few people on it. A man walked up, took the strap, leaned over him and said: "You know that if you don't go home, I'm going to have to kill you."

He did not continue to his destination. He rode to the FBI's New York field office and said: "I am a KGB sleeper. I've been activated, and I don't want to go home." He still lives in New York with his wife; his daughter is in her twenties. The Russians never tried to kill him.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Aldrich Ames
- Robert Hanssen
