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.”[1]
The defining feature is dormancy. “They just sit for years until their expertise is needed.”[2] 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.”[2]
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.”[1]
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.[3]
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.[3]
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.”[4]
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.[5]