The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
In 2018, US viewers of the TV show The Americans were treated to the final agonizing decisions of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, KGB illegals operating with relative dramatic impunity in the United States at the end of the Cold War. The fraught series finale saw
the Jennings’ children left behind in the United States while their parents fled back to Russia to avoid arrest for espionage by the FBI. For daughter Paige, the communist cause so deeply felt by her mother, was seemingly passed down to the child who voluntarily remained in the enemy territory of the United States to carry on her parents’
work. The emotional turmoil of these moments demonstrated, albeit fictionally, the quite real and immense psychological pressures faced by these highly trained Soviet illegals.