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Profile Books has acquired The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by the Guardian’s foreign correspondent Shaun Walker.
Profile’s editorial director Nick Humphrey acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights from Matthew Marland at Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency, on behalf of Adam Eaglin at The Cheney Agency. The book will be published in April 2025, and Quynh Do at Knopf will publish in the US.
"Last week saw the biggest Russia-US prisoner swap since the Cold War," the synopsis says. "Alongside the criminals and assassins returning to Russia were also some of Putin’s spies, including a couple who had been living as Argentinians in Slovenia and whose children didn’t even know they were Russian until just before Vladimir Putin greeted them at the airport. They are known as ‘illegals’, part of Russia’s long-running deep cover spy network."
The synopsis adds: "Shaun Walker’s The Illegals captures the untold story of Russia’s most prized espionage programme, following its evolution from the talented ‘great illegals’ of the 1920s and 1930s up to the twenty-first century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties even after the fall of the Soviet Union."
Humphrey said: "We’re thrilled to be publishing Shaun Walker’s rich and masterful history of twentieth and twenty-first-century Russia, told through stories of deep cover espionage. As the Russian use of such spy-fare continues in a darkening geopolitical context, this story has never been more relevant; The Illegals promises to be a major publication in 2025."
Walker added: "I’ve been fascinated with the illegals since first writing about them nearly a decade ago. The initial draw for me was trying to understand the psychological contortions required to live in a foreign skin for decades, and the mess that this causes for illegals and their families. I also realised that as well as the spy drama, the history of the illegals programme told a bigger story about Russia. It’s such a uniquely Russian form of espionage, and a fascinating lens through which to look at the last century of Soviet and Russian history."