Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America’s most prestigious universities and think tanks.
But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life.
Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by the secret Russian intelligence agency, the notorious KGB. Don, her seemingly pleasant husband, was actually Andrei Bezrukov, also a KGB agent.
In June 2010, the couple, both illegals in the US, was arrested by the FBI.
In New York City, meanwhile, Anna Chapman also worked in real estate, but lived a far different lifestyle than Ann Foley. Voluptuous and flame-haired, Chapman had a reputation for flirting with her potential property clients — the Big Apple’s men of power and wealth.
But the two women, Foley and Chapman, did have one commonality.
Chapman, too, was a secret Russian agent here to spy on America.
In 2010, she was arrested with nine other Russian spies, with authorities breaking up one of the largest intelligence networks in the US since the end of the Cold War.
It took decades for the FBI to unravel Russia’s most secret spy program. Now author Shaun Walker, in “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West” (Knopf), has written a riveting and revelatory history of the Soviet Union’s spy program that asks the reader — do you really know who your neighbors are?
Hellbound and Down 