During the final years before the arrests, when the couple were living in Boston, Vavilova worked as a estate agent, while sending regular coded messages back to controllers in Moscow. The ideal illegal, she says, is someone who is average looking, does not attract attention and does not require external approval. During her life in the west she claimed to be of French Canadian origin to explain the accent. Vavilova speaks perfect English, though with a noticeable Slavic accent. In real life, Bezrukov and Vavilova married in the Soviet Union before departing, but they left for the west separately in the late 1980s, staged a meeting in Canada, began “dating” and then married for a second time, this time using their new, Canadian identities.
The training includes long hours of language lessons to mimic native accents evading surveillance, coding and other espionage tradecraft and a period of living in a country house outside Moscow mocked up to mimic an US home, to help the young Siberians who had never travelled before learn about western life. Its characters, just like Vavilova and Bezrukov, are a couple who meet at Tomsk University in Siberia in the 1980s, are recruited by the KGB into the top-secret programme and spend years in training before they are dispatched to Canada and the US.
The book provides rare insight into the illegals programme, which was set up by the Soviet Union but continued in modern Russia. Vavilova has written a fictionalised account of her spying career, called The Woman Who Can Keep Secrets, and agreed to meet the Guardian at a cafe in central Moscow, the first time any of the deep-cover illegals has spoken to non-Russian media since their return to the country. They were deported to Russia in a spy swap that included media favourite Anna Chapman and also involved four Russians accused of spying for the west travelling in the other direction, including Sergei Skripal, who was infamously poisoned in Salisbury last year. Vavilova and Bezrukov were arrested at their Boston home in 2010, part of a group of 10 Russian spies detained by the FBI, most of them illegals living in the US as ordinary Americans or Canadians.
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