MM Suarez’s Reviews > The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West > Status Update

"Ivanov had used one of these dinners to spray his American opposite number with an odorless, colorless dust marked with a special chemical tag. The KGB would then screen the belongings and clothes of Soviet diplomats for traces of the tag, and anyone who came back positive would be suspected of traitorous contact with the CIA."😖

"Why did the KGB stick so doggedly to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort it demanded? Partly, the institutional memory of the successes during the early Soviet period and the roots in the Bolshevik underground kept the organization wedded to illegal work as a key part of its internal mythology."

"Iosif grimaced at the strict rules of the new KGB. “We used to be romantics…. Now you’re all such pragmatists,” he said wistfully."

"It was a curious feature of the purges that for all their grotesque lawlessness there was an obsession with formal paper trails to retain the appearance of due process."