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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