2025-08-13
51 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, my name's David Wolfe and I'm the editor of The Guardian Long Read.
Over the summer we'll be picking a few of our favourite pieces of the year so far and giving you a bit of background information about them.
This week I've chosen I'm Not Who You Think I Am,
How a Deep Cover KGB Spy Recruited His Own Son by Sean Walker.
So this piece is actually adapted with some additional reporting that Sean did this spring from Sean's excellent new book,
The Illegals, which is about Russia's deep cover spy program,
which began in the 20s and continues to this day.
Sean actually wrote a brilliant piece for us last year about a suspected Russian spy who had spent years posing as a Spanish journalist and who was recently involved in the prisoner swap to free the American journalist Evan Gerskovich.
But the story you're about to listen to goes back much further, to the height of the Cold War.
It's about a 16-year-old boy who had grown up in Canada in the US.
Then in 1974,
this boy's father sat him down and told him that both he and the boy's mother were KGB spies.
And then he asked his son whether he would like to become one too.
I think one of the really striking things about this piece, rereading it just now,
is the way this really dramatic high-stakes story has at its heart some almost comically normal,
relatable, mundane details.
So for one, there's the fact that the protagonist, Peter,
who's the teenager at the time, makes this huge decision to become a spy.
mainly because he wanted to connect to his emotionally distant father and to impress him.