Ion Mihai Pacepa writes on The American Spectator this week:

The recent arrest of ten Russian illegal officers targeted against us -- a superb performance on the part of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- proves that the Kremlin still looks upon the United States as the main enemy. Most of the details about these new cases are still classified by the FBI. One thing is clear, however; this is not just business as usual -- "we spy, they spy." The Kremlin's illegal officers have traditionally been dispatched to enemy countries to form an alternative presence there, should war break out and force the legal embassies to close; and to constitute a "homegrown" skeleton of the pro-Moscow governments that the Kremlin dreamed of setting up in those countries at the end of the war. In other words, vitally important assignments.

Today, most of the American media seem to find the notion of illegal officers a joke, calling them spy-novel fantasies, hilariously funny characters or do-nothing sleepers. No wonder. There are no books on the subject. The true nature of illegal operations, unique to the Russian intelligence community, has been an extremely tightly held secret. In 1964 I became a deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service, the DIE, but it was only eight years later that I realized now little I had actually known -- that was when my former KGB adviser, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, by then the Soviet Union's spy chief, gave me supervisory authority over Romania's illegal operations...Continue reading The Truth about Illegals >>