The KGB lives on and Russian spies are still in America

 

Russian sleeper agents are real and still hiding in the U.S.

They never really left. That’s the part nobody talks about enough. The KGB didn’t vanish with the fall of the Soviet Union—it morphed, rebranded, and slid back into the shadows. Today, it lives on in the Russian FSB and GRU, the modern successors of the old-school Soviet intelligence apparatus. And if you think the Cold War ended, you’ve only been paying attention to the headlines, not what’s unfolding quietly beneath the surface.

     Vladimir Putin didn’t rise from nowhere. He’s not just Russia’s president—he’s a former KGB officer who saw firsthand how Soviet intelligence operated, and he’s been using that same playbook to steer Russia’s foreign policy ever since. The strategy? Infiltration, subversion, deception. And it hasn’t stopped. It's evolved.

     Inside the U.S., the intelligence community keeps sounding the alarm. The Russian intelligence footprint, one official warned recently, is “still way too big.” And here’s what that means in plain English: Russian spies are still embedded here. Active. Watching. Waiting. Operating behind false identities.   Some of them could be your neighbors. Sound like fiction? It's not. Just ask the FBI agents who uncovered a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010. The spies had lived among us for decades. Their real names? Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. But here, they were Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley—just another suburban couple with kids, a mortgage, and a carefully crafted lie.

     And those two weren’t anomalies—they were a reality check.

     That spy ring shook people awake—for about five minutes. But then the story faded. What didn’t fade was the core question it raised: if we caught them, how many others are still out there? That question lingers, more relevant now than ever. Because sleeper agents didn’t go extinct with the Cold War. They just went quiet.

     Today’s FSB and GRU are not relics—they’re upgraded models. And they’re still using the same KGB doctrines: seduction, surveillance, blackmail, and biological warfare. Yes, biological. Department Twelve, a branch once buried deep within the KGB, specialized in this. It’s real. The honey traps, too. Soviet-era “swallows” and “ravens”—female and male agents trained to seduce and compromise targets—still serve as templates for Russia’s current-day sexpionage operations.

     It’s all there. Hidden in plain sight.

     The spy thriller SHADOW WAR taps into this unsettling truth. In it, CIA spymaster Corey Pearson uncovers a sprawling network of Russian sleeper cells embedded across America. These aren’t just ghost stories—these are reflections of real-world tactics. Corey’s mission is sanctioned at the highest level, because the threat isn’t hypothetical. It’s present. Active. Dangerous. And disturbingly familiar.

     Russia’s modern spies still operate under the same cold logic: destabilize from within. Use lies as weapons. Seed chaos. And in the U.S., they’re not just after secrets—they’re after influence. Infrastructure. Trust. The very fabric of the country.

    Want numbers? It’s estimated that around 100,000 foreign agents are currently operating inside the United States, working for up to 80 different countries. Russia’s chunk of that number isn’t small. And unlike the others, their operatives are trained with a very specific, deeply ingrained ideology—one forged in Soviet steel. They don't just collect intel. They embed. They blend. They wait.

     Bezrukov and Vavilova spent over 20 years on U.S. soil. Imagine what they learned. Who they met. What they were preparing for. Now multiply that by the unknown. Because those two were exposed. But others? Still buried, living quietly, waiting for a signal.

     Back in SHADOW WAR, Corey and his elite team stumble across something far worse than anyone expected—what looked like isolated cases were part of a masterfully orchestrated grid. Invisible killers. Sabotage teams. Carefully positioned agents poised to strike when the order comes. It's fiction that cuts too close to fact.

     This is the reality we live in. Russian spies are still here. The KGB never died. It just changed its name. And the war it’s waging isn’t one of tanks and bombs—it’s one of whispers, silence, and the long con. The enemy has been training for decades. We just stopped watching.

     Maybe it’s time we started again.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). He also writes the Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster Series, which blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.