When FBI raid the home of the Canadian couple Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley and their two teenage boys on 27 June 2010, an almost unbelievable secret was revealed to the public and the couple's boys – the parents were working as Russian spies.

Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Union, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet programme of deep-cover secret agents, known in Russia as the "illegals". After a slow-burning career building up an ordinary North American background, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.