The man who arrived in Ireland in the mid-1960s as Austrian citizen Karl-Bernd Motl seemed to take quickly to Dublin life, renting a room in Howth Road, setting up as a travelling salesman, playing chess at a local club and starting classes in Irish.
But Motl was in fact Yuri Linov, a Soviet spy trained by the KGB to speak and behave like someone from the capitalist West before being deployed there under a false identity to help the Kremlin undermine it from within.
As Guardian correspondent Shaun Walker recounts in The Illegals – an authoritative history of Moscow’s continuing deep-cover spy programme that is published this week – Linov’s first mission was to Vienna in 1964, but when “Motl” was called up for Austrian national service a year later he was ordered to move to Ireland.
Linov was told to seek out useful contacts in Dublin, particularly Americans, in what would be preparation for probable deployment to the United States. He was also waiting to be joined by his wife Tamara, who was still being trained as an illegal in the Soviet Union and had recently given birth to their first daughter.
Keen to avoid suspicion, Linov registered with the Austrian embassy and the Garda and set about finding work. After briefly trying his hand as a trainee butcher, the enterprising “Bernie Motl” became a travelling salesman.
As cover for travel around the island and as an excuse to strike up conversations that might prove fruitful, he took to the road selling bath mats and Japanese-made magnifying screens that enlarged the image on the small television sets of the day.
“Usually, spies have to find ways to coax important information from reluctant targets, but in Ireland, Yuri had the opposite problem,” Walker writes. “Most people he met were happy to regale him with their life story, sometimes for hours on end. But none of the information seemed likely to be of much use to the KGB.”
After a trip to Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, Linov reported to Moscow on tensions in Northern Ireland and offered to cultivate contacts there that could be used in operations against Britain.
But the KGB told him not to go back there and ordered him to cut contact with Irish nationalists he had met at a Dublin boxing gym – staying off London’s radar was essential to protect prospects for a future mission in the United States.
With espionage opportunities limited, Linov spent time at the Dublin Chess Club, where it was easy to talk at length to local people. One of them, John Gibson, remembered “Bernie Motl” as a “personable fellow and an exciting chess player”. After games the Russian would go to the pub, while under strict orders not to become involved with any Irish women.
Linov was transferred to Brussels, Belgium, in 1967 and then Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion to crush the Prague Spring. His life as an illegal ended with arrest in Israel in 1973 and his return to the Soviet Union following a prisoner exchange in Berlin.
Linov and his wife moved back to his hometown in provincial Russia, where he taught English and German, but he enjoyed none of the perks or praise now lavished upon some former illegals by the regime of one-time KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
“Few people in Kalach knew much about Yuri’s past,” Walker writes, “and when they saw the elderly local man yammering away in fluent German, or asking a surly waitress in a fly-ridden canteen for the bill by chirping ‘What’s the damage?’ in Dublin-lilted English, they gave the kind of indulgent half-smile usually offered to senile eccentrics.”
