Steve LeVine digs up good stuff on one of the original spies from Russia’s “illegals” program, Nikolai Khokhlov.  Maybe the spy ring of 11 underground Americans were simply awaiting their eventual orders, if they ever came.

Nikolai’s German was near-native, a skill tested when he posed as a Nazi soldier in Moscow’s wartime plot to assassinate SS officer Wilhelm Kube in Minsk. But in 1945, with World War II still not yet over, he was dispatched to Romania as an illegal. Because of his accent, and total absence of Romanian, Nikolai was to pose as a Polish émigré named Stanislaw Levandowski. As professional cover, Nikolai was provided cash to open a small electronic goods shop.