Was FX's The Americans Based On A True Story?

The Americans TV show was steeped in Cold War-era history, leading audiences to wonder if it was based on a true historical story about real people.

Summary

• The Americans was inspired by a real-life couple, Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who were deep-cover Russian spies working in the United States.
• The real-life spies, along with eight others, were arrested in 2010 as part of Operation Ghost Stories, a spy ring known as the Illegals Program.
• After a prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia, the spies returned to Moscow and were awarded for their actions, similar to what happened in the show.

FX's award-winning series The Americans was steeped in the historical era of the Cold War, begging the question of if it was based on a true story. Premiering in 2013, The Americans followed Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), a seemingly normal couple living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. However, their normal American facade hid the reality that they were secretly KGB agents working for Russia in deep cover, spying on their adopted home and sending information back to the motherland.

The Americans was gripping and tense, and acclaimed for the six seasons that it ran. As the Jennings tried to balance the normal half of their lives as parents and upstanding neighbors with being spies for the Soviet Union, they played a dangerous and delicate balancing act to keep their identities intact. The story is an incredible one, and the most incredible thing of all is that there is strong historical basis for The Americans' premise.

The Americans Was Partly Inspired By Real-Life Events

The Americans' Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings weren't actually real people. However, they were inspired by a number of people who really exist, one couple in particular: Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who later took on the identities of Canadian couple Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Howard Heathfield. Elena and Andrey were both born in Russia and later met while attending college at Tomsk State University. After college, they moved to Moscow, where they joined the ranks of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and began their spy training.

On the surface, "Tracey" and "Donald" could not have seemed more normal. Donald studied in Canada and then in Paris, earning his master's degree in international business. For her part, Tracey worked as a real estate agent, becoming one of the most successful and hard-working agents in her company. The pair even had two children while living in Canada in the early '90s, Timothy and Alexander. After living in Canada for 20 years, the married couple moved to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1999. The entire time, however, they were acting as foreign spies in the countries into which they were embedded, sending information back to their handlers and contacts in Moscow.

What Happened To The Real-Life Spies That Inspired The Americans

While Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov were the two spies that most directly inspired the characters of Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, they weren't the only Russian deep-cover agents working in the United States on behalf of the SVR at the time. In June 2010, after a decade of surveillance by various U.S. intelligence agencies, Vavilova and Bezrukov were arrested along with eight other Russian agents who belonged to a spy ring the U.S. DOJ dubbed the Illegals Program. The operation, dubbed Operation Ghost Stories, also caught an eleventh Russian agent in Cyprus. However, he skipped bail after his arrest and disappeared. A twelfth, who worked for Microsoft in the U.S., was deported. Two more were revealed in Russian court documents to have fled the country before the FBI could arrest them.

As for the ten who were arrested, including Vavilova and Bezrukov, they got off rather easily considering the length of time they'd been spying on various countries. In July 2010, the United States and Russia negotiated a prisoner exchange in the neutral territory of Vienna. The ten Russian agents were deported back to Moscow in exchange for four Russian nationals who had been imprisoned in Russia for spying on behalf of the U.S. and UK. Upon their return to Russia, Vavilova, Bezrukov, and the other Russian agents were awarded the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" 4th Class. Elizabeth and Phillip were never arrested in The Americans, instead fleeing back to Russia before being apprehended. Yet, just like in reality, the show ended with the Russian spies escaping accountability.