“The Americans,” the popular FX series that depicts the lives of Soviet spies working undercover in the U.S. during the Cold War, “looks pretty much like reality,” according to a member of the Russian spy ring nabbed in the U.S. in 2010.

Andrei Bezrukov, a Russian ‘illegal’ who lived in the U.S. under the alias Donald Heathfield, says he and his wife, also a member of the spy ring, didn’t expect the creators of the American series to delve so deeply into the inner lives of the Russian agent characters.

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