The following article courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

By STEPHEN MILLER and OLGA PADORINA

With a radio transmitter hidden in her vacuum cleaner and a homey fire burning in the living room to destroy incriminating documents, Elizaveta Mukasei posed for decades as a housewife while pursuing her real job as a Soviet spy.

Ms. Mukasei, who died Sept. 19 at age 97, and her husband, Mikhail Mukasei, served as Soviet undercover agents in the U.S., Western Europe and elsewhere, according to Russian government officials.

Known by code names of Zephyr and Elza, the couple did undercover work that has been trumpeted in recent years by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. While the Mukaseis described their spying exploits in a memoir published in 2004, many details about her life are difficult to verify independently.

From 1939 to 1943, the couple were posted to Los Angeles, where Mikhail was vice consul at the Soviet Consulate. From their diplomatic perch, the couple gained access to elite Hollywood circles, aided in part by sympathy for America's wartime ally.

The Mukaseis befriended celebrities in the movie industry, Ms. Mukasei wrote in the memoir, though it isn't clear how the couple used these relationships in their intelligence-gathering.

Charlie Chaplin became close to the Mukaseis, she wrote, and they plied him with vodka and presented him with a Russian bear cub on behalf of the Soviet state. Ms. Mukasei also claimed the couple befriended such luminaries as the conductor Leopold Stokowski, the writer Theodore Dreiser and others who they believed were politically connected in Washington.

In the early part of the war, the Soviets feared an attack by Japan, so the Mukaseis contacted merchants who had dealings with Japan, including an antiques dealer who told them that "there was an impression that the Japanese are not going to attack the USSR."

When the USSR moved several divisions from Siberia to defend Moscow against the Germans, she wrote, the couple realized that their intelligence had been heeded. The top Soviet agent in Tokyo at the time, Richard Sorge, sent them a fancy silver coffee set to thank them for their work, she wrote.

In 1943, the Mukaseis returned to the USSR, where Ms. Mukasei worked for a time as a secretary of the Moscow Art Theater. Though not actually an actress, she studied the writings of Konstantin Stanislavski, the theater director known as the father of "method acting," a personal approach to performance that Ms. Mukasei observed was "very close to the work of an intelligence agent."

After further training in spycraft, including a course in radio transmission and Morse code, the Mukaseis in 1950 began a series of missions to Western Europe.

To establish their cover, the couple lived in Poland and Czechoslovakia, posed as merchants, and eventually received Swiss passports, she wrote. That allowed them to travel around Europe and contact other Soviet spies.

During the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967, the couple visited Israel "as the bombs were still exploding," and turned a former (but unnamed) Israeli intelligence figure into a source, according to a portion of the memoir written by Mr. Mukasei.

For another assignment, they were posted to Mexico, where their home doubled as their espionage center. To transmit messages to Moscow via shortwave radio, they relied on an antenna that normally was disguised as a vacuum-cleaner cord.

"In the cold season, there was always a fire in the fireplace so that we could burn all the secret materials," Ms. Mukasei wrote. She described how she pretended to be busy with housework, giving her time to disguise traces of espionage before answering the door when visitors arrived.

The couple returned in the 1970s to Moscow, where they turned to training a new generation of spies. Mr. Mukasei died in 2008 at 101.

As part of her cover, Ms. Mukasei spent hours in Poland weeping at a "grave" of her dead child, she wrote. In reality, the Mukaseis had two children, including one, Anatoly Mukasei, who became well known as a cinematographer. But the family spent more time apart than together.

"Our bosses were kind to me," Ms. Mukasei wrote. "I spent a month with my kids every year. Don't ask me how it was organized. I won't tell you."

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Associated Press article below

MOSCOW (Associated Press) -- Lt. Col. Yelizaveta Mukasei, a Soviet spy who worked undercover in the West with her husband, has died at the age of 97.

External Intelligence Service spokesman Sergei Ivanov says Mukasei died in Moscow early Saturday.

An obituary issued by the spy agency Monday said Mukasei, whose code name was Elza, lived in Los Angeles from 1939 to 1943 when her husband, Mikhail, was working undercover there.

It said she received training in the Soviet Union before the couple went back abroad and worked as spies from 1955 to 1977.

Mukasei later helped train spies and wrote textbooks on spying. She was awarded several state medals.

Her husband Mikhail, whose code name was Zephyr, died last year at age 101.