Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War

The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer-finalist investigation team's spellbinding account of a spy war that transformed into a game of hostage-taking, in which Vladimir Putin held all the cards.

Narrated with the propulsive drive of a spy thriller and packed with revelatory reporting, Swap takes you deep inside a shadow war that will upend how you think about global politics. It is the first full account of the Kremlin's decade-long game of human poker—and the extraordinary lengths the U.S. had to go to retrieve its citizens, including Brittney Griner, Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and numerous more Americans whose arrests were unseen collateral damage in a hidden conflict.

Swap unspools the twenty year history behind the series of prisoner trades that returned Moscow and Washington to the crude transactional logic of the Cold War, culminating on August 1, 2024: the two rival’s largest and most complex swap ever, when Washington released eight Russian spies, smugglers, hackers, and a professional hitman, in return for Gershkovich, Whelan, and fourteen other journalists, dissidents and ordinary citizens held as bargaining chips.

Investigative reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson reveal the story of how the Russian government planted deep cover agents in the west, how the CIA tracked them down—and how Russia responded by kidnapping American citizens—imprisoning them under false or jacked up charges—forcing the American government to play Putin’s game. Swap takes you inside the Oval Office and the former KGB headquarters, introducing the billionaires, tech moguls, Persian Gulf princes, Hollywood producers and other back-channel mediators scrambling to free them and the tense deliberations involved in facilitating their release.

In this electrifying, page-turning narrative written with rich detail, they bring into focus dogged State Department diplomats and little-known Russian intelligence units, and take you from cordoned off-airstrips in the Middle East to penal camps in Russia's freezing interior nicknamed ""Arctic Wolf"" and ""Fashion Colony.""

Tracking each move and countermove in a complex, Rubik's Cube of negotiations, Swap unscrambles and decodes the spy craft that is really happening between the U.S. and Russia, and what it means for America's national security.

© 2025 HarperAudio (ספר מוקלט ): 9780063458284

תאריך הוצאה

ספר מוקלט : 19 באוגוסט 2025