Swap - by Drew Hinshaw & Joe Parkinson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the Wall Street Journal's award-winning international investigations team comes a spellbinding account of a spy war between the U.S. and Russia that transformed into a ruthless game of hostage-taking, in which 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 game of human poker--and the extraordinary lengths the U.S. had to go to to retrieve its citizens, including Brittney Griner, Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva, and numerous others whose arrests were unseen collateral damage in a hidden conflict.

Swap unspools the history behind the series of prisoner trades that returned Moscow and Washington to the crude transactional logic of the Cold War, culminating in the two rivals' largest and most complex swap ever. On August 1, 2024, twenty-four people jailed in seven nations were exchanged, including eight Russian spies, smugglers, hackers, and a professional hit man. But that headline moment was only the climax of a secret war two decades in the making.

Investigative reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson were Pulitzer finalists for their work with Gershkovich to uncover the Russian officials responsible for resurrecting a brutal tactic once wielded by the KGB. Now they 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 snatching American citizens--imprisoning them under false or jacked-up charges--forcing the U.S. government to play Putin's game.

Swap takes you inside the Oval Office, the Kremlin, the headquarters of the CIA and MI6, and the living rooms of ordinary families forced to become activists in order to bring their loved ones home. You'll meet the Gulf royals, billionaire tech moguls, and unlikely Hollywood intermediaries navigating back channels to save lives. You'll visit remote Arctic prison camps and cordoned-off Middle Eastern airstrips. And you'll discover how the CIA and MI6 waged a quiet, high-stakes campaign against a Kremlin that was abducting Americans to build leverage.

Tracking each move and countermove in a multilayered Rubik's Cube of negotiations, Swap unscrambles and decodes the spy craft really going on between the U.S. and Russia, offering a chilling diagnosis for how power works in the twenty-first century.

Review Quotes

"A tale of high tension and fear. . . . Swap is the inside story of a terrifying yet largely secret front in Vladimir Putin's war on the West. It is a battle fought in the back alleys, with brazen deception and wrenching choices." -- David E. Hoffman, author of The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

"Prisoners are exchanged, hostages are released, spies are captured--but how does it happen? Swap provides the deep background: how and why the Kremlin hides its citizens deep in Western societies and trades people like poker chips--and how the U.S. fights back. Essential reading for an era when authoritarians barter in human lives." -- Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

"A riveting, real-life thriller that reveals how spy swaps, once relics of the Cold War, have returned with chilling urgency. Drawing on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, this groundbreaking book lays bare the high-stakes human drama behind today's great power competition--and asks what the United States is willing to sacrifice to bring its citizens home." -- Calder Walton, author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

"This gripping book reads like a thriller screenplay with a stellar ensemble cast, but this is real life. The protagonists are real people--Americans and Russian dissidents--and the authors were at the heart of the intense international efforts to free them. They wield their inside knowledge to brilliant and dramatic effect." -- Fiona Hill, former Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States

"At a time when the Kremlin has adopted hostage-taking as statecraft, this deeply researched piece of investigative reporting shines a light on the geopolitical horse trading that gets dissidents out of Russia--and spies and assassins returned to the Motherland." -- Mark Galeotti, author of We Need to Talk about Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong