Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War

Summary

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.