Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War

Summary

The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-finalist investigation team’s spellbinding account of how Vladimir Putin and his covert operatives have ensnared Americans—including the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, WNBA star Brittney Griner, and former US Marine Paul Whelan among others—to trade for Russian spies and killers.

Delivered with the propulsive drive of a spy thriller and packed with revelatory reporting, Swap takes you deep into a dangerous 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, which culminated in the largest prisoner trade of modern times: on August 1, 2024, when the United States released eight Russian spies, hackers, and a professional hit man in return for Gershkovich, Whelan, and twenty-three other journalists and dissidents held in nine countries—the largest prisoner exchange between the US and Russia since the Cold War.

Investigative reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson reveal the story of how the Russian government kidnapped American citizens—imprisoning them under false or jacked-up charges—and how the American government responded to free them. Hinshaw and Parkinson take you inside the Oval Office and the former KGB headquarters, introducing the brokers sent 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 airstrips in the Middle East to penal camps in Russia’s freezing far north 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 US and Russia—and what it means for America’s national security.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.