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.
