Overview

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.

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Reviews

""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 US fights back. Essential reading for an era when authoritarians barter in human lives."" -- ""Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.""

Author Information

Drew Hinshaw, a senior reporter for the Wall Street Journal, spent a decade covering West Africa, where his work was nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Time, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. Joe Parkinson is the Africa Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal and a Pulitzer Prize finalist currently based in Johannesburg. One of the Journal's most seasoned foreign correspondents, he has reported from more than forty countries, and his work has won numerous international awards. Keith Brown is an audiobook narrator and voice actor with a facility for European accents and languages, including audiobook-fluent German, Russian, Italian, and French. Other voice-over projects Keith has recorded include corporate/eLearning, informational videos, and commercials. Keith has been performing his entire life, spending a decade as an instrumentalist until a transformative high school production of Les Miserables awakened his passion for theater. (Funny story: he auditioned for Javert but won the role of Valjean!) This led Keith to conservatory training and an almost ten-year career as an opera singer and actor. Keith appeared at Carnegie Hall and traveled around the US and abroad, cultivating his natural ear for language, his love of artistic collaboration, and the extraordinary stamina and vocal control that the life of a narrator demands. As an experienced on-air personality, Keith has also hosted and produced classical music programs, sharing the fascinating stories behind the pieces and engaging the listener as only a storyteller can. He was proud to broaden the horizons of classical music audiences all over the country with the syndicated show he created, GAMEPLAY, which celebrates the worlds of video game music.

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