In 2017, @drewhinshaw & I entered a Nigerian cabinet minister’s office to ask why Boko Haram was ascendent. “Because we gave them millions of euros for the Chibok girls!” he said with a nervous chuckle. It was a slip of a tongue that set us on a journey .

RT @MMQWalker: Really looking forward to reading the new book 'Swap' by my brilliant colleagues @drewhinshaw & @JoeWSJ on Russian espionage….

RT @JChengWSJ: From the duo that told the definitive tale of Meng Wangzhou and the two Michaels:

RT @yarotrof: Can’t wait to read 📕! And to watch the TV series once some smart person jumps at the opportunity to make it!.

RT @jwmjournalist: So excited for the release of SWAP!*Nobody* writes about modern espionage better than @drewhinshaw and @JoeWSJ. There wo….

In the meantime–if you're interested in this story, here’s a pre-order link.🙏. "This gripping book reads like a thriller screenplay with a stellar ensemble cast, but this is real life" -- Fiona Hill.

And a special thanks to so many who helped us chronicle this long conflict from the inside, especially @AndreiSoldatov and @christogrozev, who have their own works hitting the shelves.

Especially grateful to Evan, who worked with us after he got out to tell the story in @WSJ of the obscure Russian spy unit behind the arrest of Americans. Stay tuned for his memoir, which will be a tour-de-force of reporting when it publishes next year.

If you’d like to hear the rest of this story, we’re delighted to say it's one of many in our upcoming book “SWAP” a secret history of the spy war that spilled on the doorsteps of ordinary Americans. Publishing August. Thank you to all who helped us penetrate this mysterious world

A CIA official flies to London, hand-delivers a file to Mi6. Mi6's chief, aka "C," invites the head of Slovenia’s intel agency–best known as "Boss Owl"–to London for a tip:. A Russian mother, wife & spy is living somewhere in your country, deep undercover. Can you find her?

No trade happens–Paul’s case languishes–and soon the Russians take more Americans: Brittney Griner, teacher Marc Fogel, former Marine Trevor Reed… many more who never make the news. The White House tasks the CIA: the U.S. needs spies to trade. The kind Putin adores. Illegals.

By then, the West is cracking down on Russian spies. In 2018, the FBI arrests Maria Butina for acting as a foreign agent—Putin is convinced she’ll get 15 years. Two weeks after she pleads guilty, Putin’s FSB grabs its own “foreign agent,” Paul Whelan, and offers a trade.

We looked at 100+ docs proving Maria is not Mexican–or even Maria. She isn’t Maria. She is Anna Dultseva of Nizhny Novgorod, & she trained for years to become the perfect spy: a quiet, unassuming mother. And in 2017 she–now an Argentine–arrives in the heart of Europe, Slovenia

Soon after, a pregnant Mexican lady calling herself “Maria Munoz” shows up to a Buenos Aires clinic, fully dilated after hours of labor at home. She speaks fluent–native?–Spanish and calls her daughter “Sophie.” But her doctor notices a strange loneliness about her.

That assessment was at best so naive as to be negligent, and at worst a bold-faced lie.

The first swap since the Cold War unfolds in Vienna, away from the TV cameras… The Obama administration writes it off as an amusing relic of the Soviet era, a sideshow from its “reset” with Moscow.

Fast-forward to 2010. Putin is Russia’s PM. Pres. Obama is mystified by an FBI briefing: a Russian spy-ring lives in ordinary American suburbia, including flame-haired Anna Chapman. Hoping not to anger Putin, Obama offers to trade those spies for imprisoned Russian informants.

And yet a well of nostalgia for illegals remained in Russia. New TV channels broadcast reruns of spy series like “The Shield and Sword.”. Putin’s first appearance on TV was re-enacting a famous spy thriller scene where “Stierlitz,” a fictitious heroic illegal, returns home.

Posted to 1980s East Germany, Putin worked as an illegals’ support officer. But soon, the Cold War was over, Soviet spies were adrift, and the West was left to assume illegals, like knights or gladiators, had been relegated to the realm of fiction.

Putin idolized the “illegals”—spies without diplomatic cover who pulled off some of the Cold War’s biggest coups. They stole atomic secrets, infiltrated the Japanese court, and planted a spy ring inside British intelligence, all while living double lives behind enemy lines.

Young Putin was one of 70m Soviets who watched the KGB-commissioned movie. “What amazed me most of all is how one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not,” he later said. Putin was hooked. He learned German and walked into the Leningrad KGB to volunteer.