"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 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."-- Provided by publisher.