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CLOAK & DAGGER
The untold story of how Vladimir Putin created his own foreign intelligence service to shore up his standing in post-Soviet Russia.
Andrei Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999. He is coauthor with Irina Borogan of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs, 2010), The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (PublicAffairs, 2015) and The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad (PublicAffairs, 2019).
THE DARK ARTS
A cabal of KGB operatives stationed in Arab countries and Israel took over Russian foreign intelligence at the end of the Cold War. Their impact is still felt.
Chutzpah
George Koval infiltrated the Manhattan Project and helped Stalin build the bomb. Then he asked Uncle Sam for his Social Security check.
Bad Ideas
Mikhail Lesin, the Putin aide just found dead in a hotel in Washington, D.C., was the first to propose Russian state control of the Internet.
Silenced
Forget investigative reporting, even critical commentary is now out of bounds as the Kremlin clamps down on Web news sites.