In the early morning of August 1, 2024, six government jets, each loaded with human cargo in countries thousands of miles apart, were navigating through feathery summer clouds toward the same rendezvous point, a cordoned-off section of an airport in Turkey.
On the tarmac, protocol officers in black suits and sunglasses were nervously pacing, a heat haze lifting from the asphalt by the rising sun. Men in orange vests patrolled back and forth along the fenced perimeter of a normally bustling airport, now under lockdown. A solitary Turkish intelligence officer was watching them from the control tower, issuing directives to the aircraft over an encrypted line.
None of them would receive clearance to land until their crews ticked off a checklist that included taking, then texting him photos of every passenger on board. There were to be no news cameras, no last-minute delays or adjustments to the flight manifests. And no guns.
A handout still image taken from handout video provided by the Russian Federal Security service (FSB) shows a general view of participants of a prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries at an airport in Ankara, Turkey, 1 August 2024.EPA/EFE
An elaborate East–West prisoner trade was underway, more complicated than any attempted during the darkest days of the Cold War. In the control tower, photos of the captives began pinging onto the officer’s phone, one by one, as the planes transporting them approached Turkish airspace.
Two pictures showed the exhausted features of a married couple who had spent more than a decade building fake lives as an ordinary Argentine family, until they were arrested in Slovenia for being deep-cover Russian spies. Across from them was their eight-year-old son, fiddling with a toy rocket, and his eleven-year-old sister, quietly threading a beaded necklace, her Harry Potter sneakers barely touching the floor of a jet chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency. Weeks before the start of her sixth grade year, she and her brother were being moved like chess pieces in a game played in secret by global powers. And neither had any idea their parents were Russian, or even knew their real names.
A plane crossing the Black Sea sent confirmation that it was carrying the Spaniard, a bald and bearded journalist held in a Polish prison for slipping onto Ukrainian military bases and seducing the women his handlers deemed targets. In his mind, he was mentally rehearsing the firm, muscular handshake he would extend to his president. A third jet, flying in from Norway, was transporting a researcher who had posed as a Brazilian academic to spy on Western military facilities in the Arctic. He had told police the forbidden detail he was never supposed to divulge—his real name—and nothing good could await him in Russia. A plane from Washington, its pilot directed by a CIA officer on board, was bringing a trio of men convicted of hack- ing and sanctions violations.
A fifth jet, from Germany, was delivering the cargo President Vladimir Putin wanted most: a convicted assassin in shackles, a bulletproof vest, and a Kevlar helmet. Two of Berlin’s most senior officials were flying with him, men from law enforcement and diplomacy given one last chance to ask this murderer how many of Russia’s enemies had died at his hands. But he was absolutely silent.
The largest plane was Putin’s own, carrying sixteen prisoners, each escorted by a single security officer, none told where they were flying. Its three American passengers included Paul Whelan, a former Marine trying to calculate the destination based on the flight time flashing onto a screen, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a radio journal- ist desperate for a cup of water. Security officers, disguised as flight attendants, were pushing trolleys through the aisle, monitoring the passengers, not offering them drinks or food. Alsu thumbed through the worn pages of a Milan Kundera novel she had reread countless times and handed it to our colleague at The Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich.
Jailed on a false charge of espionage and thrown into the same prison complex where Stalin once liquidated “enemies of the people,” the young reporter and the two Americans he’d never met, now seated alongside him, had become trading chips Putin could swap for whichever Russian he chose.
In the White House, national security advisor Jake Sullivan had his ear to “the batphone,” anxiously monitoring every movement of these myriad passengers, reviewing an exhaustively detailed scenario plan for what to do if any one of the prisoners didn’t turn up. Each was a vital human component in a trade Russia insisted unfold under a veil of total secrecy. President Joe Biden was asking for updates from the other side of a thin White House wall. Two weeks after scrapping his reelection bid, the eighty-one-year-old now saw this exchange as his legacy, a monument to what America and its allies could achieve through unified action, and his answer to the complex moral riddle of what the U.S. government owed its citizens taken hostage abroad. His adversary in the Kremlin saw it as a mission statement every agent in the field would understand: The Russian Federation would never abandon a spy.
Just outside the Oval Office, restlessly awaiting word, were a group of Americans with an even greater investment in the trade unfolding: A portrait painter, Elizabeth Whelan, had put five years of her life on hold, traveling thousands of miles, grabbing time with world leaders, diplomats, and power brokers she hoped could free her brother, Paul. Two teenage sisters had toured television studios and the halls of Capitol Hill to share the ordeal that their mother, Alsu, had spelled out in notes smuggled from prison. Over the course of her son’s imprisonment, Evan’s mother, Ella Milman, had shuttled between the leaders of Germany and America, the two most important governments in the NATO alliance, ferrying messages to unlock a deal. Necessity had turned these ordinary Americans into vital players in the underworld of hostage talks.
They weren’t alone. Billionaires, world leaders, celebrities, and spy chiefs had quietly invested years into arranging a trade so complicated that diplomats nicknamed it the Rubik’s Cube. The unlikely pairing of Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson had both stepped in to advance talks between two Cold War enemies now again slipping into open conflict. So had the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who had wrestled with whether to fly to Moscow to personally petition Putin. Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of his flagship newspaper, had mobilized hundreds of America’s top journalists into a global advocacy campaign.
For all their collective power and influence, this ensemble had watched helplessly as previous deals collapsed. Political prisoners set to be traded had died inexplicably, or inched toward death, in Russian penal colonies. CIA officers had flown thousands of miles to remonstrate with Russian spies in hotel conference rooms in Central Europe and the Persian Gulf, booked under false names—only to fly home empty-handed. An Academy Award winner had traveled to Monaco for a ride in the white Rolls Royce of a Russian spy who claimed he could get a message to Putin. All told, two of the most powerful governments on Earth and their allies dedicated enormous energy and attention into haggling over a list of names that, as the jets neared their rendezvous, totaled just twenty-four prisoners and two children.
Now, like the conductor of a symphony nearing a finale, the officer in the control tower was ordering the six jets to touch down in a perfect line just thirty meters apart. Silhouetted figures imprisoned in seven countries would step down to cross one another on the tarmac, a glimpse into an unseen struggle that had been playing out for more than a decade.
At every step, the clandestine talks and backchannel interventions had been tracked by the two of us—Wall Street Journal reporters who had covered hostage crises across the world and now found ourselves trying to make sense of a crisis that had somehow reached our own newspaper. Just weeks before our colleague’s arrest, he had proposed we should together investigate the pattern of Americans mysteriously vanishing into Russian prisons: “It’s totally undercovered,” Evan said, before Putin lent his pitch a grimly ironic news hook.
Left to investigate a game of “hostage diplomacy” ensnaring more Americans than their government could manage, we plunged into the murky terrain of prisoner talks, where rival governments barter over human lives. In his jail cell, Evan never stopped reporting, and he and the other American prisoners would soon tell their own stories. We wanted to show the flip side of the coin: the years of rolling negotiations it took to bring home one batch of Americans after the next. And we wanted to answer how exactly had America and Russia fallen into such a vicious and retaliatory cycle of snatching and trading each other’s citizens, which has somehow become a central tool of modern statecraft, a mechanism for nuclear powers to inflict pain on one another without tipping into war.
We traveled the world to meet the intelligence chiefs, spy hunters, diplomats, and mediators wrapped up into this ruthless business. The contest they described went back much further than we realized, pitting an embattled democracy whose law still reaches further than any government’s on Earth against a revanchist autocracy playing by its own rules. And their fight was spilling far beyond Washington and Moscow onto a global battlefield, from the trenches of Ukraine to a hotel suite in Bangkok, an airstrip in the Maldives, and a suburban home in the Alps.
The more we peered into this world, the more Russia stared back. We were followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington in acts of surveillance apparently designed to intimidate. Our emails and phones were bombarded with password-reset attempts, and the shared files on our cloud opened at hours when we were fast asleep. The Russian Foreign Ministry would later declare us personae non gratae.
This is the story of a shadow war that few Americans understood was underway. In the fog of this new pirate world, a careful observer could glimpse a discomforting truth: To play this game of snatch-and-trade, America and its high-minded allies would have to ask themselves, how much were they willing to be like Russia?
From the SWAP: A Secret History of the New Cold War by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Copyright © 2025 by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
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