In 2007 I arrived in Moscow with my wife and young family. I was a career foreign correspondent working for the British newspaper The Guardian. My previous postings were to Delhi and Berlin. I had chronicled George Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reported from the frontline and dodged incoming mortar fire. Surely Russia would be easy? Not quite, it turned out.
Within a few months we found ourselves in a badly written spy novel. Unpromising young men followed me around the icy streets. Secret agents broke into our apartment, on one occasion opening the window next to our six-year-old son's bed. We lived on the tenth floor. The UK embassy explained that these ghostly visitors worked for the FSB. This was the main successor agency to the KGB. Its former boss was Vladimir Putin, at this point Russia's president.
I wrote about these experiences in a 2011 memoir, Mafia State (published in the US as Expelled). They fuelled much of my subsequent work as a non-fiction writer. Why had Putin's undercover agents picked on me? I was never entirely sure. My attempts to unravel the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko may have played a part and certainly contributed to the Kremlin's decision to deport me from Russia, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.
In London, I followed a public inquiry into Litvinenko's teapot assassination. It concluded Putin "probably" approved the operation using radioactive polonium. My book about the case, A Very Expensive Poison, is a dramatic account of one of this century's most lurid crimes. The playwright Lucy Prebble adapted it into an award-winning stage play at the Old Vic theatre in London; it was shortlisted for the 2017 Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Dagger Prize.
My next book sought to answer a question which haunts us still: what does Vladimir Putin have on the US president Donald Trump? The dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele says Putin's spies secretly filmed Trump in a Moscow hotel room. The claim always struck me as plausible; the FSB specialises in covert recordings and once left a sex manual by our marital bed. "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia helped Trump Win" was a number one New York Times best-seller.
Like its predecessors, my new book Shadow State is a real-life thriller. The story is incredible but true. Two Russian colonels arrive in Salisbury on a mission to murder a renegade colleague, Sergei Skripal. Shadow State further describes the myriad ways in which the Kremlin is seeking to subvert our democracy and overwhelm our politics, via cyber-hacking, disinformation, and corruption. It is - I hope - essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our dark times and how our societies have become so divided.
I have also written books on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the Conservative politician Jonathan Aitken. The director Oliver Stone made The Snowden Files into a biopic, Snowden; Dreamworks adapted my book WikiLeaks - written with David Leigh - into The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Further TV projects are forthcoming.
by Luke Harding • January 24, 2017 • Politics & Social Sciences
A true story of murder and conspiracy that points directly to Vladimir Putin, by The Guardian’s former Moscow bureau chief.
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