One night in August 2024, the two of us stood on a runway at Joint Base Andrews in the balmy Maryland moonlight, watching the sky for an unmarked CIA jet that would deliver three Americans who had been imprisoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin as bargaining chips. Among them was our Wall Street Journal colleague Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter jailed on espionage charges since the Soviet era. After being assigned to dig into what had happened to our friend, we’d followed the secret talks to free him from Lefortovo, the Moscow prison where Stalin once executed class enemies. We’d met spies, oligarchs, makeshift middlemen, and even Hollywood and Silicon Valley celebrities working in the shadows to orchestrate what ultimately became the largest prisoner swap in U.S.-Russian

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