Dunney's career-maker: Negotiate a food deal for Moscow's '80 Olympics. He didn't care about dissidents or their rights. Until he landed in the middle. And slept with Elizaveta, the beautiful activist gracing the KGB's Most Wanted. Via Elizaveta, Dunney ended up with explosive evidence certain to scuttle Moscow's huge propaganda triumph. The KGB would stop at nothing to get it.
The Pee Pee Tape: The Book is the rare film to book adaptation. The book pulls from 2013 surveillance footage captured by Russian Intelligence of Donald Trump with two sex workers in the Presidential Suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.
The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the U.S. election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency. "Russian Roulette is...the most thorough and riveting account." -- The New York Times Russian Roulette is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage, and superpower rivalry. After U.S.-Russia relations soured, as Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited WikiLeaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election. The Russians were wildly successful and the great break-in of 2016 was no "third-rate burglary." It was far more sophisticated and sinister -- a brazen act of political espionage designed to interfere with American democracy. At the end of the day, Trump, the candidate who pursued business deals in Russia, won. And millions of Americans were left wondering, what the hell happened? This story of high-tech spying and multiple political feuds is told against the backdrop of Trump's strange relationship with Putin and the curious ties between members of his inner circle -- including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn -- and Russia. Russian Roulette chronicles and explores this bizarre scandal, explains the stakes, and answers one of the biggest questions in American politics: How and why did a foreign government infiltrate the country's political process and gain influence in Washington?
The infamous Nixon White House taping system captured 3,700 hours of Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Camp David conversations between 1971 and 1973, automatically taping every single word spoken. These audio recordings have finally been released over the past decade by the National Archives, yet only fewer than 5% of them have been transcribed and published--until now.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security state. Barack Obama campaigned on changing George W. Bush's "global war on terror" but ended up entrenching extraordinary executive powers, from warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention to military commissions and targeted killings. Then Obama found himself bequeathing those authorities to Donald Trump. How did the United States get here? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage reveals high-level national security legal and policy deliberations in a way no one has done before. He tells inside stories of how Obama came to order the drone killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecendented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret program that logged every American's phone calls. Encompassing the first comprehensive history of NSA surveillance over the past forty years as well as new information about the Osama bin Laden raid, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Bush's and Obama's post-9/11 presidencies in the Trump era.
In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to his work as a propagandist for the Revolution and on to the censorship battles that turned him against the state (and, more ominously, the state against him), their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed. Written by Robert Littell, whom The Washington Post called “one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today, period,” The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era and the predicament of the artists ensnared in it.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House. It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence. To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower. Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “I’ve read kind of all the books on this subject . . . and this is the one you want to read.”—Rachel Maddow Before Ukraine, before impeachment: This is the never-before-told inside story of the high-stakes, four-year-long investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia ties—culminating in the Steele dossier, and sparking the Mueller report—from the founders of political opposition research company Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS was founded in 2010 by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, two former reporters at The Wall Street Journal who decided to abandon the struggling news business and use their reporting skills to conduct open-source investigations for businesses and law firms—and opposition research for political candidates. In the fall of 2015, they were hired to look into the finances of Donald Trump. What began as a march through a mind-boggling trove of lawsuits, bankruptcies, and sketchy overseas projects soon took a darker turn: The deeper Fusion dug, the more it began to notice names that Simpson and Fritsch had come across during their days covering Russian corruption—and the clearer it became that the focus of Fusion’s research going forward would be Trump’s entanglements with Russia. To help them make sense of what they were seeing, Simpson and Fritsch engaged the services of a former British intelligence agent and Russia expert named Christopher Steele. He would produce a series of memos—which collectively became known as the Steele dossier—that raised deeply alarming questions about the nature of Trump’s ties to a hostile foreign power. Those memos made their way to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. On January 10, 2017, the Steele dossier broke into public view, and the Trump-Russia story reached escape velocity. At the time, Fusion GPS was just a ten-person consulting firm tucked away above a Starbucks near Dupont Circle, but it would soon be thrust into the center of the biggest news story on the planet—a story that would lead to accusations of witch hunts, a relentless campaign of persecution by congressional Republicans, bizarre conspiracy theories, lawsuits by Russian oligarchs, and the Mueller report. In Crime in Progress, Simpson and Fritsch tell their story for the first time—a tale of the high-stakes pursuit of one of the biggest, most important stories of our time—no matter the costs.
From the spymaster and inspiration for the movie Argo, discover the "real-life spy thriller" of the brilliant but under-supported CIA operatives who developed breakthrough spy tactics that helped turn the tide of the Cold War (Malcolm Nance). Antonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics -- Hollywood-inspired identity swaps, ingenious evasion techniques, and an armory of James Bond-style gadgets -- that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB. As Russia again rises in opposition to America, this remarkable story is a tribute to those who risked everything for their country, and to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.
Ambitious lawyer Christopher Dunney was not in Cold War Moscow looking for a cause. A last-minute substitute, Christopher was in Moscow to seal a fast food deal for the 1980 Moscow Olympics Games. It was going to be his big break at the firm, a partnership riding on his performance. Chistopher wasn't the kind of guy to fret about Russia's Jewish dissidents or their precious human rights. He had career-building on his mind, nothing else. He did not want anything or, especially, anyone getting in his way. Until he wanted Elizaveta Krylenkev. Elizaveta was the beautiful activist, a high-profile dissident who had expected the committed American attorney whom Christopher had replaced. Her disappointment with cynical Christopher did not last long, but Elizaveta had to parlay their mutual attraction into the most dangerous of actions. With a scrupulous Russian cop manipulating every second move, Christopher learned that Elizaveta had set him up to mule the most explosive piece of evidence of the decade. A tape that would implode the Soviet's pending show trial of Russia's top dissident. The KGB would stop at nothing to get that evidence back. Christopher Dunney was nobody's hero, yet, there he was, thinking about risking his career, his freedom and, yes, his life for... Being played pissed Christoper off. That was his second biggest weakness. Damn it. Time to run.
