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 history, freeing inmates jailed in seven countries.
Our reporting gave us an unsettling view into how Russia and America actually relate to each other today, at a moment when a rules-based order is fragmenting. As we detail in our book Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War, the United States has become enmeshed in a piratical new world, and in a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, both political parties now accept that prisoner-trading with the likes of Putin is a game that America must play. Norms of conduct that stabilized Moscow-Washington relations even at the height of the Cold War have now eroded. Putin is testing how much he can use prisoners and their desperate families as leverage against the United States and its allies. Recent deals have brought deserving Americans home—including our colleague—but also undermined Western governments’ ability to enforce their laws and policies against Russians who violate them. President Donald Trump is accepting the danger, as Joe Biden did, that each successive trade may further embolden Putin to snatch more Westerners to swap away.
When the Iron Curtain still stood, the KGB trailed but never jailed visiting American rock stars, chess players, and athletes. Its successor, the FSB, orchestrated the arrest of the WNBA star Brittney Griner, a three-time Olympic gold medalist. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union held the U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff for two weeks before trading him, along with a dissident physicist, for another physicist who was a captured Soviet spy. Russia held Gershkovich for almost 500 days and ultimately traded him, among others, for a group that included Vadim Krasikov, an FSB colonel and hitman serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen separatist leader in a Berlin park.
The question of what America should do to free its citizens has vexed presidents since Thomas Jefferson, who went to war over the kidnapping of American sailors by Barbary pirates in North Africa. For many decades after World War II, the U.S. claimed to adhere to a no-concessions policy when terrorists abducted Americans. In 2002, when an email arrived from [email protected] demanding the release of Pakistani prisoners in exchange for the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been abducted in Pakistan, the newspaper quietly hoped the government would negotiate. Washington refused, right up until Pearl’s death.
After Putin’s rise, at the turn of this century, successive presidents also refused to enter into a game of trading Russians—convicted fairly, in U.S. courts—for Americans whom Russia had snatched in convoluted circumstances and convicted in opaque trials. Once Washington started playing that game, a bipartisan consensus held, the upper hand would always belong to the FSB, which Putin once led. Its agents have wide latitude to surveil, entrap, and jail visiting Americans.
The consensus held through Trump’s first term. Back then, Trump took little interest in the fate of the former Marines Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, both held on charges the U.S. government called bogus, and he never mentioned their names publicly. When their cases came up, Trump preferred to talk about A$AP Rocky, the rapper he lobbied to free from a Swedish assault case by threatening Stockholm with a trade war. The idea of trading a criminal like Viktor Bout was so beyond the pale that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, to his staff, dismissed it in four words: “No, and hell no.”
Trump’s successor shattered that taboo, deciding that trading with Putin was the only way to bring home a number of unjustly detained Americans left to rot in Russian penal colonies. In December 2022, Biden released Bout, an arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” in exchange for Griner, who had been arrested for marijuana possession earlier that year. By the time of Gershkovich’s arrest, in 2023, the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs had a staff of nearly two dozen studying what concessions the U.S. might need to make. Its case officers pored over lists of America’s prison population, which totaled more than 1 million, in order to determine how many were Russians whom the Kremlin might want.
Last year, Biden joined European allies to free eight Russians, including spies, hackers, and Krasikov. In return, America rescued 16 people: dissidents, Westerners serving onerous sentences, and journalists including Gershkovich, the Radio Free Europe staffer Alsu Kurmasheva, and the Russian-opposition figure and Washington Post contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza. Trump blasted the deal, but as we knew at the time from conversations with his team, he also wanted to be the one to bring Gershkovich home.
Since his return to office, he has sought to outdo it. In April, he retrieved Ksenia Karelin—a Russian-American ballet dancer who had made a small donation to a humanitarian-relief agency working in Ukraine—by releasing Arthur Petrov, a German-Russian dual citizen held for smuggling military-grade microelectronics. In May, Trump and Putin discussed a nine-for-nine prisoner swap. Freeing Americans held hostage overseas is a foreign-policy priority, the administration has said. Now Trump has come to embrace prisoner-haggling with Russia’s long-serving autocrat, whose top officials are on record announcing the prospect of major bilateral trades to come.
The policy volte-face, which entrenches a major shift in American foreign policy, was already apparent in the third week of Trump’s second term, when he welcomed his first American home from a Russian jail cell: Marc Fogel, a history teacher at the now-closed Anglo-American School of Moscow who had been arrested in 2021. Hours earlier, Fogel, then 63, had been in Russia’s Corrective Colony No. 2, near the Volga, serving a record 14-year sentence for possession of about 17 grams of medical marijuana.
Suddenly, Fogel was touring the Lincoln Bedroom, talking to the 47th president about other Americans Putin was holding on murky grounds—and the need to free them, even if it meant letting Russian convicts walk free. As they spoke, the U.S. government was returning a Russian cryptocurrency mogul, held in a California county jail for the alleged laundering of billions of dollars. “I feel like the luckiest man on Earth,” Fogel told the president, sipping a canned Iron City lager from his home state of Pennsylvania, as Trump smiled and patted him on the back. Moved by the conversation, Trump quietly tasked his administration with bringing as many Americans home from Russia as possible, senior officials told us.
Fogel’s case shows that America’s prisoner trading is not solely a story of diplomats and CIA agents surreptitiously meeting Russian intelligence officers in Middle Eastern hotels. It is also a story of ordinary American families who suddenly learned that a loved one was imprisoned in Russia and spent the next few years trying to figure out how their own government works.
One such actor was Fogel’s own mother, Malphine: a spry and articulate 96-year-old who, in her tenth decade, took on the task of freeing her son from a foreign prison. For years, she struggled to get a meeting with even junior officials in a Biden White House that was overwhelmed with similar cases. But history turns on strange coincidences, and she happened to live in a small town that would come to occupy an enormous place in the lore of President Trump’s return to power: Butler, Pennsylvania.
As a would-be assassin was slinking through the Trump rally at the Butler Farm Show Grounds in July 2024, Malphine Fogel was trying to reach the presidential candidate on her own terms. It bothered her that the Biden White House had scrambled to free the WNBA’s Griner, arrested under the same marijuana statute as her son, while her own family couldn’t get a moment of the administration’s time—for a teacher whose students had included the children of CIA Director Bill Burns and U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul.
“Marc and our family are not being given the same rights,” she told us in June of last year. “We have to make him as well known as Brittney Griner even though he’s not a basketball player.”
A few days after we met, she learned that Trump was headed to the county fairgrounds, nearby. By then, a deal to free Gershkovich was coming together, and the presidential candidate was painfully aware, his team told us, that his adversary might win the honors of liberating the reporter before he could.
The president was circled by aides and well-wishers in the curtained-off area near the Butler County stage when Malphine approached. She would have only a minute or two to make an impression on Trump, and extract a promise.
“We need to get him home,” she said, delivering the line she’d been rehearsing in her head for days, as Trump nodded. Flashing a thumbs-up before a camera, Trump promised to “get him out,” then invited her onto the VIP section of the stage to watch his speech.
The nonagenarian was so thrilled, she started dancing to “YMCA,” from the campaign’s rally playlist. She was only feet away from the rostrum when Trump took the stage, mentioned some statistics around immigration, and then felt a bullet graze his ear. What followed became a global spectacle: The Secret Service shot the gunman, and agents tackled the candidate, who rose, pumping his fist and shouting: “Fight, fight, fight!”
But something else important happened that day: Trump had effectively committed himself to making a trade, if returned to office. Marc Fogel would be his Evan Gershkovich. He saw the political value in it, his advisers told us. And the stories of Americans held in Russia seemed to genuinely move him.
A year later, the Fogel family has been reunited. But left unresolved is the centuries-old question of how the U.S. should deal with foreign entities that hold Americans captive. Trump recently signed a new executive order to allow sanctions and other punishments for all countries designated as “State Sponsors of Wrongful Detention” as well as travel bans against their senior officials. At least in the short term, though, America’s advantage lies not in the threats it can lob at adversaries but in the favors it can call in from friends.
The epic prisoner swap that brought our colleague home wouldn’t have been possible without allies willing to bend their own procedures for America’s sake. For Biden, Germany agreed to release Krasikov, the Kremlin hitman. Norway was inclined merely to deport its Russian spy, our reporting indicates, but two U.S. ambassadors persuaded the home of the Nobel Peace Prize to instead hold him for nearly two years without trial—until he could be exchanged for a Western prisoner. Another U.S. ambassador persuaded Poland to hold on to a Russian spy, instead of trading him for a journalist for a Polish newspaper, imprisoned in Belarus.
America, the world’s legal superpower, can get allies as far afield as Thailand to arrest and extradite prisoners. Shortly after the “Merchant of Death” was arrested in a 2008 sting in a luxury Bangkok hotel, we report in our book, the Thai police chief presiding over the gun-runner’s case from an upper floor of the capital’s Central Investigative Bureau glanced up from his desk to see his doorway blocked by three middle-aged Russian men. They had snuck past security to deliver a message: You need to release Mr. Bout right now. Thailand stood firm and flew Bout to face trial in New York.
Complex prisoner trades with moving parts all around the globe underscore America’s continuing power in international affairs. Yet with each trade, America’s legal power to extradite suspects weakens. Allied governments ask themselves why they should bother investigating and jailing a Russian citizen for genuine crimes just for America to exchange them into freedom. Still, the business of taking and trading persists unabated. Last month, about a year after the swap that brought home our colleague, a plane from Estonia landed on the U.S. East Coast, delivering an ethnic Russian jailed in that Baltic nation for smuggling electronics for the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine. If the past is any prelude, it won’t be long before he is sent home in style, as the passenger of honor on an unmarked jet, touching down on a moonlit runway.
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