From Russia with Blood
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The explosive, untold story of how Russia mastered the art and science of targeted assassination‘A real life thriller, packed with characters that even John le Carré couldn't dream of. If this doesn't scare you, then you're not paying attention.’ Oliver BulloughThey thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs, dissidents, and gangsters who fled to Britain after Vladimir Putin came to power dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, their British lawyers and fixers met similarly grisly ends. Yet, one by one, the British authorities shut down every investigation-and carried on courting the Kremlin.In From Russia With Blood, multi-award-winning investigative journalist Heidi Blake unflinchingly documents the growing web of Russian-linked deaths on British and American soil, tracking the men who lived and died in the Kremlin’s crosshairs from London’s high-end night clubs to Miami’s million-dollar hideouts, and following a trail of increasingly savage attacks onto the streets of Salisbury, where the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in 2018.Working with bags of crime scene evidence, hundreds of thousands of pages of exclusive documents, surveillance footage, classified intelligence briefings, forensically restored phones and computers, and hundreds of insider interviews, Blake bravely exposes how Russia’s killing campaign fits into Putin’s pursuit of global dominance – and why Western governments have failed time and again to stop the bloodshed.This heart-stopping international investigation – written with the page-turning pace and chilling narrative of a thriller – reveals one of the most important and terrifying stories of our time.
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This book is dedicated to Mark Schoofs, always a
guiding light; to my investigative comrades
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The covert killing campaign was one crucial line of attack in a much wider war of subversion. As soaring oil prices swelled the state’s coffers, Putin shoveled resources not only into the development of cyberweaponry capable of shutting down foreign infrastructures at the touch of a button but also hacking labs that could gather kompromat on his adversaries. He ramped up Russian espionage operations to Cold War levels, inserting Anna Chapman’s illegal sleeper cell into the American suburbs, pouring spies into every major European capital, and developing a network of agents of influence to push the Kremlin’s agenda in the corridors of Western power. He weaponized Russia’s fearsome organized crime complex, enmeshing the country’s powerful mafia groups ever more deeply with his government and security services and extending their tentacles around the world as an unofficial outgrowth of the Russian state. He grew a sprawling international propaganda machine to disseminate disinformation, assembled a troll army of social media warriors running millions of fake accounts to stoke conspiracy theories and sow chaos in the West, and built black-money channels to finance extremism, terror, and despotism abroad. And he doubled down on defense spending, pumping the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars into a sweeping military modernization program to replace crumbling Soviet weaponry with hundreds of spanking-new bombers, submarines, warships, and intercontinental missiles.
As Putin expanded his web, his use of targeted assassination beyond his own borders grew more brazen. By 2006, he was sufficiently emboldened to pass new laws explicitly giving the FSB a license to kill Russia’s enemies on foreign soil. Since then, his regime’s critics, opponents, and traitors have dropped dead in violent or perplexing circumstances in both the United States and Europe. But nowhere has Putin pursued his killing campaign with more vigor—or greater impunity—than in the United Kingdom.
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