Book description
In 2007 Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a
correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian. Within
months, mysterious agents from Russia's Federal Security Service - the
successor to the KGB - had broken into his flat. He found himself
tailed by men in cheap leather jackets, bugged, and even summoned to
Lefortovo, the KGB's notorious prison.
The break-in was the beginning of an extraordinary psychological war
against the journalist and his family. Vladimir Putin's spies used
tactics developed by the KGB and perfected in the 1970s by the
Stasi, East Germany's sinister secret police. This clandestine
campaign burst into the open in 2011 when the Kremlin expelled Harding
from Moscow - the first western reporter to be deported from Russia
since the days of the Cold War.
Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new
Russia is a brilliant and haunting account of the insidious
methods used by a resurgent Kremlin against its so-called
"enemies" -
human rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition
activists. It includes unpublished material from confidential US
diplomatic cables, released last year by WikiLeaks, which describe
Russia as a "virtual mafia state".
Harding gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's
Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller.
LUKE HARDING is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the
Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has
also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the co-author of two
previous books, written with David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian
Assange's War on Secrecy (2011) and The Liar: The Fall of
Jonathan Aitken (1997), nominated for the Orwell Prize. The Hollywood
studio DreamWorks has bought film rights to WikiLeaks. He has
also written for the magazine Granta.
He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, the freelance journalist
Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.
