Books by Luke Harding

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Harding's haunting, brilliant account of the insidious methods used against him by a resurgent Kremlin which led to him becoming the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War. FEATURING A NEW FOREWORD FROM THE AUTHOR'A courageous and explosive expose.'ORLANDO FIGES'Luke Harding is one of the best reporters in the world.'ROBERT SAVIANO'An essential read.'NEW STATESMANIn 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.Luke Harding's Mafia State gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller.

Shadow State is a gripping investigative account of how Russia's spies helped elect Donald Trump, backed Brexit, murdered enemies and threatened the very basis of western democracy. The operatives come in disguise.

MOSCOW, July 1987. Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump visits Soviet Russia for the first time at the invitation of the government.LONDON, December 2016. Luke Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect's connections with Russia. Harding follows two leads; money and sex.WASHINGTON, January 2017. Steele's explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been 'cultivating, supporting, and assisting' Trump for years and that they have compromising information about him. Trump responds on twitter, 'FAKE NEWS.'In Collusion, award-winning journalist Luke Harding reveals the true nature of Trump's decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of the dossier. It features exclusive new material and draws on sources from the intelligence community.Harding tells an astonishing story of offshore money, sketchy real-estate deals, a Miss Universe Pageant, mobsters, money laundering, hacking and Kremlin espionage. He shines a light on powerful Russian players like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have come from Vladimir Putin himself. The special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, has already indicted several of the American protagonists, including Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort. More charges are likely as the crisis engulfs Trump's administration. This book gets to the heart of the biggest political scandal of the modern era. Russia is reshaping the world order to its advantage; this is something that should trouble us all.

Accent and Listening Assessment

1 November 2006. Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty two days later he dies, killed from the inside. The poison? Polonium; a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.Based on the best part of a decade's reporting, as well as extensive interviews with those closest to the events (including the murder suspects), and access to trial evidence, Luke Harding's A Very Expensive Poison is the definitive inside story of the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko. Harding traces the journey of the nuclear poison across London, from hotel room to nightclub, assassin to victim; it is a deadly trail that seemingly leads back to the Russian state itself. This is a shocking real-life revenge tragedy with corruption and subterfuge at every turn, and walk-on parts from Russian mafia, the KGB, MI6 agents, dedicated British coppers, Russian dissidents. At the heart of this all is an individual and his family torn apart by a ruthless crime.

It began with an unsigned email: "e;I am a senior member of the intelligence community"e;. What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man, Edward Snowden. The consequences have shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, from Obama to Cameron, to the presidents of Brazil, France, and Indonesia, and the chancellor of Germany. Edward Snowden, a young computer genius working for America's National Security Agency, blew the whistle on the way this frighteningly powerful organisation uses new technology to spy on the entire planet. The spies call it "e;mastering the internet"e;. Others call it the death of individual privacy. This is the inside story of Snowden's deeds and the journalists who faced down pressure from the US and UK governments to break a remarkable scoop. Snowden's story reads like a globe-trotting thriller, from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Hawaii, carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of secret-spilling in Hong Kong and his battle for asylum. Now stuck in Moscow, a uniquely hunted man, he faces US espionage charges and an uncertain future in exile. What drove Snowden to sacrifice himself? Award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding asks the question which should trouble every citizen of the internet age. Luke Harding's other books include Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy and Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia.