Luke Harding - A Very Expensive Poison

Luke Harding is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian . Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian ’s bureau chief in Moscow. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War, in part because of his reporting on Alexander Litvinenko’s murder.

He is the author of four previous non-fiction books: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man; Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia; WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy ; and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (the last two co-written with David Leigh).

Two have been made into Hollywood movies. Dreamworks’s The Fifth Estate , based on WikiLeaks , was released in 2013. Director Oliver Stone’s biopic of Edward Snowden, adapted from The Snowden Files , is due in 2016. In 2014, Luke was awarded the James Cameron prize. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Luke lives near London with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.

‘The saga of Edward J. Snowden, the man whose leaked documents revealed the Orwellian dimensions of the National Security Agency, reads like a le Carré novel crossed with something by Kafka – at least it does in Luke Harding’s new book, The Snowden Files … But the book still gives readers, who have not been following the Snowden story closely, a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year. And if it leans toward dramatising everything in thrillerlike terms, the book also manages to leave readers with an acute understanding of the serious issues involved: the NSA’s surveillance activities and voluminous collection of data, and the consequences that this sifting of bigger and bigger haystacks for tiny needles has had on the public and its right to privacy.’

‘Luke Harding’s breathless page-turner … reads more like a spy thriller than a piece of dry political analysis … this is a riveting read and it unravels the mystery better than anything that’s been published so far.’

‘ The Snowden Files – as the iPhone episode suggests – is a super-readable, thrillerish account of the events surrounding the reporting of the documents, with a few interludes sketching out what some of the stories have revealed … Harding has done an amazing – and speedy – job of assembling material from a wide variety of sources and turning it into an exciting account.’

‘Harding’s account of how the leaks came to be published is thrilling, full of intrigue, last-minute flights, secret meetings and heroic hacks and editors … it is a vital account of the story of the decade and the issue of our age: when our lives are lived on wires, how safe are we from those who would use our private information against us, whether criminals, foreign agents or our own governments?’

‘Without one man’s courage and a life-altering decision, millions would never know about this most secret abuse of power by the intelligence agencies. This is the story of our age, brilliantly told.’

First published in 2016

by Guardian Books, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU

and by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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This ebook edition first published in 2016

Copyright © Guardian News and Media Ltd, 2016

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ISBN 978–1–78335–095–7