In this remarkable work of investigative reporting, Craig Unger reveals his thirty-year deep dive into the secret collusion between Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and Iran in which the GOP made illegal arms sales to Iran in return for Iran delaying the release of 52 American hostages until after the election, thus ensuring Reagan's win and denying Carter a second term. Taking readers inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, Unger shares never-before-seen documents and illuminates startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists. Timely, provocative, and presaging our Trump-era political scandals, DEN OF SPIES uncovers one of the darkest political conspiracies of all time and demonstrates the stakes of allowing the politics of the present to obscure our true history. Over the past two decades, Craig Unger has written some of the most explosive and respected books on the American Right's threat to democracy, including bestsellers American Kompromat and House of Bush, House of Saud. Now, Unger again displays his talent for combining superb reporting with compelling storytelling as he explores the October Surprise, a real-life spy story that changed American history. DEN OF SPIES is as powerful as Unger's previous investigations yet elevated with a personal narrative of perseverance unlike anything he's written before. Unger delivers in granular detail the most authoritative account yet of the October Surprise of 1980. It is not an overstatement, Unger contends, to say that this act of treason has played an enormous role in shaping the world we live in, from our domestic politics to our current global crises. In Iran, the repercussions from the October Surprise still reverberatetoda y thanks to the brutal, repressive theocracy that remains in place there. In the United States, the October Surprise has become the blueprint for Republican malfeasance in more than forty years of presidential elections, and part of a decades-long legacy of the Democrats' failure to fight back. The pattern culminated with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which brought with it a new paradigm of shameless cynicism that dismissed inconvenient truths as fake news, validated lies as "alternative facts," and demonized anyone who challenged Trump. "After all these years," Unger writes, "this is not a mystery to solve-at least not in a traditional sense. Rather, it is an attempt to square the circle between something that is both obvious and shrouded, self-evident and lost in the shadows... But if we are to survive as a democracy, it's vital to understand what happened all those years ago. Even if we don't like this part of our past-rather, especially if we don't like it-we must come to terms with it, to acknowledge it, to understand how and why it happened."