Spy Handler

Gregory Feifer is a senior correspondent for Radio Free Europe who also writes for Foreign Affairs and the New Republic. Until recently, he was National Public Radio’s Moscow correspondent, and has reported from Russia for almost a decade. During its resurgence under Putin, he filed from other former Soviet republics and across Russia, where he observed the effects of the country’s vast new oil wealth on an increasingly nationalistic society as well as Moscow’s rekindling of a new Cold War-style opposition to the West. In 2008, Feifer covered the Russia-Georgia war from the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia and traveled to Siberia, Belgrade and Berlin to produce a series on the Kremlin’s use of Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, as an instrument of foreign policy.

Before joining NPR in 2005, Feifer — whose mother is Russian — lived in Paris and New York, and wrote for outlets including Agence France Presse and World Policy Journal. He witnessed the coup d’état attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, and later, on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs, examined the end of the Yeltsin era and Russia’s subsequent transformation into an authoritarian state.

Feifer is the author of The Great Gamble, a history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and coauthor of Spy Handler with former KGB colonel Victor Cherkashin.