Join me in my conversation with Ann Hagedorn as we discuss her critically acclaimed book, Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away, which is the chilling, little-known story of a successful American-born, Soviet-trained spy in the U.S. atomic bomb project during World War Two.

 About Ann Hagedorn

Ann Hagedorn, a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, is an award-winning author of six narrative non-fiction books that embrace a broad range of topics and were widely reviewed with coverage including the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR, Time, Smithsonian, The New York Review of Books, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.  She is a graduate of Denison University, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.  She has also received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, from Denison University.

Hagedorn’s commitment to using the literary techniques of storytelling to deliver meaningful issues to the general reader is more than a career.  It’s a calling. The books take four to seven years to research and write: from the signing of the contract to the first book-signing.  And usually, she teaches a writing course during the year following a book’s publication. 

During her years as a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, Hagedorn covered federal trials, white collar crime, high-profile bankruptcies, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. At The New York Daily News, [under the byline, Ann Hagedorn Auerbach] she wrote several series, including one about NY Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the collapse of his American Shipbuilding Company, another about law firms laundering money for Colombian drug cartels, and another about geriatric inmates in the prison system. At The Mercury News, her stories, as a rookie reporter, focused on the cops and courts beat in the East Bay region of San Francisco.  Hagedorn grew up in Dayton, Ohio, Kansas City, and Cleveland.