Alex Konanykhin was a wanted man.

The Russian mafia took out a contract on his life. The KGB, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security were also on his trail. With paid assassins and two governments in hot pursuit, Konanykhin was running out of time and places to hide.

What happened to Konanykhin, once one of Russia's wealthiest entrepreneurs who by his mid-20's amassed a $300 million empire and bankrolled Boris Yeltsin's rise to power, is, as one U.S. judge noted, "a tale worthy of a spy novel."

It is a true-life story so riveting, only Konanykhin himself can tell it. His debut book, Defiance, out in September 2006, is a hair-raising account of betrayal, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping, high-speed chases, as well as secret government cover-ups.

The book goes behind the press headlines Konanykhin's case has generated for the past 10 years; the case Washington Post called "a spellbinding seminar on international intrigue."

In Defiance Konanykhin, 39, the founder of KMGI, a thriving high-tech agency located in New York, describes in gripping detail his against-all-odds ascent from a poor but industrious science student in the former U.S.S.R, to a powerful tycoon in the post-Communist Russia, who lived in the mansion built for the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and was protected around the clock by Russian Secret Service. But when trusted members of his own security team betrayed him, and the U.S. government became a willing accomplice in an illicit pact with the KGB, the lives of Konanykhin and his wife Elena became a terrifying roller coaster of desperate attempts at survival, vindication, and search for justice.

After fleeing the KGB-plotted assassination attempt in Budapest and eventually settling in the United States, the Konanykhins became pawns in a high-level political game between the two countries. Russia's leaders threatened to have the FBI field office in Moscow shut down if the Americans refused to extradite the couple. What followed was an extraordinary and bizarre web of intrigue that started with a KGB search of the Konanyakhins' Watergate apartment and their arrests on fake charges fabricated by the Kremlin.

Written in a Virginia jail while Konanykhin awaited his extradition to Russia, Defiance chillingly depicts corruption in U.S. government. "The American government was hell-bent on unlawfully sending me to a sure death," Konanykhin says, pointing out that on three occasions the U.S. courts declared the arrests groundless and illegal. "Writing this book was all I could do while locked up in a prison cell—and it looked like the last thing I would be able to do in my life."

Freed and granted political asylum in the U.S.—the only post-Soviet Russians to receive this status based on their political activities—the Konanykhins are still fighting efforts of U.S. government to send them to the KGB—fourteen years after their arrival in the U.S.