When I came to Washington, D.C. as a reporter in the late 1980s, another journalist gave me a tip. There’s a building downtown, he said, that’s a Justice Department annex, and you need to visit the office there that handles reports filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, widely known as FARA. These are documents submitted by lobbyists, publicists, consultants, and others working to influence Congress, the executive branch, and the public on behalf of foreign governments and entities. Ever since this law was passed in 1938 mandating such registration, the DOJ has collected these submissions, which outline what these Americans are doing for their overseas clients—which could include corporations, political parties, or warlords—and how much they are earning for their toils. You’ll find lots of stories there, my pal told me.

He was right. At the time, the office was a little-visited backwater. An older woman had overseen it for years. And if you showed up at the right time—that is, when she wasn’t too busy—she’d rustle through the records and look up a particular registration for you. (Calling ahead didn’t help.) One of my first requests was for a filing from Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, a lobbying firm founded by Republican heavy hitters, including two—Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—who would go on to fortune and infamy. Black, Manafort at the time, I learned, was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to whip up support in the Reagan Administration, on Capitol Hill, and in the media for Jonas Savimbi, a rebel leader and one-time Maoist with a reputation for brutality who was fighting to overthrow the leftist government of Angola. The filing was a gold mine, listing meetings and phone calls with government officials, congressional aides, and D.C. influencers that Black, Manafort had conducted, during which the firm could plead Savimbi’s case. He’s a freedom fighter. He’s an African George Washington. He’ll topple the Marxists and offer the United States another foothold on the continent. It revealed how influence peddling worked in the nation’s capital and how the Black, Manafort gang had managed to win backing for Savimbi from the Reagan Administration, which was providing weapons to his UNITA movement. I had a good story.

This influence campaign was nothing new. In the decades before and after the Savimbi caper, foreign agents schemed and scrambled in Washington to gain favorable treatment for assorted bad guys, including Nazis and Russian oligarchs. In his new book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, journalist Casey Michel, who directs the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, traces the history of FARA and this form of lobbying and makes the case that all this wheels-greasing undermines U.S. national security and democracy at home and abroad. The result is an eye-popping deep dive into a particularly slimy corner of the D.C. swamp that often escapes scrutiny. Americans may have an inkling about all the lobbying that transpires in Washington on behalf of corporations and the wealthy. But Foreign Agents exposes a different netherworld of the nation’s capital and shows us how influence in the United States is easily purchased by foreign actors.

Appearing in a starring role is none other than Manafort. Much of the book follows his rise and fall, casting him as emblematic of the often sleazy world of foreign agents. But before telling that story, Michel introduces us to a fellow named Ivy Lee.

In the early 1900s, Lee practically invented the public relations industry. With the rise of national newspapers and syndicated journalism, the idea of “public opinion” was born, and Lee saw that this created an opportunity to shape popular perceptions on all sorts of issues. When the Colorado National Guard in 1914 slaughtered striking miners and their family members near the town of Ludlow—and many people throughout the nation howled in protest—John D. Rockefeller Jr., who oversaw the mining operation involved, called in Lee. The PR man whipped up a campaign for the tycoon. Rockefeller flew to Colorado to meet with the miners who survived the massacre; he even attended an event where he danced with their wives. Lee drew attention to the Rockefellers’ philanthropy. He also spread the (false) word that the strikers had fired first. It worked. John Jr. and John Sr. emerged from the scandal with their reputations intact, if not enhanced. “The combination Lee perfected after Ludlow—laundering the reputations of executives, overseeing smear campaigns against opponents, all in order to cover up revolting crimes—was a playbook,” Michel writes.

After Ludlow, Lee appeared at a congressional hearing where legislators challenged him on his dissemination of deceptions about the massacre. Would he admit these were not factual assertions? “What is a fact?” Lee answered. “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to…give you my interpretation of the facts.” He was way ahead of Kellyanne Conway in the advocacy of “alternative facts.”

Lee’s list of corporate clients expanded. He became rich. But looking for more business, he set his sights on foreign lands, and that led him to a young politician in Italy named Benito Mussolini, who was leading a movement called “fascism.” Lee began advising Mussolini on how to best craft his message and gain support in the United States. He worked his American press contacts to sell Il Duce as a “people’s leader” and an “efficient authoritarian.” Other governments came knocking on his door. Advocating for American recognition of the new Soviet Union, Lee—who may or may not have been paid by Moscow—whitewashed its repressive ways.

His next notorious step came when he signed I.G. Farben, the German industrial conglomerate, as a client, with the intent to help it obtain business in the United States. In 1934, the assignment changed, with I.G. Farben asking Lee to improve the image of Berlin and Adolf Hitler in America. He enthusiastically provided advice to his German associates: The Nazis should play down all that antisemitism and stress their desire to beat back communism. When I.G. Farben asked Lee to repeat his advice to Nazi officers, he gladly did so. Fascism, communism—Lee didn’t care whether his benefactors waved red or black flags. His concern was the green.

Again, Lee was hauled before Congress, where it emerged that he had met directly with Joseph Goebbels and Hitler and had advised the Germans on how to spin the Nazis’ rearmament program. Lee soon died of a brain tumor, but Congress decided to address the problem he had represented and passed FARA. The legislators figured this shot of transparency would inhibit malevolent foreigners and possible adversaries seeking to influence the U.S. government and public opinion by paying well-connected Americans to spread propaganda and misleading talking points. If you couldn’t outlaw this activity—given that the First Amendment guarantees citizens the right “to petition the Government”—exposing it should undercut those efforts. But, as Michel notes, they were wrong.

Over the following decades, FARA was unevenly enforced and often not at all. The foreign lobbying business grew, with many, if not most, foreign agents not bothering to register. And that brings us back to Manafort, a lawyer trained at Georgetown Law School who had worked on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

After Reagan’s victory, Black, Manafort pioneered a new form of influence peddling. The firm, working with bad-boy political strategist Lee Atwater, helped Republican candidates win offices. Then it lobbied those legislators—who owed their jobs to Black, Manafort—on behalf of its corporate clients, including the Tobacco Institute, the investment bank Salomon Brothers, and Johnson & Johnson. (It also advised a casino owner named Donald Trump.) The cash rolled in. Next, Manafort and his comrades expanded their repertoire to representing overseas autocrats, kleptocrats, and human rights abusers who opposed democracy, repressed critics, and stole money from their citizens. The roster was a who’s who of miscreants: Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. The firm made millions striving to pretty up the images of these tyrants. A 1992 Center for Public Integrity report highlighted these endeavors; it was titled “The Torturers’ Lobby.”

In the 1990s, Black, Manafort was bought by a massive PR firm, and soon after that, Manafort struck out on his own. Michel chronicles how he connected with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska—proposing a plan to help boost the image of Vladimir Putin’s government—and eventually hooked up with Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin-friendly Ukrainian politician who had won a fraud-ridden presidential election in 2004 that was overturned after a popular uprising known as the Orange Revolution. Manafort spruced up Yanukovych—better suits, better hair—and helped him win the presidency in 2010. (The pair would soak naked together in Yanukovych’s hot tub.) But after four years of corruption and cronyism—as Manafort pocketed hefty fees—and following Yanukovych’s decision under pressure from Putin to cancel a European trade deal in 2013, large-scale protests challenged Manafort’s man, and Yanukovych the following year fled the country.

Two years later, Manafort, in debt to Deripaska and looking to re-juice his career, wheedled his way into Trump’s presidential campaign and soon became its top dog—only to be undone when a secret ledger emerged revealing that Yanukovych’s pro-Russia party had earmarked $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments for his firm. He denied wrongdoing, but Trump gave him the boot. Not known at the time was that Manafort had been meeting and sharing internal Trump campaign data with a former business associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who was close to Deripaska and was later identified by the U.S. government as a Russian intelligence officer.

Manafort was not only a money-grubbing lobbyist and consultant who had aided a Russia-allied autocrat in Ukraine, he had been in cahoots with a Russian spy. A subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee report would label him a “grave counterintelligence threat.” After becoming a target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and the connections between the Trump campaign and Moscow, Manafort ended up in prison on assorted charges, including money laundering, tax evasion, and failure to register as a foreign agent. The last was a big deal, for the Justice Department had rarely prosecuted such an infraction. The case sent scores of lobbyists scurrying to register.

That appeared a victory for good-government advocates who yearned to see FARA enforced. Moreover, other Trump associates were also charged in unrelated cases for not registering as foreign agents. Yet in the final months of his presidency, Trump pardoned Manafort and his disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose guilty plea included the admission that he had made false statements in FARA filings. And several of the Trump advisers who faced similar charges got off. So, ultimately, was Manafort’s story and all the rest a tale of defeat for transparency? “Trump’s pardons,” Michel observes, “blasted the foundations of the new efforts to stanch foreign lobbying.”

Manafort, as Michel thoroughly documents, was not alone. For decades, many D.C. players—on both sides of the aisle—have accepted gold from antidemocrats abroad. And they’ve done it legally. Institutional corruption is far more prevalent in the nation’s capital than the illegal shenanigans that landed Manafort in the hoosegow. Toward the end of the Cold War, the law firm Patton, Boggs and Blow repped the autocratic and murderous regime in Guatemala and successfully pushed in Washington for a block on military aid to that government to be lifted. Another law firm, DLA Piper, in the 2000s lobbied for the dictatorial United Arab Emirates and the autocratic Turkish government. The Livingston Group, founded by a former top GOP member of Congress, Robert Livingston, signed up a stable of dictators, including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Robert Dole, after retiring from the Senate, sold his services to Deripaska and successfully pressed the State Department to grant a visa to the oligarch, whom U.S. officials had suspected of being tied to Russian organized crime. The Clinton Foundation hoovered up tens of millions from foreign oligarchs seeking to buy respectability and gain access to powerful Americans. And assorted think tanks and elite universities have eagerly lapped up huge donations from Mideast tyrannies, China, and other repressive states looking to polish their images in the United States.

Michel depicts our political system and government as mired in this muck. The influence peddlers help legitimize dictators even as they undermine American national security by affording these governments easy access to U.S. decision-making and influencers. He sadly points out that President Joe Biden did not keep a campaign promise to clamp down on foreign lobbying.

Foreign Agents is an investigative accomplishment and a cri de cœur. Michel contends that all this influence selling causes deep rot in the American system and abroad. He even speculates that Manafort’s machinations helped screw up Ukrainian politics in a way that set the foundation for the horrific war there. But should lobbying for repressive foreign regimes be made illegal? he asks. It’s a tough question. Would that be constitutional? Not surprisingly, he leans toward a ban, after demonstrating that moves to increase transparency have not stymied what he considers a subversion of democracy.

American democracy is broken in a myriad of ways—the campaign finance system, the Electoral College, the overall lobbying system—and the swamp remains undrained and its inhabitants undaunted. If reformers could amass the political will to curb foreign agents, that would be a good start. Better yet would be if such an effort were part of a comprehensive money-in-politics overhaul. What’s for certain is that this shady business of influence will not greatly diminish with more exposure. As one American lobbyist who worked for Liberia’s Samuel Doe, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu once quipped, “Shame is for sissies.”