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Raelynn Hillhouse is an American spy novelist and former smuggler.

Hillhouse studied in Central and Eastern Europe for over six years at various institutions including Moscow State University, Moscow Finance Institute, Humboldt University of Berlin, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany) and Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania). She earned her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and her MA in Russian and East European Studies as well as her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.

When living as a student in Europe, she claims to have engaged in the black market between East and West, running Cuban rum, smuggling jewels from the Soviet Union and laundering East Bloc currencies. She claims to have been recruited by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and by the Libyan Intelligence Service. Some sources assert that she was an American intelligence operative (McGuire, 2004; Adler, 2004), but Hillhouse denies this (Nolan, 2004).

Hillhouse's debut novel, Rift Zone (2004), is a spy thriller about a female smuggler who becomes entangled in an East German plot to stop the fall of the Berlin Wall. The American Booksellers Association Book Sense program selected it as one of the best books of 2004 and Library Journal named it one of the year's most promising debuts. Her second novel, Outsourced (2007) is a political thriller about the outsourcing of the CIA and Pentagon and the turf wars between the two agencies.

Hillhouse taught at the University of Michigan and was a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. She is a founding member of the International Thriller Writers.

Hillhouse writes a national security blog, The Spy Who Billed Me. The Spy Who Billed Me was featured in the New York Times Week in Review after the head of the private military corporation Blackwater USA granted her an exclusive interview. In June 2007, Hillhouse discovered the US national Intelligence Community budget metadata in a declassified PowerPoint presentation released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Hillhouse was born in the Ozarks and currently lives in Hawaii.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Raelynn Hillhouse", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0