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The country on the west African coast called Ghana is hardly the place one expects a true Cold War espionage drama to play out. It had no Berlin Wall. No missile sites. In truth, it was just a nation of gold mines and cocoa plantations trying to find its way after independence in 1957.

But it was in its capital city, Accra, that Ghana became a Cold War battleground in the proxy war between the United States and Soviet Union as they competed for the soul of an entire continent. This silent war raged for years, with neither side giving an inch. But then, disaster.

It was a textbook honey trap operation that obliterated America's intelligence network across West Africa. Ghanaian intelligence services engineered a sophisticated romance targeting the most vulnerable point in any spy operation: the human heart.

All it took was one charming operative targeting a lonely American woman on assignment for the CIA. Eighteen months of seduction and manipulation ended in the complete destruction of the CIA's presence in Ghana. The consequences for the CIA extended far beyond the borders of the West African country and onto the global stage of geopolitics.

This is the story of Sharon Scranage, which was yet another devastating blow for American intelligence in the infamous Year of the Spy that was 1985

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