It was the summer of 2016 when a manager at the Central Intelligence Agency pulled him into a conference room, sat him down at a table, and asked him to read the intelligence they had brought. 

 

Van Landingham wasn’t naive about what the Kremlin was capable of. His work as an intelligence analyst for the CIA had given him a front row seat to the destruction that Russia’s spy services had wrought in places like Syria and Ukraine.

But this wasn’t about what Russia was doing in some far away country.