Page 24 of Shadow of Doubt

Since its most recent invasion of Ukraine, one of the greatest fears had been that if Peshkov and the Russians were allowed to succeed, they wouldn’t stop there and that history would repeat itself. The history they were all afraid of was what had happened in the run-up to World War II.

After Adolf Hitler had been allowed to annex Austria and then the Sudetenland, the Nazis went after the rest of Czechoslovakia. In the absence of meaningful international pushback, Hitler became even more emboldened and, after staging several false-flag attacks as a pretext, next took Poland, and World War II began.

In 2014, despite having signed an international treaty known as the Budapest Memorandum, which stated that Russia would respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the Russians invaded and took both the Donbas and Crimea. Eight years later, without provocation, the Russians invaded again, hell-bent on capturing the rest of the country.

From there, before even the thought of nuclear weapons being transferred to Belarus, analysts had seen Peshkov possibly going one of two ways. He had massed troops in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova—a tiny, former Soviet Republic—where he was running a similar playbook as he had in the Donbas. He was already claiming to just be looking out for the interests of “ethnic Russians” who happened to live in the sovereign nation of Moldova. It was the same line he had used before invading the Donbas and Crimea. It was also eerily similar to Hitler’s claim that he was simply protecting “ethnic Germans” in the Sudetenland.

The other option was that the Russians could invade one of the smaller, Baltic nations like Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, all three of which had also been members of the former Soviet Union.

Of course today, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the greatest military alliance in history and Article 5 of the NATO charter stated that an attack on one member was an attack on all.

Peshkov, however, had been doing all he could to weaken that alliance, to sow doubt as to whether it was worth fighting for, or whether it would fall apart in the face of actual war against Russia.

Analysts across NATO members’ intelligence services put the odds of a Russian attack on a member nation in the next ten years at fifty-fifty. In response, NATO headquarters in Belgium had been completely reorganizing itself into a full-on war command center. It was a level of activity not seen since the very height of the Cold War.

And the sudden threat of nuclear weapons being based in Belarus had only made things worse.

President Porter came out and publicly denounced Russia’s alleged deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, declaring any such transfers as “absolutely irresponsible.” It was a statement he made repeatedly and forcefully.

In keeping up the public pressure, the White House hoped to discourage the Russians from doing anything stupid and kicking off World War III.

But hope wasn’t a plan. A plan required a concrete course of action. That’s where Conroy came in.

Once the CIA confirmed that the nukes were in Belarus, they would be able to present options to President Porter and the National Security Council. To get to that point, however, he was going to need a lot of luck and a lot of brainpower.

Looking up, he saw the personification of both standing in his outer office. Maggie Thomas, as always, was precisely three minutes early for their daily meeting.

CHAPTER 11

Margaret Jean Thomas, or “Maggie” to the people who knew her, was a “skip leg”—a legacy employee whose family service had skipped a generation.

Maggie’s grandmother Jean, from whom she took her middle name, had worked for the Agency’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II. The woman’s exploits had been legendary. When the OSS was dissolved after the war, Jean became one of the CIA’s first female intelligence officers and served with continued valor and distinction until her retirement.

The resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter was uncanny. They were both tough, broad-shouldered women who stood over six feet tall. Maggie, like her grandmother, had no problem holding her own in the male-dominated world of espionage. She could outdrink, outsmoke, and outpoker the best of them.

She had been a Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies major at Smith College in Massachusetts and had gotten her master’s of science in global studies and international relations at Northeastern. Thanks to a pair of flower child parents, she had spent most of her youth overseas and could speak four languages. The CIA couldn’t have scripted a better résumé.

It’s been said that great intelligence analysts were like great painters or musicians. You didn’t teach them their craft, you helped them perfect it. It was a God-given ability that you either had, or you didn’t. Which was why the great ones, like Maggie, were so rare.

She was fearless, curious, and absolutely tenacious. Once she hadzeroed in on something, she didn’t give up until her objective was complete. Nothing and no one could stand in her way.

Adept at spotting patterns, she was patient and methodical in her approach, especially when it came to piecing together the bigger picture. She was also humble, willing to admit when she had gotten something wrong, to learn from her mistakes, and to adjust accordingly.

Maggie and her husband, Paul, a State Department employee, lived in a storybook Cape Cod that had belonged to her grandmother Jean. It was only three and a half miles from CIA headquarters. Maggie could make the drive in under ten minutes, but preferred, when the weather was agreeable, to ride her bike.

Considering her high-profile position at the CIA, it was a dangerous means of travel, which she and Conroy had butted heads over countless times. But no matter how often they’d argued, Maggie always came out the winner.

From Bangkok to Berlin, she had grown up on a bicycle. Since she was a child, it had given her a sense of freedom. She loved the outdoors, being in the fresh air—especially with how much time she spent cooped up at Langley. It was a mental health issue for her, something she wasn’t willing to compromise on.

Though Conroy never stopped disliking it, particularly from a security standpoint, he chalked it up to her being quirky. It was simply who she was. It was also part of what made her so good at her job.

In her mid-forties, with almost two decades at the Agency, she was smarter than most of the people in the building, which was why he’d put her in charge of Russia House. It was a specialized, highly secretive unit focused on Russia and the former Soviet states.

Despite falling under the CIA’s Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia, because of the extremely sensitive intelligence it dealt with, Russia House was fully self-contained. It had its own offices, its own computer network, and even its own SCIF.

As an example of how the culture had come full circle at Langley, post-9/11, the Middle East and counterterrorism assignments had been all the rage. Today, however, Russia House had once again become the coolest table in the lunchroom. And with all of the pressure raining downfrom the White House over Belarus and the nuke situation, Conroy was exceedingly grateful to have Maggie sitting at the head of that table. Getting her attention, he waved her into his office.

“Good morning, Maggie,” Conroy said as she entered and they both took their usual seats at his conference table.

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