Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

CIA H EADQUARTERS

L ANGLEY , V IRGINIA

Andrew Conroy had been with the Central Intelligence Agency for almost forty years. During that time, he had gone through four wives, three peptic ulcers, two brushes with cancer, and one assassination attempt.

Over his career, he had helped the Agency navigate coups, wars, foreign interventions, and untold other global and regional crises.

For his dedication and hard-won experience, he had been promoted to Deputy Director of Operations.

As such, he was responsible for overseeing the collection of foreign intelligence, most specifically human foreign intelligence, as well as covert action by CIA operatives around the world. It was a job he had not only excelled at but also had enjoyed. At least until recently.

His failed marriages notwithstanding, he liked to think that he performed better under pressure, but the relentless force being applied by the White House at the moment, as well as the intelligence committees in Congress, was withering. They all wanted answers. And rightfully so. He did too.

For three weeks, the powers that be had been pushing the CIA to turn over every rock, leaf, and blade of grass that they could find. It was critical that the Agency get to the bottom of what the Russians had transferred to Belarus. But so far, the entire Directorate of Operations had come up empty.

They had hit so many dry holes, in fact, that some were wondering if it might be a wild goose chase—some sort of psychological operation cooked up by the Kremlin to spook Western powers into reevaluating their support of Ukraine.

But on the other hand, if the story was accurate, all bets would be off. It would mark an incredibly dangerous escalation—the first time since the Cold War that Moscow had moved nuclear weapons into a country outside Russia.

And not just any country. Belarus was a bellicose, regional backwater with a rightly deserved inferiority complex and enough bubbling paranoia coursing through its leadership's corrupt bloodstream to make even the most fervent of conspiracy theorists blanch.

The Belarusians weren't just unstable nutcases; they were now unstable nutcases who may have been handed nuclear weapons.

As to what type of nukes they could be in possession of, the consensus, based on best guesses, as well as recent public statements from Russian president Fedor Peshkov, was that they were tactical nuclear weapons—smaller, shorter-range devices that could be put to devastating effect on the battlefield.

While experts debated the degree of likelihood that the transfer had taken place, Conroy and his people had already moved on to the next question—if Belarus did have Russian nukes, where were they being kept?

The most obvious answer was at one of its old Soviet-era nuclear storage facilities. The USSR had built dozens of them across the country. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the facilities had, presumably, fallen into disrepair. That meant that one, or more, must have been refurbished.

Though the CIA couldn't have eyes everywhere at every moment of the day, if the Agency had missed such a refurbishment—at the very same time they were unable to confirm or deny the presence of Russian nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil—it spoke to a massive intelligence failure. It was the Iraq WMD debacle all over again. Langley would have failed to develop the proper well-placed, knowledgeable sources necessary for the U.S. government to make vital national security decisions.

It would be a black mark on the CIA's record. More specifically, it was a stain on the Directorate of Operations—especially with how deeply invested America was in the war next door in Ukraine.

There were other divisions, departments, and American intelligence community partners that had played a role in the current failure, but ultimately Conroy saw it as his responsibility and therefore his problem to fix.

As such, the Agency was playing a dangerous game of catch-up—shoveling mountains of currency, man-hours, and resources into Belarus, all in the hopes of quickly developing as many high-value human networks as possible.

Until they received evidence to the contrary, the CIA had no choice but to operate as if there were indeed Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. That raised the stakes for everyone, including the Russians, to a dangerously high level.

It was a level that the White House deemed absolutely unacceptable. American president Paul Porter had no intention of accidentally stumbling into war with Russia, nor did he intend to allow the Russians to purposely drag him into one.

In a face-to-face with the Director of Central Intelligence, President Porter had made his position crystal clear—he wanted the gloves to come off. The Agency was to do everything in its power not just to clip Russia's wings, but to remove them.

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.