I drafted an email to then president of CNN Jeff Zucker to lay out the situation as I understood it. My immediate goal was not to report the US intelligence assessment of Russia’s invasion plan, but to warn CNN to prepare for what would become—if the intelligence bore out—a monumental and dangerous news story for our times. Most of my colleagues, myself included, had been in news only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We had done our work after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the dissolution of the USSR and Warsaw Pact, and as many former Soviet republics gained independence and even
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