The Widow Spy: My CIA Journey from the Jungles of Laos to a Moscow Prison

How working for the CIA led me from the jungles of Laos to a Moscow prison.

Her story began in 1972, when in Laos her husband John—who worked for the CIA and was there on an anti-communist mission—was killed. From that day on, the war against communism became her personal war. She got a traineeship with the CIA, and then, in a cold November of 1975, arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport to become the first female CIA agent in Moscow.

In Peterson’s memoirs you’ll find chases and surveillance, meeting her future husband at the U.S. embassy, a battle on a bridge against KGB agents, the cells of Lubyanka, the knock-you-off-your-feet smell of foul Soviet tobacco, and poison in a fountain pen that she personally passed to an agent named Trigon—also known as Aleksandr Ogorodnik—whose fate served as the basis for the plot of Yulian Semyonov’s novel “TASS is authorized to declare…”