I was sharing a meal of filet mignon and Maker's Mark with an intelligence source. As a journalist I have come to rely on certain sources for details of investigations and frankly potential scandals circulating around government. It is the kind of information that is not readily available to the public. It is often highly classified and not intended for public consumption. At least not until government officials decide to declassify it. The source I was meeting with on that day was a man who had once recounted, with disquieting calm, what it was like to watch the enemy get bombed in war zones by a predator drone. There are live feeds from the armed drones over the battlefield, and you can go to a specially designed enclosed area in a building or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF to see the strike. The “Pred feeds,” as they've been dubbed by insiders, show the dust settling after the strike while the “viewer” waits to see how it turned out or the “reflections”—whether you have hit the target or not.

That day, as he described the “Pred feed” to me, my source's voice remained even-keeled. The muscles in his face barely moved. During my career covering the Justice and Homeland Security beat for CBS News, many of the law enforcement and intelligence operatives I've come into contact with spoke of horrible things with this same kind of composure. It's not that they didn't care. They cared. But they were professionals trained to maneuver through emergencies regularly, unnerved. I learned to see their humanity beneath their stoic demeanors. I was getting better at deciphering their cryptic language. So, when these individuals started to panic, I knew something serious was going on.

My source looked me in the eye and casually alluded to problems that he believed were undermining our democracy. He couldn't state any specifics. I knew if I pressed him, he would stop talking to me altogether. He switched the subject to our country's more pressing long-term problem. This was the topic I had become almost exclusively obsessed with since the summer of 2016. I couldn't let it go—the Putin-led cyber-espionage attacks.

“So, you are saying this is just the modern-day version of trade craft for the Russians?” I asked.

I had been piecing together the evolution of how Russian operatives functioned throughout history. I appreciated the John le Carré–like glamour of the old KGB days in which spies used invisible ink, performed dead letter drops, and buried mounds of cash in the woods.

Then there were the more recent incarnations of Russian-government-led attempts to use our vulnerabilities against us, which spoke to the questions of how any of this stuff affects us directly or why we should care.1 In the 1960s, Russian-led operative units tried to exploit the country's Achilles’ heel—racism—and Jim Crow laws.² For example, they tried to portray Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an Uncle Tom who had been bribed by President Lyndon Johnson to quell the fire of the movement and keep black people in subordinate roles.³

In 2016, the internet allowed Russian-government-led cyber-espionage hackers to embed themselves in our institutions, gathering and releasing intelligence to the public to undermine our politicians in a more succinct and effective manner.⁴ They used social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and exploited these platforms’ capacity to incite hate.⁵ They attempted to compromise our voting booths and influenced us, without our knowledge, thereby waging an invisible war.

This is warfare. It's not typically discussed in these terms, but the United States and its allies are already engaged in a war with Russia. The hackers messed with our minds by exploiting our divisions with information warfare.

“Is it complicated then, because they play by a different set of rules?” I asked.

My source nodded. He was silent a long time. He seemed grave. He took a sip of water as I wondered to myself if anybody even knew what those rules were. Several sources had spoken to me about the intricate web of alleged collusion between Russian officials and the Trump administration, which was just one in a series of White House–based problems they couldn't talk about but had shaken. There was such intensity to them in how they described what had happened.

I kept feeling as if I had been living in a movie or a dream for months. This simultaneously thrilled and frightened me.

It also made me feel an urgent responsibility to uncover more and to relay what I had learned to other people.

“Do you think the cyberattacks destabilized our democracy, that we are verging on a constitutional crisis then?” I asked.

My source nodded so slightly that it was barely discernable. This is the way many of my sources operate. They never feed you all the information you want. They seem to dole it out in small nuggets. It's like an intricate puzzle you have to put together by gathering the pieces from different people, different agencies, and at different times. One must be tenacious in doing this job. You get a taste of something good and you want more. The Russia investigation for me started just as other stories I report. However, the pieces I gathered with my Justice unit at CBS News kept leading to bigger stories and ever more troubling revelations.