IT WAS THE summer of 2016 when a manager at the Central Intelligence Agency pulled him into a conference room, sat him down at a table, and asked him to read the intelligence they had brought.

Van Landingham wasn’t naive about what the Kremlin was capable of. His work as an intelligence analyst for the CIA had given him a front row seat to the destruction that Russia’s spy services had wrought in places like Syria and Ukraine.

But this wasn’t about what Russia was doing in some far away country.

Inside a room wrapped in a vault in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, he read the intelligence showing that Moscow was trying to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“I think for the first time in my professional life, I felt physically ill reading something,” he says.

That was only the beginning of a long, strange journey that would place van Landingham right at the center of the 2016 campaign’s biggest story. Months later, the Agency assigned him the job of writing the first draft of the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment about Russian election meddling that concluded what many had suspected: Vladimir Putin did it. And he did it to help Donald Trump.