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The veteran C.I.A. operative had some information I wanted. It wasn’t much: a little detail for an article I was reporting about Sergei V. Skripal, the retired Russian spy whose poisoning last year sparked a conflagration between Russia and the West. Could we talk on background? No need to put your name in the paper, I told him.

Not a chance.

I was in “a dark hole,” he informed me when I called one afternoon . And no one would help me out of it.

It had been about five months since Mr. Skripal and his daughter were found twitching on a park bench, and by that point, my colleague Ellen Barry and I might as well have been interviewing the paving stones in Salisbury, the English cathedral town where the two Russians had been poisoned. We had approached spies and their intermediaries from Washington to Moscow and many places in between — anyone we thought might have some information about the case. Few would even speak with us, and those who did provided little but discouragement.