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This wasn’t supposed to be a huge project. It began mostly as a curiosity.

In the spring of 2017, a source gave me a State Department report from the 1980s that had exposed anti-American disinformation campaigns launched by Moscow. At the time, I was a senior video correspondent in the newsroom, and I started reading with low expectations.

I had seen similar reports over the years. Many were unreadable and, given the passage of time, felt irrelevant. But this one read like a movie script — which inspired me to start reporting.

I quickly hit a roadblock: Many of the people named in the report had died. So I put the project aside.