The First Female CIA Officer in Moscow, The Widow Spy | Marti Peterson (throwback episode)
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 150 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, the team sits down with legendary CIA case officer Marty Peterson, whose Cold War mission in Moscow led to one of the most dramatic KGB arrests of the era. Marty walks through running a top Soviet asset, the night of the failed dead drop, her capture at Lubyanka Prison, and what she later learned about her agent’s tragic fate. It’s a firsthand look inside real espionage, tradecraft, and the cost of intelligence work at the highest level.
00:00 – CIA Widow Spy: Marty Peterson Intro
12:40 – Moscow Tradecraft: Dead Drops & Surveillance
27:15 – Running Soviet Assets Under KGB Pressure
44:10 – Psychological Toll of Life as a CIA Spy
1:05:30 – Losing “Trigon”: Top Cold War Asset Compromised
1:22:45 – Was There a Mole? Suspecting CIA Compromise
1:33:15 – The Failed Dead Drop: Something Is Wrong
1:42:02 – KGB Ambush on the Bridge: Marty Is Taken
1:46:37 – Inside Lubyanka: Interrogation by the KGB
2:04:03 – How Trigon Died: Betrayal, Poison & Cover-Up
2:16:14 – Briefing President Carter: From Moscow to the White House
2:26:24 – Life After the CIA & Why She Wrote The Widow Spy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Special Operations. |
| 0:05.0 | Covert Ops. |
| 0:08.0 | Espionage. |
| 0:10.0 | The Team House. |
| 0:12.0 | With your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. |
| 0:21.4 | Hi, everyone. |
| 0:22.6 | This is episode 103 of the Team House. |
| 0:25.7 | I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park. |
| 0:28.3 | Tonight, we are super excited to be joined with our guest, Marty Peterson. |
| 0:33.0 | She is the author of The Widow Spy. |
| 0:35.6 | She was one of the very first, actually she was the first CIA case |
| 0:39.4 | officer sent to Moscow, but there's so much more to her story than just that. Her husband was a |
| 0:46.0 | green beret and then a CIA paramilitary officer who was unfortunately killed in Laos during the war. |
| 0:53.1 | And Marty kind of stepped right into his jungle boots and joins the |
| 0:57.6 | CIA herself, goes through all the training to become a case officer, learns Russian, and gets |
| 1:03.1 | deployed to Moscow where she handled a strategic asset, and then went on to have a 32-year |
| 1:08.9 | career at Central Intelligence. So, Marty, we're so excited to have you 32-year career at Central Intelligence. |
| 1:11.4 | So, Marty, we're so excited to have you here today. |
| 1:14.5 | Thank you so much. |
| 1:15.6 | I really am looking forward to this. |
| 1:19.8 | So, Marty, Jack and I are both major, like, superhero comic book geeks, and every good superhero has an origin story, how they gain their powers. And |
| 1:28.8 | one of the things that we like to ask our guest is, how did you get your powers? Like, |
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