Marti Peterson spent her thirty-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer, earning both the prestigious Donovan Award and the George W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism. She began professional service on the CIA's front line in Moscow, USSR, during the Cold War. Her contribution to her country originated in Pakse, Laos, during the Vietnam War, where she accompanied her husband , John, a CIA Paramilitary officer. After he was killed in a helicopter crash in 1972, Marti returned to the U.S. and entered the CIA. The story told here appears in many books about spying acitivies in the Cold War, but in the Widow Spy, she tells it as she experienced it.