IT EXPLICS ITSELF:

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, senior Russia House officials held a series of meetings in a conference room adorned with Stalin-era posters, seeking to make sense of disconcerting reports that Moscow had mounted a covert operation to upend the U.S. presidential race.

By early August, the sense of alarm had become so acute that CIA Director John Brennan called White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. "I need to get in to see the president," Brennan said, with unusual urgency in his voice.

Brennan had just spent two days sequestered in his office reviewing a small mountain of material on Russia. The conference table at the center of the dark-paneled room was stacked with dozens of binders bearing stamps of TS/SCI -- for "top secret, sensitive compartmented information" -- and code words corresponding to collection platforms aimed at the Kremlin.

There were piles of finished assessments, but Brennan had also ordered up what agency veterans call the "raw stuff" -- unprocessed material from informants, listening devices, computer implants and other sources. Clearing his schedule, Brennan pored over all of it, his door closed, staying so late that the glow through his office windows remained visible deep into the night from the darkened driveway that winds past the headquarters building's main entrance.

The description of Brennan and this article is adapted from "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy," a Washington Post book, which will be published Oct. 2 by Custom House. [...]

At the time of Brennan's request for a meeting with President Barack Obama, election anxiety about Russia was already surging. Weeks earlier, WikiLeaks had dumped nearly 20,000 emails stolen from Democratic Party computers, material from an audacious hack that authorities almost immediately traced to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was praising Russian President Vladimir Putin with inexplicable vigor and had even called on Russian spy agencies to hack his opponent.

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