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Joseph Weisberg gained some well deserved fame as the creator and principal writer of The Americans, the hit Cold War spy drama about a family of KGB agents living undercover in the Washington suburbs, that ran on the FX network from 2013 to 2018. He knew something about that, having worked for the CIA for three-plus years in the 1980s. But lately he’s drawn notoriety, and even derision—at least from some prominent CIA veterans—for a recent piece in The Washington Post that seemed to advocate appeasing Vladimir Putin’s demands that the U.S. and NATO back away from Ukraine. The piece was adapted from his new book, Russia Upside Down: A Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War.

CIA veterans went nuts.

“The sound you may have heard…was the heads of national security professionals exploding—or at least those people spitting out their holiday eggnog,” cracked a writer on Cipher Brief, a major voice of the intelligence establishment. 

“Among the gems in his piece—which argues that…