Shortly after midnight on June 17, 1972, an unusually attentive security guard named Frank Wills discovered an unlocked door in the garage of the Watergate office complex. A piece of tape had been placed over the latch. Wills removed the tape and continued on his rounds. When he returned a while later, he found the lock taped again. He called the police. Twenty-six months later, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

“This is the door,” I tell Alexander Vindman, late of the United States Army and the National Security Council. Vindman and I were supposed to be walking along the Potomac, but we took a detour to visit the Watergate. I wanted to show him this particular door. There is no plaque here, but there should be one, dedicated to the Constitution, to the free press, and to the most important security guard in American history.

Vindman, who is an idealist—this is why he took a job in the Trump White House despite having read about the Trump White House—seems moved. “The system worked,” he says. Then he asks a question.

“Who am I in the Watergate story? John Dean?”

Dean, Nixon’s lawyer, facilitated the Watergate cover-up, and then turned witness against the president. No, I say. Dean did wrong before he did right. Did you start by doing something wrong?

“I did my duty as an American citizen and Army officer,” Vindman says.

If that’s the case, I said, that might make you the Frank Wills of the Trump impeachment. All you did was tell your colleagues that you may have witnessed a crime in progress.

WE SIT IN THE SHADE outside the Kennedy Center, masks off. People walk by, but no one recognizes him. He’s in shorts and wearing glasses. He looks more like an engineer who forgot his pocket protector than a former infantry officer, one wounded in Iraq. Utterly obscure in the summer of 2019—a bright, awkward, ambitious lieutenant colonel laboring in the salt mines of the U.S. national-security apparatus—by fall he was a linchpin witness in Donald Trump’s impeachment. His fame, all of the controversy, the demolition of his military career are owed to a single telephone call—a “perfect” call, in Trump’s formulation. On July 25 of last year, Vindman, who, as the National Security Council’s director for European affairs, organized the call, listened, with other officials, to a conversation between Trump and the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump told Zelensky, working his way to the subject of Joe Biden: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it …”

Vindman was surprised by Trump’s approach, and by its implications. Like other American specialists in the successor states of the former Soviet Union, he was invested in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. And like most national-security professionals, he was interested in countering Russia’s malign influence—along its borders, in places like Ukraine and Belarus and the Baltic states; across Europe; and in American elections. He believed in buttressing Ukraine’s new leadership. He also had an aversion to shakedowns, and this, to him, felt like a shakedown.

[Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

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