BIOGRAPHY - Page 17
Natasha watched helplessly as Matthew’s life began to fall apart again, this time when the tabloids got a tip about his secret identity and did a full-page story revealing Matt Murdock was Daredevil. Natasha was somewhat indifferent to the idea, thinking perhaps it was time to go public, but Matt was committed to fighting tooth-and-nail to force a retraction from the Daily Globe and (perhaps unrealistically) put the genie back in the bottle. What really concerned the Black Widow was that 
Matt wouldn’t even put on his costume any more these days. Foggy was also struggling to keep his life together in all this chaos, and Natasha found no support there. Thinking this all might be a delayed response to Karen’s death, Black Widow reached out through her S.H.I.E.L.D. contacts and even directed Elektra to speak to Matthew when she thought nobody else was getting through to him. [Daredevil (2nd series) #36-37]
Months later, the Avengers captured Madame Hydra while operating in Bulgaria, but the local government refused to release her to American custody. Instead, members of the Bulgarian government wanted Natasha Romanoff in exchange for Madame Hydra. The Director of Central Intelligence was inclined to make the deal, and instructed Nick Fury to call his agent in. Rather than doing that, 
Fury warned Natasha and told her to disappear. The Black Widow chose a different tactic. The media circus surrounding Matt Murdock had yet to die down, and so Natasha chose to hide in plain sight by visiting Matthew and staying extremely in the public eye where she could not be targeted or extracted by those who wanted her.
Natasha decided to play it coy with Matthew and present her visit as simply that. He didn’t believe her but had a lot on his mind regardless. Matt had impulsively married his recent girlfriend Mila Donovan, and now she wanted an annulment after experiencing the craziness of his lifestyle. 
Entertaining a beautiful ex-girlfriend was not on the forefront of his mind. Unfortunately, the CIA also adapted to Black Widow’s tactics and set up an assassination attempt on the two of them, designed to look like one of Daredevil’s gangland enemies attacking instead of Natasha’s rivals. After the chaos on the street and getting shot herself, Natasha came clean with Matt. They worked with Fury to capture the assassin and trace his illegal contract back to the CIA Director, ensuring that no further action against Black Widow was done.
All that was left was identifying the man who wanted her in the first place. It turned out that Alexi Shostakov, the Red Guardian, had survived his apparent death years earlier. Alexi went underground and built himself a position close to the Bulgarian government. Despite all he had 
achieved, Alexi decided to seek revenge on Natasha for their troubled past and risked exposing his position to get at her. His gambit failed, and he ordered Madame Hydra released simply out of spite. Natasha confronted him privately in Bulgaria to try and understand his motives but, in the end, she pulled him out of his private castle and turned him over to S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers. [Daredevil (2nd series) #61-64]
Colonel Vladimir Pradov was a former Soviet military man who changed his name and fled to the United States as Anatoly Krylenko. Once known as the butcher of Shir Khan, Pradov had committed severe war crimes in Afghanistan and oversaw missile silos filled with Sarin gas warheads as a rogue operation. Even in his new life, he began to let details slip and the Russian mafia zeroed in on Pradov to gain access to the Sarin gas. On behalf of the Russian government, Black Widow assassinated Pradov to prevent him from leaking the location of the silos. Unfortunately, Pradov (as Krylenko) owned a deli in Brooklyn and was acquaintances with Hawkeye. Clint began looking into the matter, forcing Natasha to rebuke him. Hawkeye and Black Widow ended up joining forces to stop the mobsters’ cyborg Foxfire from getting the Sarin gas, 
but Clint and Natasha’s friendship suffered in the process. [Hawkeye (3rd series) #7-8] Not long after, Black Widow was present at Avengers Mansion when the Scarlet Witch went insane and subconsciously triggered a series of attacks on the team using chaos magick. Natasha saw Clint die during a fight with the Kree Empire and the Avengers as a whole disbanded in the aftermath of this catastrophe. [Avengers (1st series) #501-503]
Daredevil and Black Widow would cross paths professionally when Nick Fury recruited Daredevil along with several other costumed heroes for his secret war with Latveria. Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. had uncovered that the tech-themed super-villains of America were being supported through the Tinkerer and Lucia von Bardas, the Latverian Prime Minister who replaced Doom after his fall. Fury believed this upgraded them from costumed criminals to terrorists seeking to undermine American institutions, but the White House told him to sit on it as they tried diplomatic solutions with Latveria. Instead, under the cover of night, Fury brought together Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America, Wolverine and Luke Cage (along with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents loyal to him like Black 
Widow and Daisy Johnson) to invade a foreign country and topple its elected leader. The backlash of their coup against von Bardas eventually hit the States, and Nick Fury was removed as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as he went underground. Black Widow therefore lost one of her major supporters in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s current hierarchy, and her status as one of Fury’s favorites made the new regime cautious of her. [Secret War #1-5]
During a vacation sabbatical working at a rock-climbing gym in Arizona, Natasha was assaulted on the side of the road by an unidentified assassin. Beaten, the assassin chose to bleed out on the road rather than disclose anything, which in and of itself warned Natasha she had been targeted by old school professionals. She reached out to Phil Dexter, a decommissioned S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who still had contacts to make inquiries off the grid. Phil’s research uncovered an activist named Stacy Matheson, who was killed in Alabama on the same day Natasha was attacked. Stacy was actually a former deep cover KGB operative, hinting at a connection. On their way to the South, Natasha saved a hitchhiker named Sally Anne from rapist truck drivers and ended up bringing the teenager along with them.
Natasha and Phil’s investigation into Stacy Matheson revealed she had been pregnant by Sergeant Will Forester of INS.E.R.T. Corps (Insurgency, Extraction, Reconnaissance, and Termination) and taking a mysterious drug called Medusagen. Their interrogation of the mostly clueless Forester ended when shooters killed the man before opening fire on them. They traced 
Natasha’s original assailant to the Red Room, now operating as “2R” in conjunction with the North Institute from the U.S. intelligence community and Gynacon, a U.S. cosmetics corporation turning the Red Room’s knowledge of bio-chemistry towards profit. It seemed Natasha and other products of the Red Room were being eliminated to prevent the bio-chemistry of the serums in their bloodstream from challenging Gynacon’s new patents.
Natasha returned to Moscow to trace 2R’s holdings and wound up retracing her steps and personal history. Unfortunately, her own memories started to unravel. As Natasha attempted to reconnect with her history as a ballerina, she found no evidence to support her training or the existence of her instructor, the “famous” Alex Sterelny. Indeed, at an abandoned 2R facility, Natasha began to remember being programmed with those memories from tapes instead of experiencing them herself. She crossed paths with Grigor Pchelintsov, former professor of 
psychotechnics now living in the abandoned building. He confessed his role in the brainwashing of Black Widow agents for the Red Room, using psychochemical conditioning to instill memory implants like the Bolshoi ballet classes Natasha thought she knew. The implants were logically inconsistent but designed to induce headaches and nausea if one thought too closely about the memories – they existed only to instill a sense of romantic affection for the motherland in their agents.
[Note: Natasha and Grigor seemed to indicate the conditioning happened when Natasha was a little girl. However, Black Widow: Deadly Origin saw her recruited into the Red Room in her late 20’s. It’s possible the conditioning took place at Taras Romanov’s training camp, although that wasn’t explicitly a Red Room facility.]
Natasha forced Grigor to tell her everything he knew about the Black Widow program, using painkillers to stave off her conditioned rejection of the truth. Regarding Medusagen, biotech wasn’t 
his area, but Grigor directed her towards a facility in the Ural Mountains. Infiltrating the base, Natasha met with Lyudmila Kudrin, the aged leading bio-chemist for Gynacon and formerly the original Black Widow research. It was Lyudmila who explained the extent of the Black Widow serum’s effect on the agents’ physiologies, ramping up their immune system and healing. The Medusagen was a system suppressant which Stacy Matheson had taken because (perhaps even with it) a Black Widow’s body would violently attack and dispose of any pregnancy as a foreign invader.
Natasha was beyond furious over having been violated in this way, but she believed Lyudmila when the old woman claimed she didn’t know agents were being killed. Natasha brought Lyudmila in to S.H.I.E.L.D., where Nick Fury told her Phil Dexter had been attacked in her absence. Phil was on life support and Sally Anne was now missing. Lyudmila also revealed the existence of a pheromonal lock and key built into the Black Widows, the compliance scent Nick Fury had stolen from their records years ago. Without admitting to anything, Fury gave Natasha the info she needed to track down North. After disposing of their field agents, Black Widow made her way to Ian McMasters, CEO of Gynacon, and his 2R liaison, Vassily Ulyanov. Vassily had access to the compliance scent, 
however, leaving Natasha at a distinct disadvantage in their fight where she was unable to fight back. At least, until Vassily made the mistake of breaking her nose. Un-tethered from the compliance scent once she could no longer smell, the last remaining Black Widow made short work of Vassily. She left McMasters alive only long enough to learn he had turned Sally Anne over to 2R. [Black Widow (3rd series) #1-6]
[Note: Nick Fury continuity was fuzzy around the time he went AWOL, given the constant delays of Secret War's conclusion (five issues released over 23 months). S.H.I.E.L.D. did continue employing Nick Fury LMDs to interact with outside parties for credibility, and Fury secretly could control some of these LMDs. So was this Natasha interacting with Fury, a Fury LMD, or Fury controlling a Fury LMD posing as Fury? For Natasha's continuity, it probably doesn't matter, but it's worth noting.]
The execution of McMasters did not go unnoticed, and Natasha became a wanted woman in the United States. She fled to Cuba and renewed ties with Yelena Belova, who had given up on the Russian spy trade to make a new living in Havana. Natasha made her way back to Miami Beach and uncovered Sally Anne’s trail. At a hidden hospital & camp at the Colombian-Panama border, Sally and other girls were being experimented on using Gynacon drugs derived from the Red Room pharmaceuticals. Although she was pursued by agents of North, Natasha located the camp and freed Sally Anne with the help of Nick Fury, Daredevil and Yelena. Her standing in America only dropped further as a result, and the Black Widow was declared an enemy of the state. [Black Widow 2: The Things They Say About Her #1-6]
[Note: Richard K. Morgan’s Black Widow series was intended to be a trilogy, and so many plot threads were left open and abandoned when the third limited series was never released, including Natasha’s relationship with the United States.]