Something I Think Is Getting Glossed Over From The Debate

Me | 10-10-2016 | Vanity

[PGR88]

Russia plans effectively to revive the KGB under a massive shake-up of its security forces, a respected business daily has reported.

They need to protect themselves from the likes of Soros.

[rfreedom4u]

We haven’t had crap to do with Syria for over 20 years. Why are we so worried about it now? I also agree that we should coordinate WITH Russia on defeating ISIS.

Risking a war with Russia over Syria is ridiculous and foolhardy.

[ETL]

As I pointed out several times above, the Soros-supported Obama administration has bent over backwards to hand Putin everything he wanted on such critical things as missile defense and nukes, including the obviously dangerous Iran nuke deal, which KGB Putin loves and claims to have played a major role in. This while he slashed the US military.

But then, why would I need to repeat this when it’s all laid out perfectly clear above? Are you that much a supporter of the KGB assassin Putin?

[ETL]

They need to protect themselves from the likes of Soros.

It makes all the sense in the world that Soros could well be a Russian creation, given all the facts I provided above -- all that the Soros-supported Obama administration has done to help build Russia's strength and weaken ours.

They well might be in cahoots (Soros and Putin), setting the US up for a major defeat.

The Russians are masters at the game of deception. Excellent chess players, thinking many moves ahead of their opponents, while most of us, it seems, suck at simple checkers. They must be laughing their butts off at how easily they can manipulate our population.

[ETL]

Agreed 110%. Looking at the bigger picture, we have waaaay more in common with even Putin’s Russia than we ever will with bagdadi’s IS

Both the islamo nazis and an increasingly aggressive Russia are serious threats, Russia more of a serious long-term threat.

If Russia grabs control of the oil/gas-rich Middle East, in addition to retaking key parts of Eastern Europe, as they are obviously in the process of doing, we (the US) will have a critical long-term problem on our hands. That plus Russia's closer than ever military alliance with the ChiComs and their continual arming and supporting of hostile leftist regimes in Latin America, as well as their close alliances with nut jobs Iran and North Korea. Unfortunately, we have a Soros-supported traitorous piece of crap in the WH who well may be deliberately setting us up for defeat, given all he's done to help build Russia's strength and weaken ours.

[PGR88]

The Russians are masters at the game of deception. Excellent chess players, thinking many moves ahead of their opponents, while most of us, it seems, suck at simple checkers. They must be laughing their butts off at how easily they can manipulate our population.

Such masters at deception, they managed to lose 700,000 square miles of their territory with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and spent the next 10 years having the remnants divided among the most corrupt politicians and criminal gangs.

among the many things Wikileaks has taught us, it was that Hillary and her clique convinced Obama that Russia was a weak power who could not defend her long-standing interests, and like her husband in Serbia and Kosovo, Syria could be overturned, and Ukraine taken-over with no pushback from the Kremlin.

NATO is now conducting exercises on the Russian border. The West conducted a coup which among other things, attempted to divide Russia from her 350 year access to the Black Sea.

If you were a self-respecting ruler of any such country - what would you do?

[ETL]

Such masters at deception, they managed to lose 700,000 square miles of their territory with the collapse of the Soviet Union...

Something to consider as a definite possibility...

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
_______________________________________________

Link to read "New Lies for Old" online:
https://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes
_______________________________________________

Link to read "The Perestroika Deception" online:
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-TVvzZzfXiMBkMdvD

[ETL]

Putin, once critical of Stalin, now embraces Soviet dictator's tactics

Carol J. Williams, reporting from Moscow
June 11, 2015

Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.

Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."

But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.

Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.

Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.

As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.

On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.

Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.

Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.

Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.

Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."

Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.

The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.

He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.

"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."

Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.

Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."

Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.

But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.

Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalin's errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.

The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.

The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.

"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.

The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.

The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.

Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.

The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.

Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalin's political purges.

"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."

Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[ETL]

"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

[ETL]

"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100711090651/http://article.nationalreview.com/365528/forgetting-the-evils-of-communism/jonah-goldberg

[PGR88]

If you recall - the Soviet Union and communism collapsed 25 years ago. Sadly, its evil seeds are more likely to sprout in the the United States and Western Europe now.

No one is claiming Putin is an angel, but its time to update our thinking.

[Stentor]

Hillary and the globalists are against Russia because it is an independent nation in Europe...

I think Putin would cheerfully strangle Hillary' boss Soros with his own hands.

[ETL]

If you recall - the Soviet Union and communism collapsed 25 years ago. Sadly, its evil seeds are more likely to sprout in the the United States and Western Europe now. No one is claiming Putin is an angel, but its time to update our thinking.

It's time YOU need to update your thinking. Because even IF Russia is truly done with communism and are now so critical of it, as they make out to be, this, as they continue to this day to arm and/or support numerous communist dictatorships around the world, including several in Latin America, in nut case communist North Korea, and the increasingly aggressive ChiComs, they are STILL a totalitarian brutal dictatorship, despite the bogus elections there.

Putin has jailed numerous political opponents of his. Even worse, he's assassinated or attempted to have had assassinated political opponents, including former KGB colleagues who've 'spilled the beans' on his various and evil schemes, a bunch of reporters, and foreign leaders, such as the former pro-US leader of the Ukraine. He also may well have ordered the "elimination' of the entire Polish leadership in that 'very timely' airliner crash several years ago, which coincided with a 'very special' anniversary (see below)...

_______________________________________

"On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the city of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board.

Among the victims were the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, the former President of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, the chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers, the president of the National Bank of Poland, Polish Government officials, 18 members of the Polish Parliament, senior members of the Polish clergy and relatives of victims of the Katyn massacre.

The group was arriving from Warsaw to attend an event marking the 70th anniversary of the [Katyn] massacre, which took place not far from Smolensk."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_crash

**********************************************************

April 2014...

Did Putin Blow Up the Whole Polish Government in 2010?
A Second Look

A plane crash at Smolensk in Russia four years ago wiped out the Warsaw leadership. It used to be seen as an accident. Now, after Putin's games in Ukraine, people aren't so sure.

Four years ago this week, Polish President Lech Kaczynski was killed in a plane crash near the Katyn Forest in Russia where he was flying to honor the 22,000 Polish officers, lawyers, priests and professors slaughtered there by the Soviets 70 years before.

Ninety-five other military, political and public figures including his wife died on that plane.

One of the more heartbreaking details to emerge was that First Lady Maria Kaczynska's body could be identified only by her nail polish and the inscription inside her wedding ring.

Less than two years before the crash the late president had given a speech warning that if Russian aggression was not stopped in Georgia, which Russia had invaded, it would extend to Ukraine, the Baltics, and possibly Poland as well. "We are here to take up the fight," he said. And many Poles still believe that their president died in the cause of that effort. Physicist Kazimierz Nowaczyk is one of them. ..."

(BIG SNIP)

He makes his case at the link...

Did Putin Blow Up the Whole Polish Government in 2010? A Second Look:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/11/did-putin-blow-up-the-whole-polish-government-in-2010-a-second-look.html

*******************************************************************

Note: They are no longer the "opposition". They won the October 2011 election.

Opposition publishes 'alternative' Smolensk report

PR dla Zagranicy

Peter Gentle June 29, 2011

Law and Justice (PiS), led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, has presented the first part of the so-called White Book report on the Smolensk tragedy of 10 April last year, days before the release of the official government version.

Law and Justice has been highly critical of both the Russian and Polish investigations into the tragedy which killed 96 politicians and top military brass, among others.

Shortly after the air crash in western Russia, the opposition party, closely associated with the late President Kaczynski, set up its own parliamentary committee headed by MP Antoni Macierewicz. The report represents the conclusions of the committee.

The White Book on Smolensk comprises 20 chapters and contains over 100 additional documents gathered and compiled by the team of Law and Justice MP investigators.

The first part of the report released today deals with alleged shortcomings of the Russian Interstate Aviation Committee's (MAK) report released last year, though all of the criticisms have been made before by Law and Justice.

The second part of the document will be issued tomorrow and will detail criticisms of the Polish government's investigation, the report of which is currently being translated into English and Russian and will be released shortly, possibly on Friday.

One of the conclusions of the first part of the Law and Justice report is that Russian protocol envisaged only the attendance of Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the 70th anniversary commemorations of the 1940 Katyn Massacre. Because of this, says the report, President Kaczynski's arrival three days later in western Russia had been given the status of a private and not official state visit.

This had the consequence of downgrading security arrangements for the party led by Lech Kaczynski, says the report.

"The decision had been taken by the Russian side but it was approved by representatives of Mr. Tusk's government," MP Antoni Macierewicz said today as he launched the report.

"Nevertheless, the decision itself had been in Russian hands. Polish diplomats were informed openly that only Prime Minister Tusk will be guaranteed security, while the President's visit remains of no interest to the Russian side," he said.

Antoni Macierewicz also stressed that the doomed presidential Tupolev 154 had undergone a general overhaul barely a year before the crash at the Aviakor plant in Russian Samara.

Law and Justice reject the conclusions of the Russian report, which blamed pilot error for the crash. Antoni Macierewicz emphasises that air traffic control at the Smolensk airport did not give clear guidance to the pilots as they approached landing.

http://www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/46756,Opposition-publishes-%E2%80%98alternative%E2%80%99-Smolensk-report
_______________________________________________________

The Polish Heritage Institute

April 10, 2010 - The Smolensk Crash
Was Poland’s President Assassinated?

http://www.phi966.org/the-smolensk-crash.html

[ETL]

MH17 missile 'came from Russia', Dutch-led investigators say

bbc.com ^ | 28 September 2016 | BBC

International prosecutors say Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed over eastern Ukraine in 2014 by a Buk missile that had come from Russia.

They also narrowed down the area it was fired from to a field in territory controlled by Russian-backed rebels.

All 298 people on board the Boeing 777 died when it broke apart in mid-air flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...

[ETL]

I think Putin would cheerfully strangle Hillary' boss Soros with his own hands.

Why would he want to do that, when it was the Soros-supported O administration who did so much to help strengthen Russia while substantially weakening the US. Soros and Putin share the same basic world view, as of course does his puppet in the White House. Putin couldn't hope to have better allies than he does now. It was the O administration who afforded him the opportunity to move into Syria with a real chance of ultimately taking control of the oil/gas-rich strategic Middle East. This in addition to what the Russians are in the process of doing in Eastern Europe, Crimea, etc.

[RegulatorCountry]

You’re forgetting that Russia issued an international arrest warrant for George Soros not that long ago, there’s no love lost there. They blame him for much of their economic difficulty, perhaps even the currency crisis of 1998. If Soros is some sort of Russian pawn, they’re willing to endure all manner of economic difficulties to maintain cover. Seems improbable.

[ETL]

Don't forget what we're dealing with here. A former KGB agent and head of its modern equivalent, the FSB. These agencies were/are notorious for their highly complex acts of deception and disinformation.

For example...

Soviet documents ‘show Abbas was KGB agent’; Fatah decries ‘smear campaign’

Israeli researchers: Notes from USSR archivist who defected indicate PA president was working for Soviets in Damascus in 1980s while Putin’s current Mideast envoy was stationed there

By Tamar Pileggi September 7, 2016.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.

The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East. was stationed in Damascus.

Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing. ..."

http://www.timesofisrael.com/soviet-documents-said-to-reveal-abbas-was-kgb-agent-in-syria/

[ETL]

If Soros is some sort of Russian pawn, they’re willing to endure all manner of economic difficulties to maintain cover. Seems improbable.

That's the whole idea. Making it 'seem' improbable.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3478702/posts?page=67#67

[ETL]

Mike Pence, in the recent (first) VP debate:

“When Donald Trump and I observe that, as I’ve said, in Syria, in Iran, in Ukraine, that the small and bullying leader of Russia has been stronger on the world stage than this administration, that’s stating painful facts. That’s not an endorsement of Vladimir Putin — that’s an indictment of the weak and feckless leadership of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”