whether Putin truly believed these tall tales of American subversive activities in Russia, or whether he just deployed these arguments to mobilize domestic support. Initially, I leaned toward the latter hypothesis. Kremlin spin doctors were a cynical bunch, but they weren’t stupid. Surely they knew precisely what we did and did not do inside Russia. Their intelligence organizations, after all, are some of the best in the world. By the end of my tenure as ambassador, however, my position changed: I came to believe that Putin and some of his closest advisors genuinely believed that we were
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