The double-agent speculation is possible and cannot be dismissed.
Replying to cytg111 in post #11: I don't think my view on this has a partisan taint -- to whit: The Cold War never ended.
Generally and for many decades, mainstream America was sold the idea that we were fighting an ideology exclusively -- communism. People thumped their chest when the USSR gave way to the Russian Commonwealth, insisting that the West won. Therefore the Cold War was "over". This may explain some attitudes of GOP adherents today.
Alexis deTocqueville in "Democracy in America" (1835 and 1840) observed that two great powers would later emerge in history: the USA and Russia (without specifying any particular incarnation).
The acknowledged architect of US strategic doctrine at the beginning of the Cold War was George Kennan. While American television was broadcasting a Saturday-afternoon series entitled "The Big Picture" -- obviously underwritten and orchestrated by the defense establishment (DOD -- possibly CIA), Americans assumed that the target of the Cold War was exclusively the ideology -- communism. Behind the scenes, Kennan himself remarked that the problem was not that the Russians were communist, but that they were Russians -- referring to the fact that Russia had lived under a form of autocracy for a thousand years, and that they had a propensity for totalitarianism or autocracy.
How much was spent on the generally acknowledged "official" Cold War? $12 Trillion? An enormous sum. People soon began to wonder why -- after the end of USSR -- we had not scaled back defense spending appreciably, with the same trend continuing through today. At the beginning of the Obama administration, we were spending about $800 billion annually on defense.
With the arrogant hubris that "America won the Cold War", impatient citizens shifted in their view of Russia -- or rather, some did. The Russian transformation to the Commonwealth of Independent States arose because the USSR empire was too unwieldly, too costly and top-heavy. The Iron Curtain fell away, releasing previous nation-states to their former status, such as Ukraine. Boris Yeltsin notwithstanding, KGB became FSB, Putin followed his own puppet Medvedev, and nothing really changed. This would likely be the continued justification for NATO.
It represents a continued moral choice, based on traditional American values, that Trump and the GOP seem to abandon. The abandonment is based on the illusion that "The Cold War ended".