>>It points to how lax we have been.

Agreed. We completely dropped the ball on Russia.

My belief is that 9/11 and the subsequent focus on international terrorism plus the general opinion that the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the USSR, mixed with a fear that those terrorists we were obsessing over were going to end up with some of the ex-USSR's nukes pulled our attention away from what was happening internally in the RF, never mind anything they might do to meddle in the West.

In retrospect, I have to wonder how far back the money laundered through the NRA goes.