This groundbreaking set of 10 weekly columns by Nicholas F. Benton published from April to June 2021 in the award-winning Inside-the-Beltway general interest weekly, the Falls Church News-Press, makes the case that the mastermind behind the violent January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was none other than a sworn adversary of the U.S., Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Benton makes his compelling case by drawing from his personal experiences embedded in the U.S. counterculture in the 1970s, when then-Soviet active measures on the fringes of U.S. politics orchestrated a fundamental change in the nature of their covert interventions in the wake of the Nixon-Brezhnev “detente” to abandon the U.S. “Left” and begin fostering rightwing cults, including the 1987 decision that Donald Trump would be groomed as their preferred U.S. presidential candidate. The cults evolved into the Tea Party, Proud Boys, QAnon and others, and now a powerful faction of the Republican Party and, of course, Trump became president in 2016. The unprecedented mobilization that defeated Trump in his bid for re-election led to the deployment of all these elements in the January 6 insurrection, which came much closer to succeeding as a coup against U.S. democracy than is commonly understood. The threat from these forces still exists.