Are you worried about the Russian influence on the presidential election? If so, there's a chance you are at least eight years too late. Consider the curious case of Rainer Baake, born in 1955 in the West German town of Witten. From his German Wikipedia entry (translated):

So a 19 year old German went from a small town in Germany to be a community organiser in Chicago for four years. This is as strange as a 19-year-old African-American would be going from the Midwest to work as a community organizer in Hamburg, overcoming the problems of a different skin color and a high-school-level language abiliy.

Doubtless young Rainer had a burning ambition to inform disadvantaged Chicago residents of tenants’ rights and the like.

Or perhaps not? And four years? It was as if it was his job or education, that he didn’t have a normal life to get back to.

The next question is who paid for young Rainer to be in Chicago?

One suspect should be Markus Wolf, head of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (the foreign intelligence division) of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi. He is considered to be the most successful spymaster in the entire post-World War II period. West Germany was riddled with Stasi agents, including, at one stage, the secretary to the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, who had to resign as a consequence. The Stasi would have known who all the promising young West German communists were.

But there is most likely to be another layer. Most people would be aware that the Russians have influenced public opinion in the West against fracking, which is a threat to their income. So have the Saudis, for that matter. For some reason the Russian campaign against fracking doesn’t concern many people. Influence campaigns to change public opinion in the target country, and thus weaken it, have a long history.

If we consider the possibility that young Herr Baake’s presence in community organizing circles in Chicago was connected to Communist influence strategies, the simplest explanation for young Rainer’s presence in Chicago forty years ago was that a Russian or East German national would attract attention, while a West German would not. And a young communist straight out of high school in West Germany would be highly expendable if things didn’t work out.

There were plenty of communists, socialists and allies in Chicago at the time for Rainer Baake to coordinate with, including Frank Davis Marshall, Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers. That seems likely to explain the choice of Chicago for Rainer Baake’s stint at communiy organizing. Barack Obama was born in 1961 and was thus 17 when Rainer Baake returned to West Germany. Mr Obama’s turn at community organizing in Chicago was from June 1985 to May 1988.

East Germany disappeared in 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Russia continued, somewhat shrunken though retaining a highly effective espionage operation. But Russian agents still have a hard time operating in the United States. So the handling of the Chicago community organizer operation was passed to Cuban intelligence, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, I am told by sources in the DC intelligence community.

Obama, as president, did what he could to reduce the size of the U.S. economy with climate concerns as the excuse. The economy has bounced back strongly now that his regulations are being removed by President Trump. No wonder Chancellor Merkel was so upset at President Trump over the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement – because she is from a privileged family in the East German nomenklatura, and the product of a similar influence campaign. Merkel is flat out trying to shrink the German economy with climate-based restrictions, including closure of Germany’s nuclear reactors. She is ably assisted to that end by Rainer Baake, who reappears in our story as State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Berlin. His main preoccupation now is wrecking the German car industry.

Of course, this thesis has a slender basis, and there could be many other possibilities. But we are dealing with people who knew the importance of covering their tracks. For example, in retirement Markus Wolf wrote his memoirs, which were published in English and German. The content and message, for each language, is different because he had two different audiences to manipulate and influence.

David Archibald’s latest book is American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare