I'd agree that the West believed a lot of unlikely things about Russian espionage, but I'm not sure anyone during the Cold War was convinced that the USSR was secretly ballet-training little girls into brainwashed super-murder assassins. We mostly just believed they were giving little girls steroids so they could win at gymnastics in the Olympics.
Though granted, considering the US was actually running programs to use LSD to brainwash people and to use telepaths to spy on people and murder them with their minds, it was definitely a bit of a ridiculous time.