Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

What’s more, Putin had seemed reluctant to take on the post of prime minister. He had had to twist his arm, he said, and tell him it was not for long, only till the situation was stable.

      What Pugachev didn’t know was that Putin had once worked closely with one of the main players in the attempt to overthrow the Yeltsin regime. He wasn’t aware that Felipe Turover, the KGB officer behind the leaks on Mabetex and the Yeltsin accounts, with connections to the top of the KGB’s legendary black-ops department, had helped Putin set up the oil-for-food barter scheme in St Petersburg.

      He’d never heard the story Turover told me, about how after Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard had allegedly given the order to eliminate Turover when his name was leaked to the Italian newspaper that August, Putin had gone to see his old associate, who was then in Moscow, warned him about the order and told him he should leave the country, fast: ‘He told me to leave because he had an order from the president to finish me off. He told me I could leave under his guarantee.’

      Pugachev didn’t know that all the while, Putin had played all sides. ‘He always kept his promises,’ said Turover. ‘He never worked for the Family against Primakov. And he only worked formally against Skuratov.’[136]

      Pugachev also had little inkling that Putin could represent anything close to a Plan B of the KGB, after the Primakov takeover failed. He always claimed he thought of Putin as someone he could control. He didn’t realise that he might have been lying to the Family when he appeared to support them. Putin ‘deceived them’, said Turover. ‘Warfare is based on deception. This is the strategy of Sun Tzu. He wrote The Art of War 2,600 years ago,’ referring to the ancient Chinese military treatise. ‘Putin learned his judo lessons well.’