Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

a new generation of democratic leaders. By the time of Putin’s interview with Shadkhan, one of those leaders, Boris Yeltsin, had emerged victorious from an attempted hard-line coup in August 1991. The abortive putsch had sought to turn the clock back on political and economic freedoms, but ended in resounding failure. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The old regime, suddenly, seemed to have been swept away.

      But what replaced it was only a partial changing of the guard, and what happened to the KGB was a case in point. Yeltsin had decapitated the top echelon of the KGB, and then signed a decree breaking it up into four different domestic services. But what emerged in its place was a hydra-headed monster in which many officers, like Putin, retreated to the shadows and continued to serve underground, while the powerful foreign-intelligence service remained intact. It was a system where the rules of normal life seemed to have long been suspended. It was a shadowland of half-truths and appearances, while underneath it all factions of the old elite continued to cling to what remained of the reins.

      Putin was to give several different versions of the timing and circumstances of his resignation from the KGB. But according to one former senior KGB officer close to him, none of them are true. He would tell interviewers writing his official biography that he resigned a few months after he began working for Sobchak at the university, but his resignation letter had somehow got lost in the post. Instead, he claimed, Sobchak had personally telephoned Vladimir Kryuchkov, the then KGB chief, to ensure his resignation at the height of the hard-line August 1991 coup. This was the story that became the official version. But it sounds like fiction. The chances of Sobchak reaching Kryuchkov in the middle of a coup in order to secure the resignation of one employee seem slim at best. Instead, according to the close Putin ally, Putin continued receiving his paycheque from the security services for at least a year after the August coup attempt. By the time he resigned, his position at the top of Russia’s second city’s new leadership was secure. He’d penetrated deep into the country’s new democratic leadership, and was the point man for the administration’s ties with law enforcement, including the KGB’s successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. His performance as deputy mayor, as clearly presented in the Shadkhan interview, was already slick and self-assured.

      The story of how and when Putin actually resigned, and how he came to work for Sobchak, is the story of how a KGB cadre began to morph in the country’s democratic transformation and attach themselves to the new leadership. It’s the story of how a faction of the KGB, in particular part of its foreign-intelligence arm, had long been secretly preparing for change in the tumult of the Soviet Union’s perestroika reforms. Putin appears to have been part of this process while he was in Dresden. Later, after Germany reunified, the country’s security services suspected he was part of a group working on a special operation, ‘Operation Luch’, or Sunbeam, that had been preparing since at least 1988 in case the East German regime collapsed.[4] This operation was to recruit a network of agents that could continue to operate for the Russians long after the fall.

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      DRESDEN – When Putin arrived in Dresden in 1985, East Germany was already living on borrowed time. On the verge of bankruptcy, the country was surviving with the help of a billion-DM loan from West Germany,[5] while voices of dissent were on the rise. Putin arrived there at the age of thirty-two, apparently fresh from a stint training at the KGB’s elite Red Banner academy for foreign-intelligence officers, and began work in an elegant art deco villa with a sweeping staircase and a balcony that overlooked a quiet, brightly-painted neighbourhood street. The villa, surrounded by leafy trees and rows of neat family homes for the Stasi elite, was just around the corner from the grey sprawl of the Stasi headquarters, where dozens of political prisoners were held in tiny windowless cells. Hans Modrow, the local leader of the ruling Communist Party, the SED, was known as a reformer. But he was also heavy-handed in his efforts to clamp down on dissent. All around the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was increasing amidst the misery and shortages of the planned economy and the brutality of state law-enforcement agencies. Sensing an opportunity, US intelligence agencies, with the help of the Vatican, had quietly started operations to funnel printing and communications equipment and cash to the Solidarność protest movement in Poland, where dissent against the Soviets had always been the strongest.

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      Vladimir Putin had long dreamed of a career in foreign intelligence. During the Second World War his father had served in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He’d operated deep behind enemy lines trying to sabotage German positions, narrowly escaping being taken prisoner, and then suffering near fatal wounds. After his father’s heroics, Putin had been obsessed from an early age with learning German, and in his teenage years he’d been so keen to join the KGB that he called into its local Leningrad office to offer his services even before he’d finished school, only to be told he had to graduate from university or serve in the army first. When, in his early thirties, he finally made it to the elite Red Banner school for foreign-intelligence officers, it was an achievement that looked to have secured his escape from the drab struggle of his early life. He’d endured a childhood chasing rats around the stairwell of his communal apartment building and scuffling with the other kids on the street. He’d learned to channel his appetite for street fights into mastering the discipline of judo, the martial art based on the subtle principles of sending opponents off balance by adjusting to their attack. He’d closely followed the local KGB office’s recommendation on what courses he should take to secure recruitment into the security services and studied at the Leningrad University’s law faculty. Then, when he graduated in 1975, he’d worked for a while in the Leningrad KGB’s counter-intelligence division, at first in an undercover role. But when he finally attained what was officially said to be his first foreign posting, the Dresden station Putin arrived at appeared small and low-key, a far cry from the glamour of the station in East Berlin, where about a thousand KGB operatives scurried to undermine the enemy ‘imperial’ power.[6]

      When Putin came to Dresden, there were just six KGB officers posted there. He shared an office with an older colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, who called him Volodya, or ‘little Vladimir’, and every day he took his two young daughters to German kindergarten from the nondescript apartment building he lived in with his wife, Lyudmilla, and the other KGB officers. It seemed a humdrum and provincial life, far away from the cloak-and-dagger drama of East Berlin on the border with the West. He apparently played sports and exchanged pleasantries with his Stasi colleagues, who called their Soviet visitors ‘the friends’. He engaged in small talk on German culture and language with Horst Jehmlich, the affable special assistant to the Dresden Stasi chief, who was the fixer in chief, the lieutenant-colonel who knew everyone in town and was in charge of organising safe houses and secret apartments for agents and informants, and for procuring goods for the Soviet ‘friends’. ‘He was very interested in certain German idioms. He was really keen on learning such things,’ Jehmlich recalled. He’d seemed a modest and thoughtful comrade: ‘He never pushed himself forward. He was never in the front line,’ he said. He’d been a dutiful husband and father: ‘He was always very kind.’[7]

      But relations between the Soviet spies and their Stasi colleagues were sometimes fraught, and Dresden was far more than the East German backwater it may have appeared to be. For one thing, it was on the front line of the smuggling empire that for a long time served as life support for the GDR’s economy. As the home of Robotron, the biggest electronics manufacturer in East Germany, producing mainframe and personal computers and other devices, it was central to the Soviet and GDR battle to illicitly obtain the blueprints and components of Western high-tech goods, making it a key cog in the eastern bloc’s bitter – and failing – struggle to compete militarily with the rapidly developing technology of the West. In the seventies, Robotron had successfully cloned the West’s IBM, and it had developed close ties with West Germany’s Siemens.[8] ‘Most of the East German high-tech smuggling came through Dresden,’ said Franz Sedelmayer, a West German security consultant who later worked with Putin in St Petersburg and started out in the eighties in the family business in Munich selling defence products to NATO and the Middle East.[9] ‘Dresden was a centre for this black trade.’ It was also a centre for the Kommerzielle Koordinierung, a department within the East German foreign trade ministry that specialised in smuggling operations for high-tech goods under embargo from the West. ‘They were exporting antiques and importing high-tech.