PUTIN’S PEOPLE
How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West
Catherine Belton

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Catherine Belton 2020

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Catherine Belton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007578795

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Dedication

To my parents, Marjorie and Derek,

as well as to Richard and to Catherine Birkett.

Epigraph

‘Russian organised-crime leaders, their members, their associates, are moving into Western Europe, they are purchasing property, they are establishing bank accounts, they’re establishing companies, they’re weaving themselves into the fabric of society, and by the time that Europe develops an awareness it’s going to be too late.’

Former FBI special agent Bob Levinson

‘I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.’

Sergei Tretyakov, former colonel in Russian Foreign Intelligence, the SVR, stationed in New York

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

PART ONE

1. ‘Operation Luch’

2. Inside Job

3. ‘The Tip of an Iceberg’

4. Operation Successor: ‘It Was Already After Midnight’

5. ‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’

PART TWO

6. ‘The Inner Circle Made Him’

7. ‘Operation Energy’

8. Out of Terror, an Imperial Awakening

9. ‘Appetite Comes During Eating’

PART THREE

10. Obschak

11. Londongrad

12. The Battle Begins

13. Black Cash

14. Soft Power in an Iron Fist – ‘I Call Them the Orthodox Taliban’

15. The Network and Donald Trump

Epilogue

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Vladimir Putin’s identity card as a Stasi officer

Putin in his Dresden days

Putin, Lyudmilla and Katerina, or Katya, in August 1986 (Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Sergei Pugachev and Pavel Borodin

Boris Yeltsin and Yevgeny Primakov (Itar Tass/Pool/Shutterstock)

Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and her husband Valentin Yumashev (Shutterstock)

Yeltsin handing over the presidency to Putin, 31 December 1999 (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)

Putin shaking hands with Pugachev

Putin with Nikolai Patrushev (Alexey Panov/AFP via Getty Images)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky (Alexei Kondratyev/AP/Shutterstock)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev facing trial in 2005 (Shutterstock)

Igor Sechin and Gennady Timchenko (Sputnik/TopFoto)

Yury Kovalchuk (Alexander Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images)

Dmitry Firtash (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Martin Schlaff (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Konstantin Malofeyev (Sergei Malgavko\TASS via Getty Images)

Putin comforting Lyudmilla Narusova at the funeral of Anatoly Sobchak (Sputnik/Alamy)

Putin at his inauguration as president in May 2000 (AFP via Getty Images)

The evacuation of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre (Anton Denisov/AFP via Getty Images)

Putin reacting to the Dubrovka theatre evacuation (AFP via Getty Images)

A dinner party at Putin’s dacha, including Pugachev, Shevkunov, Sechin and Patrushev

Putin and Lyudmilla welcomed by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during a state visit to the UK (© Pool Photograph/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mourners at the school in Beslan where 330 hostages died in a terrorist attack (Shutterstock)

The school gymnasium in Beslan (Shutterstock)

Semyon Mogilevich (Alexey Filippov/TASS via Getty Images)

Moscow police raiding the dacha of Sergei Mikhailov (Kommersant Photo Agency/SIPA USA/PA)

Vladimir Yakunin (Mikhail Metzel\TASS via Getty Images)

Roman Abramovich at a Chelsea football match (AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)

Putin sheds a tear speaking after his reelection in 2012 (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

Gennady Timchenko and Putin playing hockey (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Donald Trump inside his Taj Mahal casino (Joe Dombroski/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

Donald Trump with Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater (Mark Von Holden/WireImage)

Dramatis Personae

Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki

Igor Sechin – Putin’s trusted gatekeeper, a former KGB operative from St Petersburg who rose in power as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin to lead the state takeover of the Russian oil sector. Later became known as ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’ for his ruthless propensity for plots.

Nikolai Patrushev – Powerful former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, and current Security Council chief.

Viktor Ivanov – Former KGB officer who served with Putin in the Leningrad KGB and oversaw personnel as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin during his first term, leading the Kremlin’s initial expansion into the economy.

Viktor Cherkesov – Former senior KGB officer who ran the St Petersburg FSB and was a mentor to Putin, moving with him to Moscow, where he remained a close adviser, first as first deputy head of the FSB and then running the Federal Drugs Service.

Sergei Ivanov – Former Leningrad KGB officer who became one of the youngest ever generals in Russia’s foreign-intelligence service in the nineties and then rose in power under Putin’s presidency, first as defence minister and then as Kremlin chief of staff.

Dmitry Medvedev – Former lawyer who started out working as a deputy to Putin in the St Petersburg administration when he was in his early twenties, and followed closely in Putin’s footsteps thereafter: first as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration, then as its chief of staff, then as Putin’s interim replacement as president.

The custodians, the KGB-connected businessmen

Gennady Timchenko – Alleged former KGB operative who rose through the ranks of Soviet trade to become co-founder of one of the first independent traders of oil products before the Soviet fall. Worked closely with Putin from the early nineties, and according to some associates, before the Soviet collapse.

Yury Kovalchuk – Former physicist who joined with other KGB-connected businessmen to take over Bank Rossiya, a St Petersburg bank that, according to the US Treasury, became the ‘personal bank’ for Putin and other senior Russian officials.

Arkady Rotenberg – Former Putin judo partner who became a billionaire under Putin’s presidency after the state awarded his companies multi-billion-dollar construction contracts.

Vladimir Yakunin – Former senior KGB officer who served a stint undercover at the United Nations in New York, then joined with Kovalchuk in taking over Bank Rossiya. Putin anointed him chief of the state railways monopoly.

‘The Family’, the coterie of relatives, officials and businessmen closely surrounding the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin

Valentin Yumashev – Former journalist who gained Yeltsin’s trust while writing his memoirs, and was anointed Kremlin chief of staff in 1997. Married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana in 2002.

Tatyana Dyachenko – Yeltsin’s daughter who officially served as his image adviser, but was essentially gatekeeper to the president.

Boris Berezovsky – Former mathematician who made his fortune running trading schemes for carmaker AvtoVAZ, the producer of the boxy Zhiguli car that epitomised the Soviet era, and inveigled his way into the good graces of Yeltsin and his Family. When he acquired the Sibneft oil major, he became the epitome of the intensely politically-wired oligarchs of the Yeltsin era.

Alexander Voloshin – Former economist who started out working with Berezovsky on privatisations and other schemes, and was transferred to the Kremlin in 1997 to work as Yumashev’s deputy chief of staff. Promoted to chief of staff in 1999.

Roman Abramovich – Oil trader who became Berezovsky’s protégé and later outmanoeuvred him to take over Berezovsky’s business empire. ‘Cashier’ to the Yeltsin Family and then to Putin.

Sergei Pugachev – Russian Orthodox banker who was a master of the Byzantine financing schemes of Yeltsin’s Kremlin, and then became known as Putin’s banker too. Co-founder of Mezhprombank, he straddled the worlds of the Family and the siloviki.

The Yeltsin-era oligarch who crossed Putin’s men

Mikhail Khodorkovsky – Former member of the Communist Youth League who became one of Russia’s first and most successful businessmen of the perestroika era and the 1990s.

The mobsters, footsoldiers for the KGB

St Petersburg

Ilya Traber – Former Soviet submariner who became a black-market antiques trader in the perestroika years, and then an intermediary between Putin’s security services and the Tambov organised-crime group, controlling St Petersburg’s most strategic assets, the sea port and the oil terminal.

Vladimir Kumarin – Tambov organised-crime boss who lost an arm in an assassination attempt and became known as St Petersburg’s ‘night governor’, joining in business with Putin’s men, most notably with Ilya Traber.

Moscow

Semyon Mogilevich – Former wrestler, known as ‘the Brainy Don’, who at the end of the eighties became banker to the leaders of Russia’s most powerful organised-crime groups, including the Solntsevskaya, funnelling cash into the West and setting up a criminal empire of drugs and arms trafficking of his own. Recruited in the seventies by the KGB, he was ‘the criminal arm of the Russian state’.

Sergei Mikhailov – Alleged head of the Solntsevskaya organised-crime group, Moscow’s most powerful, with close ties to many of the KGB-connected businessmen who later cultivated connections with New York property mogul Donald Trump.

Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) – Mobster dispatched by Mogilevich to Brighton Beach, New York, to oversee the Solntsevskaya’s criminal empire there.

Yevgeny Dvoskin – Brighton Beach mobster who became one of Russia’s most notorious ‘shadow bankers’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle, Ivankov, joining forces with the Russian security services to funnel tens of billions of dollars in ‘black cash’ into the West.

Felix Sater – Dvoskin’s best friend since childhood. Became a key business partner of the Trump Organization, developing a string of properties for Trump, all the while retaining high-level contacts in Russian intelligence.

Prologue
Moscow Rules

It was late in the evening in May 2015, and Sergei Pugachev was flicking through an old family photo album he’d found from thirteen years ago or more. In one photo from a birthday party at his Moscow dacha, his son Viktor keeps his eyes downcast as Vladimir Putin’s daughter Maria smiles and whispers in his ear. In another, Viktor and his other son, Alexander, are posing on a wooden spiral staircase in the Kremlin presidential library with Putin’s two daughters. At the edge of the photo, Lyudmilla Putina, then still the Russian president’s wife, smiles.

We were sitting in the kitchen of Pugachev’s latest residence, a three-storey townhouse in the well-heeled London area of Chelsea. The late-evening light glanced in through the cathedral-sized windows, and birds chirped in the trees outside, the traffic from the nearby King’s Road a faint hum. The high-powered life Pugachev had once enjoyed in Moscow – the dealmaking, the endless behind-the-scenes agreements, the ‘understandings’ between friends in the Kremlin corridors of power – seemed a world away. But Moscow’s influence was in fact still lurking like a shadow outside his door.

The day before, Pugachev had been forced to seek the protection of the UK counter-terrorism squad. His bodyguards had found suspicious-looking boxes with protruding wires taped to the undercarriage of his Rolls-Royce, as well as on the car used to transport his three youngest children, aged seven, five and three, to school. Now, on the wall of the Pugachevs’ sitting room, behind the rocking horse and across from the family portraits, the SO15 counter-terrorism squad had installed a grey box containing an alarm that could be activated in the event of attack.

Fifteen years before, Pugachev had been a Kremlin insider who’d manoeuvred endlessly behind the scenes to help bring Vladimir Putin to power. Once known as the Kremlin’s banker, he’d been a master of the backroom deals, the sleights of hand that governed the country then. For years he’d seemed untouchable, a member of an inner circle at the pinnacle of power that had made and bent the rules to suit themselves, with law enforcement, the courts, and even elections subverted for their needs. But now the Kremlin machine he’d once been part of had turned against him. The tall, Russian Orthodox believer with a dark beard and a gregarious grin had become the latest victim of Putin’s relentlessly expanding reach. First, the Kremlin had moved in on his business empire, taking it for itself. Pugachev had left Russia, first for France and then for England as the Kremlin launched its attack. Putin’s men had taken the hotel project the president had granted him on Red Square, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, without any compensation at all. Then his shipyards, two of the biggest in Russia, valued at $3.5 billion, were acquired by one of Putin’s closest allies, Igor Sechin, for a fraction of that sum. Then his coal project, the world’s biggest coking-coal deposit in the Siberian region of Tuva, valued at $4 billion, was taken by a close associate of Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman Chechen president, for $150 million.[1]

In the process, Putin’s men had blamed him for the collapse of Mezhprombank, the bank he co-founded long ago in the nineties that had once been the key to his power. The Kremlin authorities had opened a criminal case claiming Pugachev had caused the bank’s bankruptcy by transferring $700 million from it to a Swiss bank account at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. The Kremlin paid no regard to Pugachev’s claims that the money was his own. It seemed to matter little that the takeover of the shipyards by Sechin at a fraction of their value was the biggest reason for the shortfall in the bank’s funds to creditors.[2]

The hand of the Kremlin seemed clear. ‘People within the state manipulated the rules against him in order to bring the bank down, unsurprisingly benefiting themselves,’ said Richard Hainsworth, a long-standing Russian banking expert.[3]

It was a typical story for a Kremlin machine that had become relentless in its reach. First, it had gone after political enemies. But now it was starting to turn on Putin’s one-time allies. Pugachev was the first of the inner circle to fall. And now the Kremlin had expanded its campaign against him from the brutal closed-door courts of Moscow to the veneer of respectability of London’s High Court. There, it obtained a freezing order against his assets with ease, tying the tycoon up in knots in the courtroom along the way.

Ever since Pugachev had left Russia, the Kremlin had pursued him. At his home in France, he’d been threatened by stooges sent by Mezhprombank’s liquidator. Three members of a Moscow mafia group had taken him out to a yacht off the coast of Nice and demanded he pay $350 million to guarantee his family’s ‘safety’. It was ‘the price of peace’, they told him, the price for making the Russian criminal case against him for the Mezhprom bankruptcy go away, documentary evidence shows.[4] In the UK courts, Pugachev had been a fish totally out of water, incapable of operating according to their unfamiliar rules and procedures. He was too accustomed to the backroom deals of his Kremlin past, too accustomed to slipping through the net of rules and regulations because of his position and power. He hadn’t done himself any favours. Convinced of the righteousness of his position, that he was the victim of the latest Kremlin asset grab, he believed himself above the regulations of the British courts. He’d failed to stick to court orders related to the asset freeze, and had burned through millions of pounds from an account he’d kept hidden from the UK court. He believed the disclosure rules were beneath him, petty compared to the calamity that had befallen his business empire, and no more than part of a Kremlin campaign to hound and frustrate him at every turn. The Kremlin, however, had become adept at pursuing its enemies through the UK court system, while a PR machine was honed to fill the pages of the UK tabloids with allegations of the Russian oligarch’s stolen wealth.

The Kremlin had first learned to navigate its way through the UK court system during its victory against Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who’d become Putin’s fiercest critic, in a case that seemed to turn Russian history on its head. Berezovsky was the fast-talking one-time Kremlin insider who had tried – and failed – to sue his erstwhile business partner Roman Abramovich, a close Kremlin ally, for $6.5 billion in London’s High Court. The judge overseeing the case, Dame Elizabeth Gloster, had taken a dim view of Berezovsky’s claim that he’d jointly owned one of Russia’s biggest oil majors, Sibneft, and a stake in Rusal, Russia’s biggest aluminium giant, with Abramovich, and that Abramovich had forced him to sell his stakes at a knockdown price. Though Berezovsky was recognised throughout Russia as owner of these concerns, Mrs Justice Gloster said she found him to be ‘an inhererently unreliable witness’,[5] and sided with Abramovich, who’d claimed that Berezovsky had never owned these assets; he’d merely been paid for providing political patronage. Later, it turned out that Mrs Justice Gloster’s stepson had been paid nearly £500,000 to represent Abramovich in the early stages of the case. Berezovsky’s lawyers claimed his involvement was more extensive than had previously been disclosed.[6]

The Kremlin had further honed its operations in the UK court system through its pursuit of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a Kazakh billionaire who happened to be the biggest political foe of the Kazakh president, a key Kremlin ally, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Ablyazov was pursued by Russia’s state deposit insurance agency, which charged him with siphoning more than $4 billion from the Kazakh BTA Bank, of which he had been chairman, and which had branches across Russia. The Russian agency hired a team of lawyers from the top London law firm Hogan Lovells, who launched eleven civil fraud lawsuits against Ablyazov in the UK, as well as a freezing order on his assets. Private detectives had traced the siphoned $4 billion to a network of offshore companies controlled by the Kazakh tycoon.[7]

But in Pugachev’s case, no stolen or hidden assets appeared to have been found. No fraud claims had ever been launched in the UK, or anywhere else outside Russia. Instead, on the basis of a Russian court ruling alone, the same team from Hogan Lovells had won the freezing order against Pugachev’s assets, and ably ran rings around him while he chafed at the multitude of court orders that came his way. He’d been interrogated over asset disclosures, and found to have given false evidence over whether the sale of his coal business had been conducted by himself or by his son. It didn’t seem to matter to the judge that the sale had been forced through at a price that was less than one twentieth of the business’s real value. What mattered was whether he’d followed procedure and declared all the assets that remained under his control. Pugachev had been forced to hand over his passports to the court, and was banned from leaving the UK during a prolonged period of questioning over his asset disclosures as the Kremlin’s lawyers tightened the legal net. He’d run through a series of lawyers who in turn seemed baffled by a case that had never been heard on its merits in the UK, while others viewed him mendaciously as easy prey. Spoilt by the flood of Russian cases that Moscow’s tycoons were willing to pay top prices for airing in London’s High Court, legal firms padded their bills to astronomical sums for work that was never done, as documents show. PR firms offered to defend Pugachev’s image for £100,000 a month. ‘He’s on our territory now,’ said one partner at a global law firm representing him.

At first Pugachev had believed the case against him was being driven by unruly Kremlin underlings anxious to draw a line over their expropriation of his business empire. But as the campaign expanded, and Pugachev began to fear for his physical safety, he became convinced that it was being guided by Putin himself. ‘How could he do this to me? I even made him president,’ he said that evening as he sat in his Chelsea kitchen, still shell-shocked by the visit from SO15 and the suspicious devices found underneath his cars.[8] A former friend sent by the Kremlin to London had told him that Putin was personally managing every step of the campaign against him, warning: ‘We have control of everything here, we’ve got everything all stitched up.’

Pugachev had long detected the growing influence of Kremlin cash in London. Long before the legal attack started, he said, he’d met a string of English lords who’d guffawed and shaken his hand, and told him how great they thought Putin was. In those days they believed Pugachev was ‘Putin’s banker’, as the press had called him then, yet they’d still asked him to donate to the Conservative Party without any question or thought. All his former friends from the Kremlin kept relatives and mistresses in town, who they visited at weekends, flooding the city with cash. There was Sechin’s ex-wife, Marina, who kept a house with her daughter here. There was Igor Shuvalov, the deputy prime minister, who owned the most prestigious flat in the city, a penthouse overlooking Trafalgar Square. There were the sons of Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s billionaire former judo partner, who attended one of the country’s most vaunted private schools, while his ex-wife Natalya shopped and sued her husband for divorce in London’s High Court. There was the deputy speaker of the State Duma, one of Russia’s most vocal patriots, Sergei Zheleznyak, who’d long raged against the influence of the West, yet his daughter Anastasia had lived in London for years. The list of officials resident in London was endless, said Pugachev. ‘They have sorted themselves out very well on this small island with terrible weather,’ he sniffed. ‘In the UK, the main thing was always money. Putin sent his agents to corrupt the British elite.’

The city had grown used to the flood of Russian cash. Property prices had surged as first tycoons and then Russian officials had bought up high-end mansions in Knightsbridge, Kensington and Belgravia. A string of Russian share offerings, led by the state’s Rosneft, Sberbank and VTB, had helped pay the rents and wages for the offices of London’s well-heeled PR and legal firms. Lords and former politicians were paid lavish salaries to serve on Russian companies’ boards, although they were granted little oversight of corporate conduct. Russia’s influence was everywhere. Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB officer and banker who’d positioned himself as a champion of the free press in Russia, had acquired London’s most-read and influential daily, the Evening Standard, becoming a fixture at the capital’s soirées and on the lists for the most sought-after dinner invitations. Another was Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon who’d become the Kremlin’s gas trader of choice, and who despite his links to a major Russian mobster wanted by the FBI, Semyon Mogilevich, had become a billionaire donor to Cambridge University. His chief London minion, Robert Shetler-Jones, had donated millions of pounds to the Tories, while influential party grandees served on the board of Firtash’s British Ukrainian Society. There were other less noticeable players. At least one of them had slipped through the cracks to become close friends with Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, at the top of the Tory elite. ‘Everyone has gotten used to spies wearing dark glasses and looking suspicious in films,’ said Pugachev. ‘But here they are everywhere. They look normal. You can’t tell.’

Pugachev had no idea whether the envoy sent by the Kremlin to warn him that it had everything stitched up in the UK was telling the truth, or whether he’d been sent merely to frighten him. But at some point – after he found the suspicious-looking devices on his cars, and after he first got wind that Russia was going to seek his extradition from the UK – he decided he didn’t want to risk waiting to find out. Despite his previous closeness to Putin, and his extensive contacts with the Kremlin’s clan of former KGB men known as the siloviki, a meeting set up for him with a top-level official from the British Foreign Office had been cancelled at the last minute. Instead he’d been told by a visiting Kremlin agent that he should meet a man Russian intelligence had cultivated in MI6. Everything was being turned on its head. He feared that the UK government was preparing a deal with the Russians to extradite him. He wondered too about the fate of his friend Boris Berezovsky, the arch Kremlin critic who in March 2013 had been found dead on the floor of his bathroom in his country mansion in Berkshire, his favourite black cashmere scarf round his neck, an unidentified fingerprint left at the scene. For some unknown reason, Scotland Yard didn’t investigate, leaving it to the local Thames Valley Police, which called it a suicide and closed the case.[9] ‘It looks like there is an agreement with Russia not to make a fuss,’ Pugachev worried.[10]

And so one day in June 2015, a few weeks after we’d met in his Chelsea home, Pugachev was suddenly no longer in the UK. His phones had all been switched off, ditched by the wayside as he ran. He’d ignored the court orders forbidding him to leave the country. He hadn’t even told his partner, the mother of his three young children, the London socialite Alexandra Tolstoy, who was left waiting late into the night for him to appear at her father’s eightieth birthday party. He’d last been seen in a meeting with his lawyers, at which they’d warned him he’d need £10 million to secure bail on an imminent Russian extradition request – cash to which Pugachev didn’t have access. A few weeks later he surfaced in France, where he’d gained citizenship in 2009, and where French law protected its citizens from extradition to Russia. He’d fled to the relative safety of his villa high in the hills above the bay of Nice, a fortress surrounded by an impenetrable high iron fence, a team of bodyguards and a battery of security cameras at every turn.

The ease with which the Kremlin had been able to pursue its case against him in London seemed to Pugachev, as the Russians would say, like the first lastochka – the first swallow of spring. It was the arrival of Moscow rules in London, where the Kremlin could twist and distort the legal process to suit its agenda, where the larger issue of its expropriation of Pugachev’s multi-billion-dollar business empire could be artfully buried in the minutiae of rules related to the freezing order and whether Pugachev had correctly followed them. Pugachev was no angel, of course. It was not at all clear what had happened to the $700 million he’d been accused of siphoning from Mezhprombank. But a series of asset disclosures, unquestioned by the UK High Court, had revealed that $250 million of that money had been returned to the bank, while the trail of the remainder had been lost in companies liquidated by a former Pugachev ally who was now working closely with the Kremlin. Later, Swiss prosecutors, asked by Russia to block Pugachev’s Swiss bank accounts, said they’d found no evidence that any crime was committed when the $700 million was transferred from Pugachev’s company accounts in Mezhprombank to the Swiss bank account at the height of the 2008 crisis.[11]

But even though the Kremlin lawyers had not opened a fraud case against him in the UK, even though there appeared to be no trail of stolen funds, the legal pursuit of Pugachev was relentless. Lawyers working for the Russian State Deposit Agency insisted they had him ‘bang to rights’ over Mezhprombank’s bankruptcy. ‘If you get cash from a regulator, you should take it to help the bank survive, not fund a payment to yourself,’ one person close to the legal team said.[12] Despite the Kremlin having expropriated his business empire, and his having begun to fear for his life, Pugachev was found in contempt of court for fleeing the UK, and sentenced in absentia to two years in jail. During the contempt hearings he was frequently branded a liar. He’d flouted the rules of the freezing order. He’d not only fled the country, but transferred funds from the sale of two cars to France. One of the judges presiding over the case, Justice Vivienne Rose, found she could not ‘safely rely on any evidence he gave’. A New Zealand trust he’d set up to hold tens of millions of dollars in properties, including his Chelsea home, was later found to be a sham.

For all his flaws, Pugachev insisted he had been caught in a Russian state vendetta pursued through the UK courts. The Kremlin seemed intent on quashing any notion that he’d ever been well-connected in the Kremlin, or that he could have any knowledge that could be damaging to it. It had been able to suppress any political connotation to the case by leveraging the diminishing knowledge of Russia in the UK intelligence services, which had been distracted by monitoring the Islamic terrorist threat, and Pugachev’s own low profile. Before things had got tough in London, Pugachev had never given an interview in his life. Few knew who he was. Most people believed it was the recently deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky who had helped bring Putin to power. Lawyers at Hogan Lovells had been told that Pugachev was a nobody, and the case against him had nothing to do with politics. ‘I’ve not seen any evidence of what he was doing in the Kremlin,’ said one person close to the legal team. ‘We have to be extremely careful. Pugachev seems to say whatever he wants. The people I have spoken to just say he was a blatant crook.’[13]

But in fact Pugachev had worked at the heart of the Kremlin, and had been privy to some of its deepest secrets, including how it was exactly that Putin came to power. This seemed to be one of the main reasons the Kremlin was so intent on pursuing him, and making sure he was tied up in legal knots. Even before the Kremlin took over his business empire, he’d been seeking to leave Russia, to escape the endless intrigue of business there. Already, he’d been sidelined by Putin’s KGB allies from St Petersburg, and he’d begun seeking French citizenship in 2007. For those on the inside, Pugachev was being punished precisely for seeking to exit the tight-knit system that ruled Russia, the mafia clan which no one was ever meant to leave. ‘Pugachev was like a kidney. He was essential for the functioning of the system. But he lost his mind and thought he could leave and work on his own business. Of course the order was given to destroy him,’ said a senior Russian banker involved in financial operations for the Kremlin.[14]

In the rush of his flight from the UK to France, Pugachev left behind a number of telltale signs. Detectives working for the Kremlin’s lawyers had swooped in to raid his Knightsbridge office on a court order issued in the days after his disappearance. Among the reams of documents, there were a number of disc drives. On one of the disc drives were recordings: the Russian security services had been secretly taping every meeting he held in his downtown Moscow office since the end of the nineties.

One of the recordings vividly documents Pugachev’s candid and rueful feelings about Putin and his own role in bringing him to power. The tape records Pugachev sitting in his office with Valentin Yumashev, former president Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law and chief of staff, discussing over dinner and fine wine the tense state of affairs as Moscow hurtled through yet another political crisis. It was November 2007, and just a few months remained before Putin would come to the end of his second consecutive term as president, at which point Russia’s constitution dictated that he must step down. But although Putin had made vague statements about becoming prime minister after standing down as president, there was not yet even a whisper of his real intentions. In the warren-like corridors of the Kremlin, the former KGB and security men who had risen to power with Putin had been jostling for position, bickering and backstabbing in hopes that they, or their candidate, would be selected as his successor.

Pugachev and Yumashev quietly clinked glasses as they discussed the standoff. The uncertainty over the succession was bringing back strong memories of 1999, when they’d assisted Putin’s rise. It seemed to them an age ago. By now they had been eclipsed by Putin’s KGB allies from St Petersburg. By now they were almost relics from a totally different era. The system of power had changed irrevocably, and they were still struggling to understand what they’d done.

‘You remember how it was when he came into power?’ says Pugachev on the tape. ‘He would say, “I am the manager. I have been hired.”’ In those days, Putin had appeared reluctant to take the leading role, and seemed malleable and compliant to those who’d helped bring him to power. ‘Between us, at the beginning I think he had the idea to become rich, to live a happy life, to decide his own personal issues,’ Pugachev goes on. ‘And in principle, he decided these issues very quickly … But as the four years of his first term passed he understood things had happened that would never allow him to step down.’

Putin’s first term had been drenched in blood and controversy. It led to a sweeping transformation of the way the country was run. He faced a series of deadly terrorist attacks, including the siege of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow by Chechen terrorists in October 2002. The hostage-taking ended with more than a hundred dead when the Russian security services botched the storming of the theatre and gassed the very theatregoers they’d been trying to free.

Putin’s battles with rebels from the restive northern Caucasus republic of Chechnya had caused thousands of deaths, including the 294 who died in a string of apartment bombings. Many in Moscow whispered Putin’s security services were behind these bloody attacks, not least because the end result was a security clampdown that strengthened his power.

The freewheeling oligarchs of the 1990s were soon brought to heel. It had taken just one big case against the country’s richest man for Putin and his men to rein in the market freedoms of the Yeltsin era, and to launch a takeover by the state.

‘He would have gone gladly after four years, I think,’ Pugachev continues. ‘But then all these controversies happened. With the West now, there is such a serious standoff that it’s almost the Cuban missile crisis. And now he’s gone even deeper … He understands that if it goes further, he will never get out.’

For both these men, the power construct built by Putin, by which the president had accumulated so much power that everything now depended on him, looked the very opposite of stable. ‘It’s a pyramid. All you have to do is knock it once and it will all collapse … He understands all this, but he can’t change himself.’

‘I don’t have the feeling he understands any of this,’ says Yumashev.

‘It would be strange if he said everything I did is backward,’ Pugachev interjects. ‘Many of the decisions he makes are based on his convictions of how the world is run. The subject of patriotism – he believes this sincerely. When he says the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, he believes this sincerely … He just has such values. What he does he does sincerely. He sincerely makes mistakes.’

Putin had often justified his consolidation of all levers of power – which included ending elections for governors, and bringing the court system under Kremlin diktat – by saying such measures were necessary to usher in a new era of stability, ending the chaos and collapse of the 1990s. But behind the patriotic chest-beating that, on the face of it, appeared to drive most of the decision-making was another, more disturbing factor. Putin and the KGB men who ran the economy through a network of loyal allies now monopolised power, and had introduced a new system in which state positions were used as vehicles for self-enrichment. It was a far cry from the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois principles of the Soviet state they had once served.

‘These people, they are mutants,’ says Pugachev. ‘They are a mixture of homo-soveticus with the wild capitalists of the last twenty years. They have stolen so much to fill their pockets. All their families live somewhere in London. But when they say they need to crush someone in the name of patriotism, they say this sincerely. It’s just that if it’s London they’re targeting, they will get their families out first.’

‘I think it is a terrible thing,’ says Yumashev. ‘Some of my friends who work in the Kremlin now say – with absolute sincerity – how great it is they can get so rich there. In the nineties, this was unacceptable. You either had to go into business or work for the country. Now they go and work for the state to earn money. Ministers hand out licences to make money. And of course all this comes from the boss … The first conversation [Putin] has with a new state employee is, “Here is your business. Share it only with me. If someone attacks you, I will defend you … and if you don’t [use your position as a business] you are an idiot.”’

‘Putin said this himself,’ says Pugachev. ‘Openly. I remember, I was speaking with him. He said, “What is that guy waiting for? Why isn’t he earning? What is he waiting for? He has the position. Let him make money for himself.” These are now like people who have drunk blood. They can’t stop. Now it is state officials who are the businessmen.’

‘There are very few real businessmen left,’ Yumashev agrees, shaking his head sadly. ‘The atmosphere … The atmosphere has changed so much in the country. The air has changed. It’s suffocating now. Suffocating.’

The two men sigh. Everything has changed – apart from their ability to idealise their own roles. ‘What was great about the nineties was that there were no lies,’ Yumashev continues.

‘Absolutely,’ says Pugachev. ‘For me, my whole life, the truth was equivalent to freedom. I earned money not for riches, but for freedom. How much can you spend? As long as you have enough to buy two pairs of jeans, that’s fine. But a certain independence gave me one thing: I don’t need to lie.’

It seemed to the two men that the president had become surrounded by yes-men, all of whom proffered lengthy toasts to Putin, telling him he had been sent by God to save the country, while they served at his pleasure. Yet it seemed to Pugachev that these yes-men understood the deep hypocrisy of the system, the sham democracy represented by the Kremlin’s ruling party, United Russia, and how deeply corrupt it had become.

‘Look at the people around VV [Putin], who say Vladimir Vladimirovich, you’re a genius!’ Pugachev continues. ‘I look at them – and they don’t believe in anything. They understand it’s all crap. That United Russia is crap, the elections are crap, the president is crap. But they understand all this, and then they go on stage and say how great everything is. And all the toasts they make, which are total lies. They can sit and tell … rubbish about how they have always been together, ever since they were sitting on the school bench. But at the same time the guys sitting in the office next door are saying, “As soon as he comes out, let’s finish him off.” There is such cynicism. I don’t think they feel comfortable. The ones who have power … I am sorry for them. They’re stealing from all sides, and then they come out and speak about how Putin is fighting against corruption. I look at them and think, this is the end. I’m sorry for them … VV was always asking, “What is that word beginning with s? Sovest – conscience.” They don’t have receptors for this. They don’t understand it. They forgot the word and what it means. They’ve gotten totally messed up.’

All the achievements of the Putin era so far – the economic growth, the increase in incomes, the riches of the billionaires that had turned Moscow into a gleaming metropolis where sleek foreign cars filled the streets and cosy cafés opened on street corners – boiled down to the sharp increase in the oil price during the Putin years, they agree. ‘In 2000 the oil price was $17 and we were happy,’ says Yumashev. ‘When you and I were in power it was $10, $6. The best time for me was when it hit $16 for two to three weeks. Now it’s $150, and the only thing they’re doing is building awful houses for themselves.’

‘The state is doing nothing with the money. They could have transformed the country’s infrastructure. But he thinks everything will be stolen if we build roads … Time is passing so quickly,’ says Pugachev.

‘Eight years have gone. In 2000 we gave the boss such a smoothly oiled machine. Everything worked. And what did we get?’ asks Yumashev.

‘We didn’t understand that he wasn’t going to drive things forward. I thought he was liberal, young,’ Pugachev replies.

‘For me it was principally important that he was young,’ says Yumashev.

‘You understand it turned out he was from a different species.’

‘Yes. They are different people,’ Yumashev agrees.

‘They are different, special people. This was something we didn’t understand. The person who understood this very well was Ustinov [the prosecutor general],’ says Pugachev. ‘He told me, “You understand, the guys from the security services, they are different. Even if you were to suck all their blood out and then put on a different head, they would still be different. They live in their own system. You will never be one of them. It is an absolutely different system.”’

The recording offers a unique window into the unguarded views of two men who had brought Putin to power, and their horror at the system they’d help create. This book is the story of that system – the rise to power of Putin’s KGB cohort, and how they mutated to enrich themselves in the new capitalism. It is the story of the hurried handover of power between Yeltsin and Putin, and of how it enabled the rise of a ‘deep state’ of KGB security men that had always lurked in the background during the Yeltsin years, but now emerged to monopolise power for at least twenty years – and eventually to endanger the West.

This book began as an effort to trace the takeover of the Russian economy by Putin’s former KGB associates. But it became an investigation into something more pernicious than that. First research – and then events – showed that the kleptocracy of the Putin era was aimed at something more than just filling the pockets of the president’s friends. What emerged as a result of the KGB takeover of the economy – and the country’s political and legal system – was a regime in which the billions of dollars at Putin’s cronies’ disposal were to be actively used to undermine and corrupt the institutions and democracies of the West. The KGB playbook of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union deployed ‘active measures’ to sow division and discord in the West, to fund allied political parties and undermine its ‘imperial’ foe, has now been fully reactivated. What’s different now is that these tactics are funded by a much deeper well of cash, by a Kremlin that has become adept in the ways of the markets and has sunk its tentacles deep into the institutions of the West. Parts of the KGB, Putin among them, have embraced capitalism as a tool for getting even with the West. It was a process that began long before, in the years before the Soviet collapse.

Putin’s takeover of strategic cash flows was always about more than taking control of the country’s economy. For the Putin regime, wealth was less about the well-being of Russia’s citizens than about the projection of power, about reasserting the country’s position on the world stage. The system Putin’s men created was a hybrid KGB capitalism that sought to accumulate cash to buy off and corrupt officials in the West, whose politicians, complacent after the end of the Cold War, had long forgotten about the Soviet tactics of the not too distant past. Western markets embraced the new wealth coming from Russia, and paid little heed to the criminal and KGB forces behind it. The KGB had forged an alliance with Russian organised crime long ago, on the eve of the Soviet collapse, when billions of dollars’ worth of precious metals, oil and other commodities was transferred from the state to firms linked to the KGB. From the start, foreign-intelligence operatives of the KGB sought to accumulate black cash to maintain and preserve influence networks long thought demolished by the Soviet collapse. For a time under Yeltsin the forces of the KGB stayed hidden in the background. But when Putin rose to power, the alliance between the KGB and organised crime emerged and bared its teeth. To understand this process, we must go back to the beginning of it all, to the time of the Soviet collapse.

For the men who helped bring Putin to power, the revanche has also brought a reckoning. Pugachev and Yumashev had begun the transfer of power in desperate hurry, as Yeltsin’s health failed, in an attempt to secure the future of the country – and their own safety – against what they believed to be a Communist threat. But they too had forgotten the not too distant Soviet past.

The security men they brought to power were to stop at nothing to prolong their rule beyond the bounds of anything they’d thought possible.

‘We should have spoken to him more,’ sighed Yumashev.

‘Of course,’ said Pugachev. ‘But there wasn’t any time.’

PART ONE

1
‘Operation Luch’

ST PETERSBURG – It’s early February 1992, and an official car from the city administration is slowly driving down the main street of the city. A grey slush has been partially swept from the pavements, and people are trudging through the cold in thick anonymous coats, laden with bags and hunched against the wind. Behind the fading façades of the once grand houses on Nevsky Prospekt, shops stand almost empty, their shelves practically bare in the aftershocks of the Soviet Union’s sudden implosion. It’s barely six weeks since the Soviet Union ceased to exist, since the fateful day when Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics signed their union out of existence with the stroke of a pen. The city’s food distributors are struggling to react to rapid change as the strict Soviet regulations that for decades controlled supply chains and fixed prices had suddenly ceased to exist.

In the bus queues and at the impromptu markets that have sprung up across the city as inhabitants seek to earn cash selling shoes and other items from their homes, the talk all winter has been of food shortages, ration cards and gloom. Making matters worse, hyperinflation is ravaging savings. Some have even warned of famine, sounding alarm bells across a city still gripped by memories of the Second World War blockade, when up to a thousand people starved to death every day.

But the city official behind the wheel of the black Volga sedan looks calm. The slight, resolute figure gazing intently ahead is Vladimir Putin. He is thirty-nine, deputy mayor of St Petersburg and the recently appointed head of the city’s foreign relations committee. The scene is being filmed for a series of documentaries on the city’s new administration, and this one centres on the youthful-looking deputy mayor whose responsibilities include ensuring adequate imports of food.[1] As the footage flickers back to his office in City Hall at Smolny, Putin reels off a string of figures on the tonnes of grain in humanitarian aid being shipped in from Germany, England and France. There is no need for worry, he says. Nearly ten minutes is spent on careful explanations of the measures his committee has taken to secure emergency supplies of food, including a groundbreaking deal for £20 million-worth of livestock grain secured during a meeting between the city’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and British prime minister John Major. Without this act of generosity from the UK, the region’s young livestock would not have survived, he says.

His command of detail is impressive. So too is his grasp of the vast problems facing the city’s economy. He speaks with fluency of the need to develop a class of small and medium business owners as the backbone of the new market economy. Indeed, he says, ‘The entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole.’

He speaks with precision on the problems of converting the region’s vast Soviet-era defence enterprises to civilian production in order to keep them alive. Sprawling plants like the Kirovsky Zavod, a vast artillery and tank producer in the south of the city, had been the region’s main employer since tsarist times. Now they were at a standstill, as the endless orders for military hardware that fuelled and eventually bankrupted the Soviet economy had suddenly dried up. We have to bring in Western partners and integrate the plants into the global economy, says the young city official.

With sudden intensity, he speaks of the harm Communism wrought in artificially cutting off the Soviet Union from the free-market relations linking the rest of the developed world. The credos of Marx and Lenin ‘brought colossal losses to our country’, he says. ‘There was a period of my life when I studied the theories of Marxism and Leninism, and I found them interesting and, like many of us, logical. But as I grew up the truth became ever more clear to me – these theories are no more than harmful fairy tales.’ Indeed, the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 were responsible for the ‘tragedy we are experiencing today – the tragedy of the collapse of our state’, he boldly tells the interviewer. ‘They cut the country up into republics that did not exist before, and then destroyed what unites the people of civilised countries: they destroyed market relations.’

It is just a few months since his appointment as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, but already it is a powerful, carefully crafted performance. He sits casually straddling a chair backwards, but everything else points to precision and preparation. The fifty-minute film shows him on the judo mat flipping opponents over his shoulder, speaking fluent German with a visiting businessman, and taking calls from Sobchak about the latest foreign aid deals. His meticulous preparation extends to the man he specifically requested to conduct the interview and direct the film: a documentary film-maker known and loved across the Soviet Union for a series he made intimately charting the lives of a group of children, a Soviet version of the popular UK television series Seven Up. Igor Shadkhan is a Jew, who recently returned to St Petersburg from making a series of films on the horrors of the Soviet Gulag in the far north; a man who still flinches at the memory of anti-Semitic slurs from Soviet times, and who, by his own admittance, still ducks his head in fear whenever he passes the former headquarters of the KGB on the city’s Liteyny Prospekt.

Yet this is the man Putin chose to help him with a very special revelation, the man who will convey to the world the fact that Putin had served as an officer in the feared and hated KGB. It is still the first wave of the democracy movement, a time when admitting this could compromise his boss, Sobchak, a rousing orator who rose to mayor on a tide of condemnation of the secrets of the old regime, of the abuses perpetrated by the KGB. To this day, Shadkhan still questions whether Putin’s choice was part of a careful rehabilitation plan. ‘I always ask why he chose me. He understood that I was needed, and he was ready to tell me he was from the KGB. He wanted to show that people of the KGB were also progressive.’ Putin chose well. ‘A critic once told me that I always humanised my subject matter, no matter who they were,’ Shadkhan recalls. ‘I humanised him. I wanted to know who he was and what did he see. I was a person who had always criticised the Soviet authorities. I endured a lot from them. But I was sympathetic to him. We became friends. He seemed to me one who would drive the country forward, who would really do something. He really recruited me.’[2]

Throughout the film, Putin artfully takes opportunities to stress the good qualities of the KGB. Where he served, he insists in response to a delicate question on whether he abused his position to take bribes, such actions were considered ‘a betrayal of the motherland’, and would be punished with the full force of the law. As for being an ‘official’, a chinovnik, the word need not have any negative connotation, he claims. He’d served his country as a military chinovnik; now he was a civilian official, serving – as he had before – his country ‘outside the realm of political competition’.

By the end of the documentary, Shadkhan appears to have fully bought in. The film concludes with a nod and a wink to a glorified KGB past: Putin is shown surveying the icy river Neva, wrapped against the cold in a fur hat, a man of the people behind the wheel of a white Zhiguli, the boxy car ubiquitous in those days. As he watches over the city with a steely and protective gaze, the film closes to the strains of the theme tune from a popular Soviet TV series – 17 Moments of Spring – that made a hero out of an undercover KGB spy who had infiltrated deep into Nazi Germany’s ruling regime. It was Shadkhan’s choice. ‘He was a person exactly of his profession. I wanted to show how it turned out that he was still in the same profession.’

Putin, however, had taken care in the interview to give the impression that he’d resigned from the KGB as soon as he’d returned to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then called, in February 1990. He told Shadkhan that he’d left for ‘all kinds of reasons’, not for political ones, indicating that he’d done so before he started working in May of that year with Sobchak, then a law professor at Leningrad’s State University and the fast-rising star of the city’s new democratic movement. Putin had returned to the tsarist-era capital from five years of service in Dresden in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), where he’d served as liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi, the East German secret police. Later legend had it that he’d confided to a colleague that he feared he might have no better future than working as a taxi driver on his return.[3] Apparently he was keen to create the impression that he’d cut all ties to his old masters, that Russia’s rapidly changing order had cast him adrift.

What Putin told Shadkhan was just the start of a string of falsehoods and obfuscation surrounding his KGB career. In the imploding empire that he had returned to from Dresden, nothing was quite as it seemed. From the KGB villa perched high on the banks of the river Elbe overlooking Dresden’s still elegant sprawl, Putin had already witnessed at first hand the end of the Soviet empire’s control of the GDR, the collapse of the so-called socialist dream. The Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact power bloc had shattered around him as its citizens rebelled against the Communist leadership. He’d watched, first from afar, as the aftershocks began to reverberate across the Soviet Union and, inspired by the Berlin Wall’s collapse, nationalist movements spread ever more rapidly across the country, forcing the Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev into ever more compromise with 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.

*

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.

*

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. They were exporting arms and importing high-tech,’ said Sedelmayer. ‘Dresden was always important for the microelectronics industry,’ said Horst Jehmlich.[10] The espionage unit headed by East Germany’s legendary spymaster Markus Wolf ‘did a lot’ for this, added Jehmlich. He remained tight-lipped, however, on what exactly they did.

The Dresden Stasi foreign-intelligence chief, Herbert Kohler, served at the same time as head of its information and technology intelligence unit,[11] a sign of how important smuggling embargoed goods was for the city. Ever since Germany was carved up between East and West in the aftermath of World War II, much of the eastern bloc had relied on the black market and smuggling to survive. The Soviet Union’s coffers were empty after the ravages of the war, and in East Berlin, Zürich and Vienna organised-crime groups worked hand in hand with the Soviet security services to smuggle cigarettes, alcohol, diamonds and rare metals through the black market to replenish the cash stores of the security services of the eastern bloc. Initially the black-market trade had been seen as a temporary necessity, the Communist leaders justifying it to themselves as a blow against the foundations of capitalism. But when, in 1950, the West united against the Soviet-controlled bloc to place an embargo on all high-tech goods that could be used for military means, smuggling became a way of life. The free choices of capitalism and the drive for profit in the West were fuelling a boom in technological development there. By comparison, the planned socialist economy of the eastern bloc was frozen far behind. Its enterprises were bound only to meet annual production plans, its workers and scientists left to procure even the most basic goods through informal connections on the grey market. Isolated by the Iron Curtain, smuggling became the only way for the eastern bloc to keep up with the rapidly developing achievements of the capitalist West.[12]

The East German foreign trade ministry set up the Kommerzielle Koordinierung, appointing the garrulous Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski as its chief. Its mission was to earn illicit hard currency through smuggling, to bankroll the Stasi acquisition of embargoed technology. The KoKo, as it was known, answered first to Markus Wolf’s Stasi espionage department, but then became a force unto itself.[13] A string of front companies was set up across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, headed by trusted agents, some with multiple identities, who brought in vitally needed hard currency through smuggling deals and the sale of illicit arms to the Middle East and Africa.[14] All the while, the Soviet masters sought to keep a close eye on these activities. The KGB could access all the embargoed high-tech blueprints and goods collected by the Stasi.[15] Often, the Stasi complained that the intelligence-gathering was a one-way street.

At the time Putin arrived in Dresden, West Germany was becoming ever more important as a source of high-tech goods. The KGB was still recovering from a major blow in the early eighties, when Vladimir Vetrov, an officer in its ‘Directorate T’, which specialised in procuring Western scientific and technological secrets, offered his services to the West. Vetrov handed over the names of all the KGB’s 250 officers working on ‘Line X’, the smuggling of technology, in embassies across the world, as well as thousands of documents which provided a breakdown of the Soviets’ industrial espionage efforts. As a result, forty-seven agents were expelled from France, while the US began to develop an extensive programme to sabotage the Soviets’ illicit procurement networks.

The KGB was doubling down on its efforts in Germany, recruiting agents in companies including Siemens, Bayer, Messerschmidt and Thyssen.[16] Putin was clearly involved in this process, enlisting scientists and businessmen who could assist in the smuggling of Western technology into the eastern bloc. Robotron’s status as the biggest electronics manufacturer in East Germany made it a magnet for visiting businessmen from the West. ‘I know that Putin and his team worked with the West, that they had contacts in the West. But mostly they recruited their agents here,’ said Putin’s Stasi colleague Jehmlich. ‘They went after students before they left for the West. They tried to select them and figure out how they could be interesting for them.’[17]

But Jehmlich was far from aware of all the operations of his KGB ‘friends’, who frequently went behind the backs of their Stasi comrades when recruiting agents, including in the Stasi itself. Jehmlich, for instance, claimed he’d never heard that Putin used a cover name for sensitive operations. But many years later, Putin told students he’d adopted ‘several technical pseudonyms’ for foreign-intelligence operations at that time.[18] One associate from those days said Putin had called himself ‘Platov’, the cover name he’d first been given in the KGB training academy.[19] Another name he reportedly used was ‘Adamov’, which he’d taken in his post as head of the House of Soviet–German Friendship in the neighbouring city of Leipzig.[20]

One of the Stasi operatives Putin worked closely with was a short, round-faced German, Matthias Warnig, who was later to become an integral part of the Putin regime. Warnig was part of a KGB cell organised by Putin in Dresden ‘under the guise of a business consultancy’, one former Stasi officer recruited by Putin later said.[21] In those days, Warnig was a hotshot, said to have recruited at least twenty agents in the 1980s to steal Western military rocket and aircraft technology.[22] He’d risen fast through the ranks since his recruitment in 1974, becoming deputy head of the Stasi’s information and technology unit by 1989.[23]

Putin mostly liked to hang out in a small, lowlit bar in the historic centre of Dresden called Am Tor, a few tram stops into the valley from his KGB base, where he’d meet some of his agents, according to one person who worked with him then.[24] One of the main hunting grounds for operations was the Bellevue Hotel on the banks of the Elbe. As the only hotel in the city open to foreigners, it was an important hive for recruiting visiting Western scientists and businessmen. The hotel was owned by the Stasi’s department of tourism, and its palatial restaurants, cosy bars and elegant bedrooms were fitted out with hidden cameras and bugs. Visiting businessmen were honey-trapped with prostitutes, filmed in their rooms and then blackmailed into working for the East.[25] ‘Of course, it was clear to me we used female agents for these purposes. Every security service does this. Sometimes women can achieve far more than men,’ said Jehmlich with a laugh.[26]

We may never know if Putin took his hunt further afield into the West. We cannot trust the authorised accounts of his KGB contemporaries. He himself has insisted he’d never done so, while his colleagues liked to tell instead of the long, lazy ‘tourist’ trips they took to neighbouring East German towns. But one of Putin’s chief tasks was gathering information on NATO, the ‘main opponent’,[27] and Dresden was an important outpost for recruiting in Munich and in Baden-Württemberg five hundred kilometres away, both home to US military personnel and NATO troops.[28] Many years later a Western banker told me the story of his aunt, a Russian princess, Tatiana von Metternich, who’d married into the German aristocracy and lived in a castle, near Wiesbaden, West Germany, where the US Army had its main base. She’d told her nephew how impressed she’d been by a young KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, who had visited her in her home and taken confession religiously, despite his background in the KGB.[29]

While Putin operated under the radar, in the background, the ground was beginning to shift beneath his feet. Parts of the KGB leadership were becoming ever more cognisant of the Soviet Union’s flagging capacity in the struggle against the West, and had quietly begun preparing for a different phase. Soviet coffers were running on empty, and in the battle to procure Western technology, despite the extensive efforts of the KGB and the Stasi, the eastern bloc was always on the back foot, always playing catch-up and lagging ever further behind the technology of the West. In an era when US president Ronald Reagan had announced a new initiative to build the so-called ‘Star Wars’ system that would defend the United States from nuclear-missile attack, the Soviet bloc ploughed ever greater efforts into securing Western technology, only to become ever more aware of how behind they were.

Since the early eighties, a few progressive members of the KGB had been working on a transformation of sorts. Ensconced in the Institute for World Economy in Moscow, they began working on reforms that could introduce some elements of the market to the Soviet economy in order to create competition, yet retain overall control. When Mikhail Gorbachev took office as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, these ideas were given impetus. Gorbachev launched the political and economic reforms of glasnost and perestroika, which aimed for a gradual loosening of control over the country’s political and economic system. Throughout the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was rising against the repression of Communist rulers, and Gorbachev pressed his colleagues across the Warsaw Pact to pursue similar reforms as the only way to survive and stay ahead of the tide of resentment and dissent. Aware that a collapse could nevertheless be on its way, a small handful of KGB progressives began preparing for a fall.

As if seeing the writing on the wall, in 1986 Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s venerated Spymaster, resigned, ending his reign over East Germany’s feared foreign-intelligence unit, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, where for more than thirty years he’d ruthlessly run operations for the Stasi, known for his ability to relentlessly exploit human weaknesses to blackmail and extort agents into working for him. Under his watch the HVA had penetrated deep into the West German government, and had turned numerous agents thought to be working for the CIA. But now he’d somehow suddenly dropped all that.

Officially, he was helping his brother Konrad write his memoirs of their childhood in Moscow. But behind the scenes he too was preparing for change. He began working closely with the progressive perestroika faction in the KGB, holding secret meetings in his palatial Berlin flat to discuss a gradual liberalisation of the political system.[30] The plans they spoke of were similar to the glasnost reforms Gorbachev had launched in Moscow, where informal political movements were gradually being allowed to emerge and media constraints were being relaxed. But though the talk was of democracy and reform, the plan was always for the security services to remain in control behind the scenes. Later it turned out that Wolf had secretly remained on the Stasi payroll throughout.[31]

Ever more aware of the risks of Communist collapse, in the mid-eighties the KGB quietly launched Operation Luch, to prepare for a potential regime change ahead. Wolf was kept fully aware of it, but his successor as head of the Stasi foreign-intelligence arm was not.[32] In August 1988 the KGB sent a top official, Boris Laptev, to the imposing Soviet embassy in East Berlin to oversee it.[33] Officially, Laptev’s mission was to create a group of operatives who would work secretly in parallel with the official KGB residency to penetrate East German opposition groups. ‘We had to collect information on the opposition movement and put the brakes on any developments, and prevent any moves towards German reunification,’ he later said.[34] But in fact, as the anti-Communist protests grew and the futility of such efforts became ever clearer, his mission became almost the opposite of that. The group instead began to focus on creating a new agent network that would reach deep into the second and third tier of political circles in the GDR. They were looking for agents who could continue to work undercover for the Soviets even in a reunified Germany, untainted by any leadership role before the collapse.[35]

The signs are that Putin was enlisted to play a part in this process. In those days he served as Party secretary,[36] a position that would have put him in frequent contact with Dresden’s SED chief Hans Modrow. The KGB appear to have hoped that they could cultivate Modrow as a potential successor to the long-serving East German leader Erich Honecker, apparently even believing he could lead the country through modest perestroika-like reforms.[37] Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB foreign-intelligence chief, paid a special visit to Modrow in Dresden in 1986.[38]

But Honecker had refused to step down until the bitter end, forcing the KGB to dig deeper to recruit agents who would continue to act for them after the fall of the eastern bloc. Kryuchkov would always insist that he never met Putin then, and to deny that Putin played any part in Operation Luch, as did Markus Wolf.[39] But the West German equivalent of MI5, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, believed the reverse. They later questioned Horst Jehmlich for hours on what Putin had been up to then. Jehmlich suspected that Putin had betrayed him: ‘They tried to recruit people from the second and third tier of our organisation. They went into all organs of power, but they didn’t contact any of the leaders or the generals. They did it all behind our backs.’[40]

Other parts of the Stasi also began secretly preparing. In 1986, Stasi chief Erich Mielke signed off on plans for a squad of elite officers, the Offiziere im besonderen Einsatz, to remain in power in case the rule of the SED suddenly came to an end.[41] The most important phase of securing the Stasi’s future began when they started moving cash via their smuggling networks through a web of firms into the West, in order to create secret cash stores to enable them to maintain operations after the fall. A senior German official estimated that billions of West German marks were siphoned out of East Germany into a string of front companies from 1986.[42]

Putin’s Dresden was a central hub for these preparations. Herbert Kohler, the head of the Dresden HVA, was closely involved in the creation of some of these front companies – so-called ‘operative firms’ – that were to hide their connections with the Stasi and store ‘black cash’ to allow Stasi networks to survive following a collapse.[43] Kohler worked closely with an Austrian businessman named Martin Schlaff, who’d been recruited in the early eighties by the Stasi. Schlaff was tasked with smuggling embargoed components for the construction of a hard-disc factory in Thüringen, near Dresden. Between the end of 1986 and the end of 1988 his firms received more than 130 million marks from the East German government for the top-secret project, which was one of the most expensive ever run by the Stasi. But the plant was never finished. Many of the components never arrived,[44] while hundreds of millions of marks intended for the plant, and from other illicit deals, disappeared into Schlaff front companies in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Singapore.[45]

These financial transfers took place at the time Putin was serving as the main liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi in Dresden, in particular with Kohler’s HVA.[46] It’s not clear whether he played any role in them. But many years later, Schlaff’s connections with Putin became clear when the Austrian businessman re-emerged in a network of companies in Europe that were central cogs in the influence operations of the Putin regime.[47] Back in the 1980s Schlaff had travelled at least once to Moscow for talks with Soviet foreign-trade officials.[48]

Most of what Putin did during the Dresden years remains shrouded in mystery, in part because the KGB proved much more effective than the Stasi at destroying and transferring documents before the collapse. ‘With the Russians, we have problems,’ said Sven Scharl, a researcher at the Stasi archives in Dresden.[49] ‘They destroyed almost everything.’ Only fragments remain in the files retrieved from the Stasi of Putin’s activities there. His file is thin, and well-thumbed. There is the order of Stasi chief Erich Mielke of February 8 1988, listing Major Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as receiving a Bronze Medal of Merit of the National People’s Army. There are the letters from the Dresden Stasi chief Horst Böhm wishing Comrade Putin a happy birthday. There is the seating plan for a dinner celebrating the seventy-first anniversary of the Cheka, the original name for the Soviet secret police, on January 24 1989. There’s the photograph marking the visit of more than forty Stasi, KGB and military officers to the First Guards Tank Army Museum. (Putin peeps out, almost indistinguishable among the grey mass of men.) Then there are the photographs, uncovered only recently, of a loutish and bored-looking Putin in light-grey jacket and bright suede shoes holding flowers and drinking at an award ceremony for the Stasi intelligence unit’s top brass.

The only trace of any operative activity connected to Putin is a letter from him to Böhm, asking for the Dresden Stasi chief’s assistance in restoring the phone connection for an informant in the German police who ‘supports us’. The letter is short on any detail, but the fact of Putin’s direct appeal to Böhm appears to indicate the prominence of his role.[50] Jehmlich indeed later confirmed that Putin became the main KGB liaison officer with the Stasi on behalf of the KGB station chief Vladimir Shirokov. Among the recent finds was one other telltale document: Putin’s Stasi identity card, which would have given him direct access to Stasi buildings and made it easier for him to recruit agents, because he would not have had to mention his affiliation with the KGB.

Many years later, when Putin became president, Markus Wolf and Putin’s former KGB colleagues took care to stress that he had been a nobody when he served in Dresden. Putin was ‘pretty marginal’, Wolf once told a German magazine, and even ‘cleaning ladies’ had received the Bronze Medal awarded to him.[51] The KGB colleague Putin shared an office with on his arrival in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who was somehow permitted to write a book on those times, took care to emphasise the mundanity of their work, while revealing zero detail about their operations. Though he admitted that he and Putin had worked with ‘illegals’, as the sleeper agents planted undercover were called, he said they’d spent 70 per cent of their time writing ‘senseless reports’.[52] Putin, he claimed, had only managed to recruit two agents during his entire five years in Dresden, and at some point had stopped looking for more, because he realised it was a waste of time. The city was such a provincial backwater that ‘the very fact of our service in Dresden spoke of how we had no future career’, Usoltsev wrote.[53] Putin himself claimed he’d spent so much time drinking beer there that he put on twelve kilos.[54] But the photographs of him in those days do not suggest any such weight gain. Russian state television later proclaimed that Putin was never involved in anything illegal.

But one first-hand account suggests the downplaying of Putin’s activities in Dresden was cover for another mission – one beyond the edge of the law. It suggests that Putin was stationed there precisely because it was a backwater, far from the spying eyes in East Berlin, where the French, the Americans and the West Germans all kept close watch. According to a former member of the far-left Red Army Faction who claimed to have met him in Dresden, Putin had worked in support of members of the group, which sowed terror across West Germany in the seventies and eighties: ‘There was nothing in Dresden, nothing at all, except the radical left. Nobody was watching Dresden, not the Americans, not the West Germans. There was nothing there. Except the one thing: these meetings with those comrades.’[55]

*

In the battle for empire between East and West, the Soviet security services had long been deploying what they called their own ‘active measures’ to disrupt and destabilise their opponent. Locked in the Cold War but realising it was too far behind technologically to win any military war, ever since the sixties the Soviet Union had found its strength lay in disinformation, in planting fake rumours in the media to discredit Western leaders, in assassinating political opponents, and in supporting front organisations that would foment wars in the Third World and undermine and sow discord in the West. Among these measures was support for terrorist organisations. Across the Middle East, the KGB had forged ties with numerous Marxist-leaning terror groups, most notably with the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organisation that carried out a string of plane hijackings and bomb attacks in the late sixties and seventies. Top-secret documents retrieved from the archives of the Soviet Politburo illustrate the depth of some of these connections. They show the then KGB chief Yury Andropov signing off three requests for Soviet weapons from PFLP leader Wadi Haddad, and describing him as a ‘trusted agent’ of the KGB.[56]

In East Germany, the KGB actively encouraged the Stasi to assist in its ‘political activities’ in the Third World.[57] In fact, support for international terrorism became one of the most important services the Stasi rendered to the KGB.[58] By 1969 the Stasi had opened a clandestine training camp outside East Berlin for members of Yassar Arafat’s PLO.[59] Markus Wolf’s Stasi foreign-intelligence unit became deeply involved in working with terrorist groups across the Arab world, including with the PFLP’s notorious Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, otherwise known as Carlos the Jackal.[60] Stasi military instructors set up a network of terrorist training camps across the Middle East.[61] And when, in 1986, one Stasi counter-intelligence officer, horrified at the mayhem that was starting to reach German soil, tried to disrupt the bombing plots of a group of Libyans that had become active in West Berlin, he was told to back off by Stasi chief Erich Mielke. ‘America is the arch-enemy,’ Mielke had told him. ‘We should concern ourselves with catching American spies and not bother our Libyan friends.’[62] Weeks later a bomb went off at the La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, popular with American soldiers, killing three US servicemen and one civilian, and injuring hundreds more. It later emerged that the KGB had been aware of the activities of the bombers, and knew exactly how they’d smuggled their weapons into Berlin.[63] Apparently all methods were to be permitted in the fight against the US ‘imperialists’.

One former KGB general who defected to the US, Oleg Kalugin, later called these activities ‘the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence’.[64] The former head of Romania’s foreign-intelligence service, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who became the highest-ranking eastern-bloc intelligence officer to defect to the US, had been the first to speak openly about the KGB’s operations with terrorist groups. Pacepa wrote of how the former head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence, General Alexander Sakharovsky, had frequently told him: ‘In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.’[65] Pacepa also stated that KGB chief Yury Andropov had launched an operation to stoke anti-Israeli and anti-US sentiment in the Arab world. At the same time, he said, domestic terrorism was to be unleashed in the West.[66]

West Germany had been on edge ever since the far-left militant Red Army Faction – also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group after its early leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – launched a string of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and bank robberies in the late 1960s. In the name of toppling the country’s ‘imperialism and monopoly capitalism’, they’d killed prominent West German industrialists and bankers, including the head of Dresdner Bank in 1977, and had bombed US military bases, killing and injuring dozens of servicemen. But by the end of the seventies, when the West German police stepped up a campaign of arrests, the Stasi began providing safe haven in the East to members of the group.[67] ‘They harboured not just one but ten of them. They lived in cookie-cutter buildings around Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin,’ said the German security consultant Franz Sedelmayer.[68] The Stasi had provided them with false identities, and also ran training camps.[69] For four years, from 1983 to 1987, one of their number, Inge Viett, had lived under a false name in a Dresden suburb, until one of her neighbours travelled to West Berlin and saw her face on a wanted poster there. She was one of West Germany’s most wanted terrorists, known as the ‘grandma of terrorism’, accused of participating in the attempted assassinations of a NATO commander-in-chief and the commander-in-chief of US forces in Europe, General Frederick Kroesen.[70]

Initially, after the fall of the Wall, the West German authorities believed the Stasi had provided only refuge and false identities to the Red Army Faction members. But as prosecutors continued to investigate the Stasi’s role, they found evidence of a much deeper collaboration. Their investigation led to the arrest and indictment of five former Stasi counter-terrorism officers for conspiring with the group to bomb the US’s Ramstein army base in 1981, and attempting to kill General Kroesen.[71] Stasi chief Erich Mielke was indicted on the same charges. One former Red Army Faction member emerged to tell how the group would frequently be used by the Stasi to transport weapons to terrorists in the Arab world.[72] Another former member spoke of working in the eighties as a handler for the notorious Carlos the Jackal,[73] who had lived for a time under Stasi protection in East Berlin, where he lived it up in the city’s most luxurious hotels and casinos.[74] Inge Viett later confessed that she’d attended a training camp in East Germany to prepare for the 1981 attack on General Kroesen.[75]

But amid the tumult of German reunification, there was no political will to root out the evils of the GDR’s past and bring the Stasi men to trial. The five-year statute of limitations on those charged with collaboration with the Red Army Faction was deemed to have passed, and the charges dropped away.[76] The memory of their crimes faded, while the KGB’s involvement with the Red Army Faction was never investigated at all. But all the while the Soviets had overseen the operations of the Stasi, with liaison officers at every command level. At the highest level KGB control was so tight that, according to one former Red Army Faction member, ‘Mielke wouldn’t even fart without asking permission in Moscow first.’[77] ‘The GDR could do nothing without coordination with the Soviets,’ said a defector from the senior ranks of the Stasi.[78]

This was the environment Putin was working in – and the story that the former Red Army Faction member had to tell about Dresden fitted closely with that. According to him, in the years that Putin served in East Germany, Dresden became a meeting place for the Red Army Faction.

Dresden was chosen as a meeting place precisely because ‘there was no one else there’, this former Red Army Faction member said.[79] ‘In Berlin, there were the Americans, the French and the British, everyone. For what we needed to do we needed the provinces, not the capital.’ Another reason the meetings were held there was because Markus Wolf and Erich Mielke wanted to distance themselves from such activities: ‘Wolf was very careful not to be involved. The very last thing a guy like Wolf or Mielke wanted was to be caught red-handed supporting a terrorist organisation … We met there [in Dresden] about half a dozen times.’ He and other members of the terrorist group would travel into East Germany by train, and would be met by Stasi agents waiting in a large Soviet-made Zil car, then driven to Dresden, where they were joined in a safe house by Putin and another of his KGB colleagues. ‘They would never give us instructions directly. They would just say, “We heard you were planning this, how do you want to do it?” and make suggestions. They would suggest other targets and ask us what we needed. We always needed weapons and cash.’ It was difficult for the Red Army Faction to purchase weapons in Western Germany, so they would hand Putin and his colleagues a list. Somehow, this list would later end up with an agent in the West, and the requested weapons would be dropped in a secret location for the Red Army Faction members to pick up.

Far from taking the backseat role often ascribed to him during his Dresden years, Putin would be among the leaders in these meetings, the former Red Army member claimed, with one of the Stasi generals taking orders from him.

As the Red Army Faction sowed chaos across West Germany in a series of vicious bomb attacks, their activities became a key part of KGB attempts to disrupt and destabilise the West, the former member of the terror group claimed. And, as the end loomed for Soviet power and the GDR, it’s possible that they became a weapon to protect the interests of the KGB.

One possible such attack came just weeks after the Berlin Wall’s fall. It was 8.30 in the morning on November 30 1989, and Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of Deutsche Bank, was setting off from his home in Bad Homburg, Frankfurt, for his daily drive to work. The first car in his three-car convoy was already heading down the road that was his usual route. But as Herrhausen’s car sped to follow, a grenade containing 150 pounds of explosives tore through his armoured limousine, killing him instantly. The detonator that set off the grenade had been triggered when the limousine drove through a ray of infrared light beamed across the road.[80] The attack had been carried out with military precision, and the technology deployed was of the highest sophistication. ‘This had to be a state-sponsored attack,’ said one Western intelligence expert.[81] Later, it emerged that Stasi officers had been involved in training camps at which Red Army Faction members had been instructed in the use of explosives, anti-tank rockets and the detonation of bomb devices through photo-electric beams just like the one used in the Herrhausen attack.[82]

Herrhausen had been a titan of the West German business scene, and a close adviser to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. The attack came just as reunification had suddenly become a real possibility. This was a process in which Deutsche Bank could stand to gain massively from the privatisation of East German state enterprises – and in which Dresdner Bank, where Putin’s friend the Stasi officer Matthias Warnig would soon be employed, was to battle with Deutsche for the spoils. According to the former Red Army Faction member, the attack on Herrhausen was organised for the benefit of Soviet interests: ‘I know this target came from Dresden, and not from the RAF.’[83]

For the former Red Army Faction member those days now seem long ago and far away. But he can’t help but remember with regret that he was no more than a puppet in Soviet influence games. ‘We were no more than useful idiots for the Soviet Union,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘This is where it all began. They were using us to disrupt, destabilise and sow chaos in the West.’

When asked about the Stasi and the KGB’s support for the Red Army Faction, a shadow falls across the still spry face of Horst Jehmlich, the former Dresden Stasi fixer-in-chief. We are sitting around the dining table of the sunlit Stasi apartment he’s lived in ever since the GDR years, just around the corner from the Stasi headquarters and the villa of the KGB. The fine china is out for coffee, the table is covered with lace. The Red Army Faction members were only brought to the GDR ‘to turn them away from terrorism’, he insists. ‘The Stasi wanted to prevent terrorism and stop them from returning to terrorist measures. They wanted to give them a chance to re-educate themselves.’

But when asked whether it was the KGB who were in fact calling the tune, whether it was Putin who the Red Army Faction members were meeting with in Dresden, and whether the order for the Herrhausen attack could have emanated from there, the shadow across his face becomes darker still. ‘I don’t know anything about this. When it was top-secret, I didn’t know. I don’t know whether this involved the Russian secret service. If it is so, then the KGB tried to prevent that anyone knows about this material. They will have said that this is a German problem. They managed to destroy many more documents than us.’[84]

The former Red Army Faction member’s story is near-impossible to verify. Most of his former comrades are either in prison or dead. Others allegedly involved in the meetings back then have disappeared off the grid. But a close Putin ally from the KGB indicated that any such allegations were extremely sensitive, and insisted that no connection between the KGB and the Red Army Faction, or any other European terrorist group, had ever been proved: ‘And you should not try to do so!’ he added sharply.[85] At the same time, however, the story he told about Putin’s resignation from the security services raised a troubling question. According to this former KGB ally, Putin was just six months from qualifying for his KGB pension when he resigned – at thirty-nine, he was far younger than the official pension age of fifty for his rank of lieutenant-colonel. But the KGB doled out early pensions to those who’d given special service in terms of risk or honour to the motherland. For those who were stationed in the United States, one year of service was considered as one and a half years. For those who served time in prison, one year’s service was considered three. Was Putin close to gaining an early pension because one year’s service counted as two, as a result of the high risk involved in working with the Red Army Faction?

Many years later, Klaus Zuchold, one of Putin’s recruits in the Stasi, offered some partial details of Putin’s involvement in other active measures then. Zuchold, who’d defected to the West, told a German publication, Correctiv, that Putin had once sought to obtain a study on deadly poisons that leave few traces, and planned to compromise the author of this study by planting pornographic material on him.[86] It’s not clear whether the operation ever got off the ground. Zuchold also claimed that Putin’s activities included a role as the handler of a notorious neo-Nazi, Rainer Sonntag, who was deported to West Germany in 1987, and who returned to Dresden after the Wall’s fall and stoked the rise of the far right.[87] By the time I sought out Zuchold to ask him about Putin’s alleged work with the Red Army Faction, he had long gone to ground, and didn’t respond to interview requests. According to one person close to Western intelligence, he was under the special protection of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz.

*

While working with the Red Army terrorists may have been Putin’s training ground in active measures against the imperialist West, what happened when the Berlin Wall came down was the experience he would carry with him for decades to come. Though it had become ever clearer that the eastern bloc might not hold, that social unrest could tear it apart and that the reverberations could reach into the Soviet Union itself, still Putin and the other KGB officers in Dresden scrambled to salvage networks amid the sudden speed of the collapse.

In a moment, it was over. There was suddenly no one in command. The decades of struggle and covert spy games seemed done. The border was gone, overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest built up over so many years. Though it took another month for the protests to reach Dresden, when they came, Putin and his colleagues were only partially prepared. While the crowds massed in the bitter cold for two days outside the Stasi headquarters, Putin and the other KGB men barricaded themselves inside the villa. ‘We burned papers night and day,’ Putin said later. ‘We destroyed everything – all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material. We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.’[88]

Towards evening, a few dozen protesters broke off and headed towards the KGB villa. Putin and his team found themselves almost abandoned by the nearby Soviet military base. When Putin called for reinforcements to protect the building, the troops took hours to arrive. He telephoned the Soviet military command in Dresden, but the duty officer merely shrugged, ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’[89] It seemed to Putin a betrayal of all they had worked for: the phrase ‘Moscow is silent’ rang through his head for a long time. One by one, the outposts of empire were being given up; the geopolitical might of the Soviet Union was collapsing like a house of cards. ‘That business of “Moscow is silent” – I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure – a paralysis of power,’ Putin said later.[90] ‘The Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe. Although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls cannot last, I wanted something different to rise in its place. But nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.’[91]

But not all was lost. Though the fierceness of the protests and the timing of the ensuing collapse appeared to have taken the KGB by surprise, parts of it, together with the Stasi, had been preparing for that day. Parts of the KGB had been planning for a more gradual transition in which they would retain an element of influence and control behind the scenes.

Somehow, the KGB officers in Dresden managed to get one of their Stasi counterparts to hand over the vast majority of the Stasi’s files on their work with the Soviets before the protesters burst into the Stasi headquarters. Putin’s colleague from the earlier Dresden days, Vladimir Usoltsev, recounted that a Stasi officer handed over the files in their entirety to Putin. ‘Within a few hours, nothing remained of them apart from ashes,’ he said.[92] Reams of documents were taken to the nearby Soviet army base and thrown into a pit, where it was planned that they would be destroyed with napalm, but they were burned with petrol instead.[93] A further twelve truckloads were spirited away to Moscow. ‘All the most valuable items were hauled away to Moscow,’ Putin later said.

Over the next few months, as they prepared their exit from Dresden, they were provided with special cover from the powerful head of the KGB’s illegals department, Yury Drozdov, the legendary officer in charge of overseeing the KGB’s entire global network of undercover sleeper agents. The Dresden station chief, Vladimir Shirokov, told of how Drozdov made sure he was watched over from six in the morning to midnight. Finally, in the dead of night Shirokov and his family were driven to safety across the border to Poland by Drozdov’s men.[94] Later, one of Putin’s former colleagues told journalist Masha Gessen that Putin met with Drozdov in Berlin before he travelled home.[95]

The Dresden KGB ‘friends’ disappeared into the night, leaving little trace, abandoning their Stasi colleagues to face the people’s wrath. It was a pressure Horst Böhm, the local Stasi chief, seemed unable to bear. In February the following year he apparently took his own life while under house arrest. ‘He didn’t see any other way out,’ said Jehmlich. ‘To protect his house, he removed all the fuses and then he poisoned himself with gas.’[96]

Two other Stasi commanders in neighbouring regions were also reported to have killed themselves. What precisely they feared most, we may never know, as they died before they’d been questioned on their roles. But for the KGB, although they’d been forced to abandon their posts, some of their legacy at least had been left intact. Part of their networks, their illegals, remained hidden far away from scrutiny and sight.[97] Much later, Putin would speak with pride of how his work in Dresden had mostly revolved around handling the illegal ‘sleeper agents’. ‘These are unique people,’ he said. ‘Not everyone is able to give up their life, their loved ones and relatives and leave the country for many, many years to devote themselves to serving the Fatherland. Only an elect can do this.’[98]

After Hans Modrow, backed by the Soviets,[99] took over as East Germany’s interim leader that December, he quietly allowed the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence arm, the HVA, to liquidate itself.[100] Untold assets disappeared in the process, while hundreds of millions of marks were siphoned off through the Liechtenstein and Swiss front companies of Martin Schlaff. Amid the jubilance of reunification, the voices of defectors from the Stasi to the West were rarely heard. But a few of them spoke out. ‘Under certain conditions, parts of the network could be reactivated,’ one such defector said. ‘Nobody in the West has any guarantee as to whether some of these agents will be reactivated by the KGB.’[101]

*

When Putin returned home to Russia from Dresden in February 1990, the impact of the Berlin Wall’s collapse was still reverberating across the Soviet Union. Nationalist movements were on the rise, and threatening to tear the country apart. Mikhail Gorbachev had been thrust onto the back foot, forced to cede ever more ground to emerging democratic leaders. The Soviet Communist Party was gradually starting to lose its monopoly on power, its legitimacy coming ever more under question. In March 1989, almost a year before Putin’s return to Russia, Gorbachev had agreed to hold the first ever competitive elections in Soviet history to choose representatives for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. A ragtag group of democrats led by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who’d become a dissident voice of moral authority, and Boris Yeltsin, then a rambunctious and rapidly rising political star who’d been thrown out of the Politburo for his relentless criticism of the Communist authorities, won seats and debated against the Communist Party for the first time. The end was rapidly nearing for the seven decades of Communist rule.

Amidst the tumult, Putin sought to adapt. But instead of earning a living as a taxi driver, or following the traditional path after a return home from foreign service, a post back at the Centre, as the Moscow headquarters of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service was known, he embarked on a different kind of mission. He’d been ordered by his former mentor and boss in Dresden, Colonel Lazar Matveyev, not to hang around in Moscow, but to head home to Leningrad.[102] There, he was flung straight into a city in turmoil, where city council elections, also competitive for the first time under Gorbachev’s reforms, were pitting a rising tide of democrats against the Communist Party. For the first time, the democrats were threatening to break the Communists’ majority control. Instead of defending the old guard against the democrats’ rise, Putin sought to attach himself to Leningrad’s democratic movement.

Almost immediately, he approached one of its most uncompromising leaders, a doughty and fearless newly elected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Galina Starovoitova. She was a leading human rights activist, known for her uncompromising honesty as she railed against the failings of Soviet power. After she had given a resounding speech ahead of the city council elections, Putin, then a pale-eyed and unremarkable figure, walked up to her and told her how impressed he’d been by her words. He asked whether he could assist her with anything – including perhaps by working as her driver. But, suspicious of such an unsolicited approach, Starovoitova apparently resoundingly turned him away.[103]

His first post instead was as an assistant to the rector of the Leningrad State University, where in his youth he’d studied law and first entered the ranks of the KGB. He was to watch over the university’s foreign relations and keep an eye on its foreign students and visiting dignitaries. It seemed at first a sharp demotion from his Dresden post, a return to the most humdrum work reporting on foreigners’ movements to the KGB. But it was no more than a matter of weeks before it landed him a position at the top of the country’s democratic movement.

Anatoly Sobchak was the university’s charismatic professor of law. Tall, erudite and handsome, he’d long won students over with his mildly anti-government line, and had risen to become one of the new democratic movement’s most rousing orators, appearing to challenge the Party and the KGB at every turn. He was part of the group of independents and reformers that took control of the city council after the March 1990 poll, and by May he’d been anointed the council’s chairman. Almost immediately, Putin was appointed his right-hand man.

Putin was to be Sobchak’s fixer, his liaison with the security services, the shadow who watched over him behind the scenes. From the start, the posting had been arranged by the KGB. ‘Putin was placed there. He had a function to fill,’ said Franz Sedelmayer, the German security consultant who later worked with him. ‘The KGB told Sobchak, “Here’s our guy. He’ll take care of you.”’ The position in the law faculty had merely been a cover, said Sedelmayer, who believed that Sobchak himself had long been working unofficially with the KGB: ‘The best cover for these guys was law degrees.’[104]

Despite his democratic credentials and his blistering speeches against abuses of power by the KGB, Sobchak understood all too well that he would not be able to shore up political power without the backing of parts of the establishment. He was vain and foppish, and most of all he wanted to climb. Along with hiring Putin, he’d also reached out to a senior member of the city’s old guard, appointing a Communist rear admiral of the North Sea Fleet, Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, as his first deputy in the Leningrad city council. Sobchak’s fellow members of the city’s democratic movement who’d made him their leader were horrified at the choice. But, compromise by compromise, Sobchak was climbing his way to the top. By the time the city held elections for mayor in June 1991 he was the front-runner and won with relative ease.

When, that August, a group of hard-liners launched a coup against the Soviet leader, Sobchak relied on part of the old guard – in particular Putin and his KGB connections – to see himself, and the city, through a defiant stance against the attempted putsch without any bloodshed at all. Threatened by the increasing compromises Gorbachev was making to democrats driving for change, the coup plotters had declared a state of emergency, and announced that they were taking over control of the Soviet Union. Seeking to prevent Gorbachev drawing up a new union treaty that would grant the leaders of the restive Soviet republics control and ownership of their economic resources, they’d essentially taken Gorbachev hostage at his summer residence at Foros, on the shores of the Black Sea.

But in St Petersburg – as Leningrad was now named once again – as in Moscow, the city’s democratic leaders rebelled against the coup. While members of the city council manned the defences of the democrats’ headquarters in the tattered halls of the Marinsky Palace, Putin and Sobchak garnered the support of the local police chief and sixty men from the special militia. Together, they persuaded the head of the local television company to allow Sobchak on air on the first evening after the coup.[105] The speech Sobchak gave that night denouncing the coup leaders as criminals electrified the city’s residents, and brought them out in the hundreds of thousands the next day, when they gathered in the shadow of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace to demonstrate against the coup. Sobchak rallied the crowd with powerful calls for unity and defiance, but in the main he left the most vital and difficult mission to his deputies, Putin and Scherbakov. That first tense night of the putsch, after making his televised address, he buried himself deep in his office in the Marinsky Palace, while Putin and Scherbakov were left to negotiate with the city’s KGB chief and the Leningrad region’s military commander to make sure the hard-line troops approaching in tanks did not enter the city.[106] While Sobchak addressed the crowds gathered on the Palace Square the following day, Putin and Scherbakov’s negotiations had stretched on. And when the tanks came to a rumbling halt that day at the city limits, Putin disappeared with Sobchak and a phalanx of special forces to a bunker deep beneath the city’s main defence factory, the Kirovsky Zavod, where they could continue talks with the KGB and military chiefs in safety through an encrypted communication system.[107]

By the time Putin and Sobchak emerged from their bunker the next morning, the coup was over. The hard-liners’ bid to take power had been defeated. In Moscow, elite special units of the KGB had refused orders to fire on the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin, by then the elected leader of the Russian republic, had amassed tens of thousands of supporters against the coup’s bid to roll back the freedoms of Gorbachev’s reforms. What remained of the legitimacy of the Communist Party was in tatters. The leaders of Russia’s new democracy were ready to step up. Whatever his motives, Putin had helped them be in a position to do so.

All the while, true to his KGB training, Putin had reflected everyone’s views back to them like a mirror: first those of his new so-called democratic master, and then those of the old-guard establishment he worked with too. ‘He would change his colours so fast you could never tell who he really was,’ said Sedelmayer.[108]

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