Who is Vladimir Putin?

Last October, Yeltsin dismissed then-prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko and put former Soviet KGB espionage leader Yevgeny Primakov in his place. In May, he sacked Primakov in favor of former secret-police general Sergei Stepashin. Now he has fired Stepashin and replaced him with KGB veteran Vladimir Putin.

Seasoned Russia-watchers say Yeltsin's increased reliance on KGB leaders marks an ominous trend. "In what normal country does one go to the secret services to appoint a new prime minister?" asks Professor Uri Ra'anan, director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy at Boston University.

Russia's new government leader represents some of the worst elements of the old KGB, Kremlin observers say. His main assignment abroad was a post as KGB commissioner in Dresden, East Germany, where he oversaw the city division of the Stasi secret police in the dark years of the 1980s. So notorious was the Stasi that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal once termed it "worse than the Gestapo."

Dresden was the second city after Berlin where the East German Communist Party and the Stasi ran the "coordinating committee," or KOKO, after the German initials, to sell off state property to the West to raise cash for high-ranking officials and the Stasi. U.S. intelligence sources say that, if the Stasi was involved, "at minimum they were coordinated with the KGB." That would place Putin near the core of East Germany's illegal theft-for-hard-currency schemes as the communist regime collapsed.

When the Soviet empire began to unravel, Putin returned to Leningrad (since renamed St. Petersburg) and established the city's new hard-currency exchange....Intelligence sources tell Insight that Putin's former professor at the local KGB academy, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, appointed him as first deputy mayor responsible for foreign relations and trade -- the heart of corrupt hard-currency operations in the scandal-plagued city council. There he met Stepashin, then a police lieutenant colonel elected to the Russian parliament whom Yeltsin named secret-police chief of St. Petersburg. Stepashin's wife happened to be a top executive in a large St. Petersburg bank. Fellow Leningrader Chubais, as presidential chief of staff in 1996, tapped Putin to become Kremlin business manager in charge of the multibillion-dollar empire under presidential control - and to become part of the Family.

Putin ultimately succeeded Stepashin as FSB director. His immediate subordinate, Lt. Gen. Viktor Cherkesov, was a career dissident-hunter from the Leningrad KGB Fifth Chief Directorate, the notorious political police unit that persecuted dissidents and religious believers. Human-rights activists in St. Petersburg, including artist Georgy Mikhailov and Jewish refuseniks, tell Insight that Cherkesov personally interrogated and abused them under Soviet rule.

Putin's tenure as FSB director was marred last year by allegations from within the agency that it was involved in extortion and murder rackets. Putin personally took charge of the investigation of the November 1998 assassination of democratic opposition lawmaker Galina Starovoitova in her St. Petersburg apartment building, but allowed the probe to fizzle. Starovoitova, a prominent human-rights worker and anti-corruption crusader, was investigating the contract killing of a St. Petersburg privatization chief at the time of her death. She had frequently directed her ire at the FSB. She even introduced legislation in the Duma, or parliament, that would have banned former KGB officers who engaged in political repression from holding any public office, a law that would have kept the likes of Putin and Cherkesov out of government.

Putin handed the Starovoitova case - considered post-Soviet Russia's highest profile political assassination - to former dissident-hunter Cherkesov. That action, human-rights leaders argue, ensured that the killers would never be found. Sergei Alexeyev, a local leader of Starovoitova's Democratic Russia Party, told reporters at the time, "If Cherkesov's been brought into the case, you can consider it buried." And so it appears to be.

A month after the Starovoitova murder, Putin showed his nostalgia for the golden days of the Soviet police state. He gave a televised address on Dec. 20, 1998, to celebrate the 81st anniversary of the founding of the Bolshevik Cheka secret police, praising the Cheka but saying nothing about its systematic executions of political opponents. He then hosted a gala at KGB headquarters to honor the Cheka.

When he rose to lead the day-to-day operations of the presidential security council last March, Putin placed dissident-hunter Cherkesov in de facto control of the FSB. He used his extraordinary Kremlin powers to shut down investigations into financial crimes and corruption. "Over the past three months, Putin has carried out a pogrom of sorts in the Russian judicial system," according to [Victor] Yasmann. "One of the main results was to practically paralyze all federal-prosecutor offices around the country. He cashiered federal investigators, including general officers, involved in criminal investigations in state-prosecutor offices probing economic crimes."

Putin's real history is very different than has been portrayed to date. In place of an unremarkable career in the KGB, he in fact participated in the most important intelligence operations at the end of the Cold War. Throughout his career, Putin was an economic spy: tasked with helping to steal the West's technology and manage the flow of Western investment after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And now he arrives at the Kremlin possibly the presidency at a pivotal moment in the collapse of both Russian economics and politics. If Putin is oriented toward any Russian politician, it is Yevgeny Primakov, many of whose foreign and domestic policies Putin has carried forward. Putin has a clear cut agenda and allegiance that predates his arrival in the Kremlin and shapes his current foreign and domestic policies. Whether or not he prevails in next year's election, Putin is the man of the hour. In his background and agenda, are the outlines of post-Yeltsin Russia in the years to come.

Vladimir Valdimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad on October 7, 1952. He graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University (LGU) in 1975, embarking immediately on a career with the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the KGB. Officially, Putin spent almost his entire career based in Dresden, monitoring East German political attitudes.

Reserve Lt. Col. Putin then returned home to Leningrad, where he proceeded to build a respectable career in reformist politics. In short, Putin has reportedly been just enough of a KGB man to maintain a patina of toughness and incorruptibility, without being tainted by having harassed dissidents or spied on the West. End of official story.

But there is much more to Putin than a 17-year career rut watching the Soviet Union's erstwhile allies slip away. Though scanty, the available evidence suggests that Putin was deeply involved in several of the KGB's highest priority operations through the 1980s and into the 1990s. He was an economic spy in and around the operations that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and that formed the chaotic nation that Russia is today.

Indeed, it is not even clear that Putin spent all of his time in East Germany as his official biography claims. Germany's Schweriner Volkszeitung and De Zeit both report he did not arrive until 1984. The Moscow Times initially reported Putin spent about 15 years in Dresden; the newspaper has since noted that, after graduating KGB college, Putin worked for a time in personnel. The KGB's central office in Moscow handled "personnel," in the human resources management sense. If Putin spent his entire career in the First Chief Directorate, his "personnel" work referred to the recruitment of agents perhaps in Leningrad, perhaps undercover in East Germany.

Whenever he truly arrived in East Germany, Putin found himself on the front lines of the Cold War. East Germany was a prestigious post for a rising KBG officer. It was home to the KGB's largest residency in Eastern Europe. There, too, East German spy-master Marcus Wolf directed something of a finishing school for young intelligence officers. Some of the KGB's highest priority projects focused on East Germany in the 1980s involving both confrontation with the West and a rear guard action of the communist ruling elite in the face of crumbling regimes.

The one officially acknowledged feature of Putin's KGB career was monitoring East German attitudes and contacts with West Germans. Even this was no career backwater. The operation (code named LUCH) was of such importance that the section in the KGB base at Karlshorst responsible for the operation was elevated to a directorate, according to a recent account by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin.

Though based in Dresden, Putin was responsible for "German-Soviet Friendship" in Leipzig during the 1980s, according to the German newspaper Der Spiegel. Schweriner Volkszeitung also reported Putin operated out of the consulate general in Leipzig, a city not only host to numerous international fairs and exhibitions but also a key jumping off point for operations into central and southern West Germany. Insight Magazine reported that Putin served as KGB commissioner in Dresden in the 1980s, overseeing the activities of the East German "Stasi" secret police.

But Putin may have been involved in far more sensitive operations, too. Die Zeit has that he worked as an observer with the Western Group of Soviet Forces in Dresden. Additionally, Die Welt reported that Putin worked with the Soviet Army's intelligence branch, the GRU, at various times. Putin's involvement with the Soviet Army could have been as a zampolit -- a political officer -- monitoring the loyalty of Soviet troops. But the GRU connection is interesting from another standpoint. According to Mitrokhin's book, the GRU and the KGB cooperated during the early to mid 1980s on operation RYAN. The project, a priority of First Chief Directorate head Vladimir Kryuchkov, was aimed at uncovering evidence of a suspected NATO plan for a surprise nuclear attack.

But Putin's most important role may have been a role in one of the most important missions of the KGB: the attempt to steal technology from the West and thus save the Soviet Union from losing the Cold War. Until 1990, Putin reportedly headed a secret department in Dresden which inserted spies among groups of highly specialized East German scientists who wanted to emigrate to the United States and West Germany, according to Focus magazine.

It was one of the most important operations of the KGB and its First Chief Directorate during the 1980s. The intelligence gathered illuminated the rapidly growing high technology gap between the East and West, documented in a series of secret KGB reports in the early 1980s. The issue broke into the open in May 1984, when Chief of the Soviet General Staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov publicly warned that the West's military high technology was outpacing that of the Soviet Union.

Attempts by Putin's department and others to infiltrate and steal the technology quickly proved inadequate. The underlying technology was too complicated and rapidly evolving to be effectively reverse engineered. In turn, the KGB determined that the only effective way to acquire the technology and expertise was to attract Western investment and technology transfer to the Soviet Union. This set the stage for the KGB -- and Putin's -- next operation: The Soviet economy could handle neither a huge infusion of technology nor investment. It had to be restructured. And so the agency helped launch perestroika. And an opening of relations with the West was needed: glasnost.

By 1986, KGB officers were actively involved in constructing the economic infrastructure that would attract Western investment. KGB operatives began to funnel state and party resources out of the Soviet Union through KGB residencies in foreign countries, with the initial intent of cycling this cash back through the new banks and joint ventures. Putin's position with the KGB placed him at the heart of these theft-for-hard-currency schemes.

By 1989 Putin had been dispatched back to Leningrad on another mission -- driving and monitoring perestroika from the inside.

Leningrad was ground zero, home to anti-communist activists and the reformist economists such as Anatoli Chubais, who later shaped the first years of the Yeltsin government. This was the ideal location for keeping a finger on the pulse of perestroika and Putin thrust himself into the middle of it.

Evidence strongly suggests that Reserve Lt. Col. Putin remained an active KGB officer, this time monitoring the Leningrad reformers. First, the reserve status was created with the express purpose of allowing KGB officers to become involved in the perestroika economy while still retaining KGB benefits. Additionally, Nezavisimaya Gazeta has reported that, prior to 1991, Putin was an officer in the counterintelligence department of the Leningrad KGB division. Segodnya reported that he served in the KGB until 1991. Komersant Daily reported that Putin and his protégé -- current FSB head Nikolai Patrushev -- have known each other from the time they worked together in the Leningrad office of the KGB.

Putin's relationship with the influential Sobchak was particularly important, ultimately allowing Putin to burrow deeper into the reform movement. As an instructor at LGU in the 1970s, Sobchak taught Putin economic law....Sobchak made Putin his advisor on international relations in 1989. When Sobchak was elected St. Petersburg mayor in June 1991,he appointed Putin chairman of the city government's Committee on Foreign Relations.

More politician than administrator, Sobchak left many details of running the city to Putin. As early as 1992, Putin was referred to as Deputy Mayor. By 1993 he essentially exercised control of St. Petersburg during Sobchak's frequent absences, though he did not take the title of First Deputy Mayor until March 1994.

Dutifully facilitating perestroika, Putin set up a hard currency exchange, signed a contract between the city and the consulting firm KPMG, and attracted German banks to St. Petersburg, including the BNP-Dresdner Bank. Putin oversaw the power ministries and relations with the media and interest groups, and in 1993 was made head of the mayor's Commission on Current Problems....

But Sobchak's defeat set the stage for Putin's move to Moscow. In September 1996, Putin took a position as first deputy to Kremlin property manager Pavel Borodin.

Indeed, Putin's arrival appears now to be a continuation of the KGB operation to take state resources out of the country. Putin was responsible for determining the fate of External Economic Relations Ministry assets in countries where its missions had closed. In March 1997, Yeltsin promoted Putin to deputy head of the presidential administration and head of the Main Oversight Department -- responsible for ensuring that Yeltsin's decrees were carried out.

Putin's KGB training served him well here, according to the Moscow Times and other Russian newspapers. More than an administrator, Putin collected the dossiers on regional leaders so they could be pressured into adhering to Yeltsin's policies. Die Welt adds that Putin also collected files on members of the administration.

He also began to bring allies into the administration, culminating with fellow KGB veteran and protégé Nikolai Patrushev, whom he selected to replace him as head of the Department when Putin was promoted to first deputy chief of staff in May 1998.

In July 1998, after just two months as First Deputy Chief of Staff, KGB Lt. Col. Putin's career came full circle when Yeltsin appointed him Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the chief successor agency to the KGB. He promptly began to move his allies into key positions and resumed the KGB's domestic espionage activities.

In March 1999, Putin was appointed Secretary of the Russian Security Council, coordinating policy between the power ministries of Defense, FSB, foreign intelligence (SVR), Interior and others. Putin headed the FSB through the Kosovo conflict and in the run-up to the Chechen commando incursion into Dagestan. Yeltsin also tasked Putin and the FSB with "safeguarding" the upcoming Duma and presidential elections, a mission interpreted by many in Russia as ensuring the election of Yeltsin allies. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, appointed Putin to the post, and declared him heir apparent to the presidency.

The exact reason for Putin's ultimate promotion has never been made entirely clear. Yeltsin could have felt that Putin could best ensure the election from the helm. Or perhaps the power ministries, dissatisfied with the evident mismanagement of the escalating crisis in Dagestan, forced Putin on Yeltsin. No doubt it is a bit of both and more.

Putin, and thousands like him, was shaped by the single greatest mission in the history of the KGB -- the systematic restructuring of the Soviet economy, Soviet society and Soviet relations with the West in the hope of preserving the state and regime.

The Soviet Union died but the operation never really ended. Putin and his fellow officers who attempted to save the Soviet Union through perestroika were scattered throughout a crippled, mutant economy. Some were caught up in the greed and corruption that have permeated the Russian economy for the last decade. Everyone got a piece of the action. But they remain patriots and some have not forgotten the mission.

With Russia now on the cusp of collapse, we can expect these men to step forward.

Of note, Putin had a Stasi connection, via his service in Dresden. Of further note, that particular operation was tied in with Robotron, who were the largest mainframe computer company in the East Bloc. The specific task of joint KGB and Stasi ops our of Dresden was two fold - to gain insights into Western technology (e.g. from West Germany) and to recruit Western High tech professionals to provide info or become outright embedded espionage assets. One trick was to approach people from IBM, NCR, HP, Siemens, AT&T and the like (and later, Cisco, Sun, and Transmeta) at technical conferences in Western European or neutral countries. They also had illegals working throughout the West, dumpster diving and otherwise gathering info. My account is from memory, however, all that I have written is available from a number of articles, which can be found using Google on the web. One final note - even as recently as the 1980s, during Putin's Dresden days, ex Gestapo who had been recruited by the Stasi during the late 1940s and 1950s were still in service.

GW's "Pooty Poot" sounds a lot like FDR's "Uncle Joe" in the sense of making a bad man sound "nice" and acceptable to the American public.
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You would think people would be on to the political pandering and stroking by now...Putin, just old-line KGB, old-line Russia...all for the return of THE RODINA!!!

Intresting info, GOP. As far as the main article here, no one is more willing than I am to see the evil hand of the KGB at work far and wide throughout the world. I believe they have deeply penetrated every Western nation including the US and remain active all over, both in a conventional "intelligence" sense and in a more insidious form of "cultural subversion" (what Jim Quin attributes to "Cultural Marxism.")

However, the idea that the KGB engineered peristroika to be able to sustain investment and technology transfer from the West sounds ridiculous to me. Too much of a tail wagging the dog story for me to swallow without some pretty good evidence. I beleive someone might have floated that inside the Soviet Union as an excuse for peristroika, to some conservative factions. That is about as far as I could take that idea.

Not this article, but I read other Investigative articles discussing Putin. Thanks for sharing this article. The point is that the Putin and his ilk understand Patriotism as a totalitarian or authocratic state controlling every move of the citizenry. Chubais and other so called reformers are also responsible for grossly corrupt and criminal Economic Policies of the 1990's which allowed people like Putin to become powerful.

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