Putin’s People

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]