Putin in the KGB: Spying for a Dying Empire
This article provides a biography the young Vladimir Putin, describing his experiences in the KGB. It is the second article in the series “Putin’s Russia, Global Corruption, and the Road to the 2016 American Election” While it is not necessary to read the previous entries, it is recommended.
The first article provided a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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According to the U.S. intelligence community, Vladimir Putin personally ordered his intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election to benefit the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. A basic understanding of Putin’s life and background in the KGB is essential not only to understand how he came order such a daring operation, but what motivated him to launch his war of aggression against Ukraine.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in St. Petersburg on October 7th, 1952. Russia was under the rule of Joseph Stalin, one of the most dreaded dictators of the 20th Century.
Comrade Stalin had less than six months left to live.
Leningrad, as the great Imperial city was known in Soviet times, still bore the scars from the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, which had ended just seven years earlier. The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days and resulted in over a million civilian deaths, making it the longest and bloodiest siege in history. It was a time of suffering, starvation, relentless artillery barrages, and human endurance.
In a 2015 article penned by Putin himself for the publication Russky Pioner, the Russian President described the activities of his father during the war.
Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin was a member of the NKVD, Stalin’s infamous secret police and enforcers of his periodic terrors. Putin’s father allegedly parachuted with 27 comrades behind Nazi lines with the objective of sabotaging the German advance. However, the small NKVD detachment was betrayed by a group of local Estonians and were set upon by the cold, professional killers of the Wehrmacht.
As Putin tells it, his father split off from the group and was pursued by German soldiers with dogs. He managed to evade capture and almost certain execution by submerging himself into the murky waters of a nearby swamp and breathing through a reed until the Nazi’s tired of the search and moved on. Of the initial twenty-eight members of the NKVD demolitions detachment, only four returned to fight another day. Putin’s father spent the rest of his life with fragments lodged in his leg, a grim reminder of the horrors of war.
The veracity of this tale is lost to the fog of war, further obscured by the nationalism and jingoistic propaganda of the Putin era. In a way, whether or not these events unfolded exactly as Putin related is beside the point. These were the kinds of stories the young Putin grew up listening to. Perhaps more importantly, these are the kinds of stories President Putin chooses to tell the Russian people.
Like his father’s wartime escapades, the factual details of Putin’s early years are not unknown but can be difficult to distinguish from the persona Putin the politician carefully constructed for himself upon assuming the mantle of Russian leadership.
Unlike most world leaders, Vladimir Putin was plucked from obscurity when Boris Yeltsin selected him in 1999 as his Prime Minister and eventual successor. Thus, he enjoyed the unique advantage of being able to shape his public image unfettered by an established past.
War damage pockmarked Leningrad’s residential tenement blocks years after the war had ended. The social life of these enclaves was organized around their central courtyards. The courtyard was where a young Putin learned to be a man.
In a series of wide ranging though scrupulously crafted interviews Putin gave upon being introduced to the Russian public and the international community, he presents his younger self as a small and scrappy fighter, a “thug”, in his own words.
Early friends of Putin and he himself repeatedly emphasize his youthful willingness to engage in brawls with older, larger men.
Children like Putin were forced to fend for themselves among the varied crowd that populated the courtyards. Education was low on the young Putin’s list of priorities and his early grades were unremarkable.
After a few spats with elementary school authorities, Putin eventually found discipline through an embrace of the Soviet martial art Sambo, a mix of Judo and wrestling. By his own account, participation in martial arts had a beneficial impact on Putin and his grades and behavior improved.
Putin’s first martial arts coach, Leonid Usvyatsov, was a criminal recidivist known as Lyonya the Sportsman who was murdered in 1994. He was believed to have ties to the dangerous criminal Vyacheslav Ivankov, whose name will reappear in this story.
One must take the machismo and bravado of Putin’s account of his childhood with a grain of salt. Putin’s parents doted on their son and the Putin family enjoyed an existence that was, though impoverished by Western standards, materially better off than most Russian families. Some have speculated that the Putins were able to enjoy the standard of living that they did because the elder Putin was on the Russian secret service’s active reserve following his stint in the NKVD during the war.
In 1965, a popular Russian novel changed the course of Putin’s life.
The Shield and the Sword was a thrilling tale of espionage in which the fictional Soviet agent Major Aleksandr Belov infiltrates Nazi military intelligence. In 1968, the novel was adapted into a popular Russian film that captured Vladimir Putin’s 16-year-old imagination.
Putin was enthralled, later claiming, “What amazed me most of all was how one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.”
Putin in the KGB and the Last Days of East Germany
In an audacious act for a boy of 16, Putin took the initiative to visit his regional KGB Directorate.
The building, known as the Bolshoi Dom, or “Big House”, had served as the headquarters of Stalin’s secret police during the purges. Executions reportedly took place in its basement.
Putin was greeted by a KGB officer who did not identify himself. After expressing his desire to get a job with the KGB, the officer told Putin that they didn’t recruit anyone who approached them on their own initiative, and that before anyone could join they had to either have been in the army or attended civilian higher education. Putin pressed the KGB officer on what kind of higher education was preferred and the officer, who Putin suspected just wanted to get rid of him, suggested law.
“From that moment on,” Putin recalled, “I began to prepare for the law faculty at Leningrad University. And nobody could stop me.”
Putin was recruited by the KGB in 1974 during his final year of law school. In his excitement, he told Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and one of his best friends. Years later, Roldugin’s name was linked to a shell company created by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The shell company is believed to contain a portion of the illicit fortune Putin amassed.
Roldugin later recounted of his conversation with Putin, “I said to him, “I am a cellist. I play the cello. I could never be a surgeon. Still, I’m a good cellist. But what is your profession? I know, you’re a spy. I don’t know what that means. Who are you? What do you do? And he [Putin] said to me, ‘I’m a specialist in human relations.’”
Unsurprisingly, a great deal of mystery surrounds Putin’s intelligence career. Putin officially joined the KGB in 1975, during a period in which the Soviet Union was at peace.
He spent six months attending KGB officer’s school, where he learned basic spycraft. While there, Putin met and befriended Sergei Ivanov, who later became the head of his Presidential administration.
According to Ivanov, their teachers included former “Illegals”, a term used by Russian intelligence to this day referring to deep cover operatives acting outside of diplomatic cover.
“We had very good teachers,” Ivanov has said, “Very experienced intelligence operatives. Many of them had worked many years abroad. They included — and I can say this for the first time because those people are no longer with us, although we remember them perfectly — our ‘Illegals’, who had returned, some of them after 20 years work as an Illegal abroad, and were handing on their experience to us, the younger generation.”
Upon graduating from KGB officer’s school, Putin was tasked with working in counterintelligence in St. Petersburg. The work consisted of trailing foreign visitors and diplomats, most of whom were stationed in Moscow.
By the time the twenty-three-year old Putin joined, the KGB was a bloated bureaucracy responsible for both foreign and domestic intelligence. It collected intelligence rather than analyzing it, which was left to the Communist Party. However, most of the voluminous information it collected, newspaper clippings, transcripts of private conversations, officers reports, was left unanalyzed.
Other responsibilities of the agency included military counterintelligence, customs and border enforcement, cryptography, monitoring telephone communications, protecting party leadership and snuffing out illicit free-market activity wherever it could be found.
The primary activity the KGB engaged in at the time was monitoring and harassing Soviet dissidents. Putin has denied being involved in any such activities, although he admits to having been aware of them.
Vladimir Usoltsev, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s, claimed that Putin at this time was a member of the Fifth Chief Directorate, the body in charge of monitoring dissidents. His claim has never been proven, nor has it been officially denied.
After six months, Putin was transferred out of counterintelligence and placed into the KGB division responsible for intelligence, the First Chief Directorate.
Little is known about Putin’s activities between 1975 and 1983. In 2000, leaks from German intelligence suggested that in 1975 Putin was stationed in the West German city of Bonn undercover as a TASS news agency reporter but was subsequently removed in the late 70s for botching an operation, but these reports remain unverified.
In 1984, after nine years of service, Putin was promoted to the rank of major and he enrolled in the Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow, where he was trained for foreign intelligence work.
He studied German in preparation for placement in Germany following graduation. Students at the Institute were provided with codenames, so Putin became Platov. The faculty included luminaries of the “golden age” of Soviet espionage, including Yuri Modlin, who had been a handler of the infamous British double agent Kim Philby.
Putin himself was studied by his instructors.
According to Mikhail Frolov, a retired KGB colonel and instructor at the institute, “At the Red Banner, we didn’t just teach the rules of intelligence and counterintelligence. We needed to study our trainees — their professional worth and personal qualities. We had to determine, in the final analysis, whether a trainee was suitable for work in intelligence.”
Of Putin, Frolov stated, “I remember I wrote about several negative characteristics in his evaluation. It seemed to me that he was somewhat withdrawn and uncommunicative. By the way, that could be considered both a negative and a positive trait. But I recall that I also cited a certain academic tendency among his negative aspects. I don’t mean that he was dry. No, he was sharp-witted and always ready with a quip…”
Upon graduating, Putin was assigned to East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). He was sent, with his pregnant wife Lyudmila and their one-year-old daughter, to the industrial city of Dresden. In 1985 Putin, now thirty-three, was provided with a passport and prepared to leave Russia for the first time in his life.
Putin in Dresden: A KGB Officer in East Germany
Scholars have expressed differing views on the importance of Putin’s assignment. Some have suggested Putin’s position in Dresden represented a mediocre, low level assignment in a sleepy city far from the center of the action in Berlin, or more prestigious still, outside of the Eastern bloc in Western Europe or the United States.
Others argue that Dresden, in fact, sat at the center of an important smuggling ring that provided a lifeline to the ailing East German economy and Western technology to the Communist world.
While Dresden may have been a backwater compared to Berlin, the KGB’s headquarters in Germany, the GDR itself was on the front lines of the Cold War. It was home to over 380,000 Soviet troops as well Soviet intermediate range nuclear missiles.
At the time, East Germany and the Soviet Union were drifting in opposite directions. By 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had risen to power in the USSR and would shortly begin to implement glasnost and perestroika, programs of political and economic reform, respectively. Meanwhile, under the hardline leadership of Erich Honecker, the GDR remained firmly on the path of Communist totalitarianism.
“The work was political intelligence,” Putin has said, “obtaining information about political figures and plans of the potential opponent… We were interested in any information about the ‘main opponent,’ as we called them, and the main opponent was considered NATO.”
Putin has described his duties as, “recruiting sources of information, obtaining information, analyzing it, and sending it to Moscow.
“I looked for information about political parties, the tendencies inside these parties, their leaders. I examined today’s leaders and the possible leaders of tomorrow and the promotion of people to certain posts in parties and the government.”
“It was important to know who was doing what and how, what was going on in foreign ministries of a particular country, how they were constructing their policy on certain issues and in various areas of the world, how our partners would react in disarmament talks.”
“Of course, in order to obtain such information, you need sources. So recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job.”
Putin was a senior case officer stationed in the illegal intelligence gathering unit known as Directorate S. His KGB office was located across the street from Dresden’s local Stasi headquarters.
In 2018, Putin’s Stasi identification card surfaced in German state archives. The head archivist told the German newspaper Bild that the card would have allowed Putin to enter and exit Stasi headquarters without having to reveal his affiliation with the KGB.
Douglas Selvege of the Wilson Center has suggested that Putin likely used the card to easily gain entry to Dresden’s Stasi headquarters to discuss, “potential targets for recruitment among the local population, foreign students, and visitors to Dresden” with his Stasi comrades.
According to Vladimir Usoltsev, a KGB colleague of Putin’s in Dresden, their work consisted of little more than reading about the political situation in local press articles and then summarizing them in an endless series of reports that they would send back to Moscow.
Usoltsev also claimed that Putin spent much of his time poring over smuggled Western mail order catalogues. Putin himself admitted to developing a taste for German beer and gaining 25 pounds because of it.
Was Putin In Contact with Terrorist Organizations?
Investigative reporter and Putin scholar Catherine Belton has argued that the image of Putin as an unimportant mediocrity may have been constructed to conceal vastly more controversial activities.
Belton notes in her indispensable work Putin’s People that the KGB was at the time consorting and aiding various terrorists and terrorist organizations active in Western Europe at the time, including the Red Army Faction (RAF), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Carlos the Jackal.
A RAF source told Belton that members the group, which was involved in a bombing and assassination campaign in Western Europe, met and took orders from Putin in Dresden precisely because it was far from the eyes of Western intelligence agencies in Berlin.
Putin biographer Masha Gessen spoke with RAF members who knew Putin and claimed that rather than have any connection to their terrorist activities, he used them to procure forbidden Western electronic equipment such as a stereo for his personal use.
Putin and Operation LUCH
Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy maintain that it is “virtually inconceivable” that Putin was not involved in a KGB operation in East Germany codenamed Operation LUCH.
By the mid-1970s, the KGB believed it had identified 500,000 individuals in East Germany who were hostile to the socialist system. LUCH was an operation in which the KGB “monitored opinion within the East German population and Party, contacts between East and West Germans, and alleged ‘attempts by the USA and FRG [Federal Republic of Germany — West Germany] to harm the building of socialism’ in the GDR.”
German authorities later grew worried that Operation LUCH was in fact an effort to go behind the back of the Stasi and recruit agents in the dying days of the GDR to live on after reunification.
In 2000, after Putin ascended to power, officials at the Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, opened an investigation into the potential role then President Putin had played in Operation LUCH. Investigators interviewed Putin’s Stasi colleagues, some of whom verified the existence of LUCH, but were unable to identify the names of any agents or determine Putin’s role in the operation.
By the late 1980s, the KGB was focused on stealing Western technology. Not only was the Soviet Union approaching a terminal economic crisis, it was also dangerously behind in technological development, particularly in the area of microprocessing technology.
Intelligence specialists have suggested that Putin may have been engaged in technology theft and espionage activity centered around Robotron, a Dresden-based electronics conglomerate that was the Eastern blocs largest microchip research center and mainframe computer producer.
Putin and the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Putin’s experiences as a KGB agent in Dresden occurred against the backdrop of seismic shifts taking place within the USSR that would shatter Soviet hegemony in the GDR and across Eastern Europe as a whole.
While Gorbachev attempted to preserve the Soviet Union through a program political and economic reform, Erich Honecker in the GDR struck a hardline. From his office in Dresden, Putin could see that Honecker’s iron grip was slipping. Slowly but inexorably, protests began to flair, and the tide of opposition rose in East Germany.
It was Putin’s job to keep his finger on the pulse of political developments in the country, so he watched the unfolding of these events first-hand. In addition to studying the nature of the opposition, Putin had a front row seat as a totalitarian system struggled and failed to reform itself.
In October of 1989, westbound trains rumbled through Dresden carrying East Germans who had claimed political asylum at the West German embassy in Prague. Throngs of Dresdeners attempted to break through the security cordon around the train station, hoping to join their compatriots.
By November 9th, the fall of the Berlin Wall had sent shockwaves around the world. Emboldened crowds of citizens gathered across Germany. Putin watched in horror as a crowd of thousands gathered outside the Stasi headquarters across the street from his office.
Overwhelmed by the size of the crowd and the rapidity of events, Horst Böhm, the head of the Stasi branch in Dresden who had once awarded Putin a medal, ordered the gates be opened to the protesters. Less than a year later, Böhm took his own life.
Pandemonium broke out in the KGB’s Dresden headquarters. Putin and his comrades began shoveling sensitive documents into the furnace. In addition to the documents, everything Putin had been working toward for the past several years was going up in flames before his eyes.
“We destroyed everything — all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks,” Putin recalled. “I personally burned a huge amount of material. We burned so much that the furnace burst.”
As the hour approached midnight, some members of the emboldened crowd turned their attention from Stasi headquarters to the KGB office across the street. Startled, a single security guard dashed up to inform Putin and the four others with him that people were gathering outside.
Putin, the officer-in-charge, issued orders to prepare for an assault. He called Soviet military command in Dresden and described the situation, requesting immediate backup. The response he received from his military counterpart haunted him for the rest of his life, “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”
Abandoned by his superiors, Putin took decisive action. In uniform, he went outside alone and confronted the few dozen protestors. Speaking fluent German, he explained that his men were armed and would fire if they if they entered the compound. The crowd, dazed by the shocking collapse of the Stasi, dispersed.
Putin had stood his ground, avoiding the humiliation of having his headquarters ransacked, but the experience was traumatic.
“I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure — a paralysis of power.”
Putin recalled, “I thought the whole thing was inevitable. To be honest, I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe. I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.”
In 2005, during his annual state of the nation address to Russia’s top leaders, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the 20th Century.
The next installment of the series will cover the origins of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and its relationship with Eurasian organized crime.