Who is Vladimir Putin?

p>(Washington, D.C.): The American make-over of Russia’s new acting President,
Vladimir
Putin, has begun. Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel Berger reportedly enjoys a
“friendly relationship by telephone” with Putin. Michael McFaul, a sympathetic Kremlinologist
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been much in evidence promoting the
line that, thanks to his years of service as a KGB officer, Putin has been exposed to the West and
is, therefore, more likely to pursue a path of political and economic reform. Next, we are likely
to be told that — like former KGB chief-turned Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov — Putin
is a man we can do business with because he likes scotch whiskey and American jazz!

In fact, Vladimir Putin’s career strongly suggests that, whatever his tastes in libations
and
music, the business he has in mind doing is not going to be consistent with U.S. interests.
Highlights of two excellent summaries — one by J. Michael Waller that appeared in the 6
September 1999 issue of Insight Magazine (shortly after Yeltsin named Putin Prime Minister)
and the other an analysis recently distributed by Stratfor.com — of the path that brought Putin to
power in Russia deserve close reading by the American people and by U.S. policy-makers sworn
to defend them, before the temptation becomes once again irresistible to portray whoever is
running the Kremlin as a reliable “partner for peace.”

Insight Magazine, September 6, 1999

Yeltsin Keeps It All in ‘the Family’

by J. Michael Waller

* * *

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.”

Vladimir Putin: The Face of Russia To Come

Stratfor

* * *

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.

The KGB Years

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.

The Next Mission: St. Petersburg

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….

Moscow

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’s Role in Russia’s Future

* * *

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.