Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ