Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ their smuggling networks through a web of firms into the West, in order to create secret cash stores to enable them to maintain operations after the fall. A senior German official estimated that billions of West German marks were siphoned out of East Germany into a string of front companies from 1986.[42]

      Putin’s Dresden was a central hub for these preparations. Herbert Kohler, the head of the Dresden HVA, was closely involved in the creation of some of these front companies – so-called ‘operative firms’ – that were to hide their connections with the Stasi and store ‘black cash’ to allow Stasi networks to survive following a collapse.[43] Kohler worked closely with an Austrian businessman named Martin Schlaff, who’d been recruited in the early eighties by the Stasi. Schlaff was tasked with smuggling embargoed components for the construction of a hard-disc factory in Thüringen, near Dresden. Between the end of 1986 and the end of 1988 his firms received more than 130 million marks from the East German government for the top-secret project, which was one of the most expensive ever run by the Stasi. But the plant was never finished. Many of the components never arrived,[44] while hundreds of millions of marks intended for the plant, and from other illicit deals, disappeared into Schlaff front companies in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Singapore.[45]

      These financial transfers took place at the time Putin was serving as the main liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi in Dresden, in particular with Kohler’s HVA.[46] It’s not clear whether he played any role in them. But many years later, Schlaff’s connections with Putin became clear when the Austrian businessman re-emerged in a network of companies in Europe that were central cogs in the influence operations of the Putin regime.[47] Back in the 1980s Schlaff had travelled at least once to Moscow for talks with Soviet foreign-trade officials.[48]

      Most of what Putin did during the Dresden years remains shrouded in mystery, in part because the KGB proved much more effective than the Stasi at destroying and transferring documents before the collapse. ‘With the Russians, we have problems,’ said Sven Scharl, a researcher at the Stasi archives in Dresden.[49] ‘They destroyed almost everything.’ Only fragments remain in the files retrieved from the Stasi of Putin’s activities there. His file is thin, and well-thumbed. There is the order of Stasi chief Erich Mielke of February 8 1988, listing Major Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as receiving a Bronze Medal of Merit of the National People’s Army. There are the letters from the Dresden Stasi chief Horst Böhm wishing Comrade Putin a happy birthday. There is the seating plan for a dinner celebrating the seventy-first anniversary of the Cheka, the original name for the Soviet secret police, on January 24 1989. There’s the photograph marking the visit of more than forty Stasi, KGB and military officers to the First Guards Tank Army Museum. (Putin peeps out, almost indistinguishable among the grey mass of men.) Then there are the photographs, uncovered only recently, of a loutish and bored-looking Putin in light-grey jacket and bright suede shoes holding flowers and drinking at an award ceremony for the Stasi intelligence unit’s top brass.

      The only trace of any operative activity connected to Putin is a letter from him to Böhm, asking for the Dresden Stasi chief’s assistance in restoring the phone connection for an informant in the German police who ‘supports us’. The letter is short on any detail, but the fact of Putin’s direct appeal to Böhm appears to indicate the prominence of his role.[50] Jehmlich indeed later confirmed that Putin became the main KGB liaison officer with the Stasi on behalf of the KGB station chief Vladimir Shirokov. Among the recent finds was one other telltale document: Putin’s Stasi identity card, which would have given him direct access to Stasi buildings and made it easier for him to recruit agents, because he would not have had to mention his affiliation with the KGB.

      Many years later, when Putin became president, Markus Wolf and Putin’s former KGB colleagues took care to stress that he had been a nobody when he served in Dresden. Putin was ‘pretty marginal’, Wolf once told a German magazine, and even ‘cleaning ladies’ had received the Bronze Medal awarded to him.[51] The KGB colleague Putin shared an office with on his arrival in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who was somehow permitted to write a book on those times, took care to emphasise the mundanity of their work, while revealing zero detail about their operations. Though he admitted that he and Putin had worked with ‘illegals’, as the sleeper agents planted undercover were called, he said they’d spent 70 per cent of their time writing ‘senseless reports’.[52] Putin, he claimed, had only managed to recruit two agents during his entire five years in Dresden, and at some point had stopped looking for more, because he realised it was a waste of time. The city was such a provincial backwater that ‘the very fact of our service in Dresden spoke of how we had no future career’, Usoltsev wrote.[53] Putin himself claimed he’d spent so much time drinking beer there that he put on twelve kilos.[54] But the photographs of him in those days do not suggest any such weight gain. Russian state television later proclaimed that Putin was never involved in anything illegal.

      But one first-hand account suggests the downplaying of Putin’s activities in Dresden was cover for another mission – one beyond the edge of the law. It suggests that Putin was stationed there precisely because it was a backwater, far from the spying eyes in East Berlin, where the French, the Americans and the West Germans all kept close watch. According to a former member of the far-left Red Army Faction who claimed to have met him in Dresden, Putin had worked in support of members of the group, which sowed terror across West Germany in the seventies and eighties: ‘There was nothing in Dresden, nothing at all, except the radical left. Nobody was watching Dresden, not the Americans, not the West Germans. There was nothing there. Except the one thing: these meetings with those comrades.’[55]

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      In the battle for empire between East and West, the Soviet security services had long been deploying what they called their own ‘active measures’ to disrupt and destabilise their opponent. Locked in the Cold War but realising it was too far behind technologically to win any military war, ever since the sixties the Soviet Union had found its strength lay in disinformation, in planting fake rumours in the media to discredit Western leaders, in assassinating political opponents, and in supporting front organisations that would foment wars in the Third World and undermine and sow discord in the West. Among these measures was support for terrorist organisations. Across the Middle East, the KGB had forged ties with numerous Marxist-leaning terror groups, most notably with the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organisation that carried out a string of plane hijackings and bomb attacks in the late sixties and seventies. Top-secret documents retrieved from the archives of the Soviet Politburo illustrate the depth of some of these connections. They show the then KGB chief Yury Andropov signing off three requests for Soviet weapons from PFLP leader Wadi Haddad, and describing him as a ‘trusted agent’ of the KGB.[56]

      In East Germany, the KGB actively encouraged the Stasi to assist in its ‘political activities’ in the Third World.[57] In fact, support for international terrorism became one of the most important services the Stasi rendered to the KGB.[58] By 1969 the Stasi had opened a clandestine training camp outside East Berlin for members of Yassar Arafat’s PLO.[59] Markus Wolf’s Stasi foreign-intelligence unit became deeply involved in working with terrorist groups across the Arab world, including with the PFLP’s notorious Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, otherwise known as Carlos the Jackal.[60] Stasi military instructors set up a network of terrorist training camps across the Middle East.[61] And when, in 1986, one Stasi counter-intelligence officer, horrified at the mayhem that was starting to reach German soil, tried to disrupt the bombing plots of a group of Libyans that had become active in West Berlin, he was told to back off by Stasi chief Erich Mielke. ‘America is the arch-enemy,’ Mielke had told him. ‘We should concern ourselves with catching American spies and not bother our Libyan friends.’[62] Weeks later a bomb went off at the La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, popular with American soldiers, killing three US servicemen and one civilian, and injuring hundreds more. It later emerged that the KGB had been aware of the activities of the bombers, and knew exactly how they’d smuggled their weapons into Berlin.[63] Apparently all methods were to be permitted in the fight against the US ‘imperialists’.

      One former KGB СКАЧАТЬ