Putin

Putin at this time was a low-level operative, fresh from law school with a quick six months’ training behind him. But he was working in the field of counterintelligence. On both sides, it was assumed that certain embassy, consulate, and mission personnel were spies, but the question always remained, precisely which ones? To determine that was the task of counterintelligence. The material gleaned from the bugging of the electric typewriters would have been valuable in determining which of the Leningrad U.S. consulate’s personnel were intelligence officers. At the least, Putin’s task would have been facilitated by this information, and he would also have shared in the general rise in esprit de corps that a successful operation always brings to an organization.

The KGB was on a roll. On September 7, 1978, on a crowded London street, Georgi Markov, a defector who broadcast for the BBC’s Bulgarian radio service, often ridiculing the Bulgarian Communist regime, was assassinated with a poison (ricin) pellet fired from a miniaturized gun in the tip of an umbrella, a masterstroke of disguise in forever rainy London. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the date was also the birthday of the Bulgarian Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov, who must have been gladdened by this gift. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the assassination of the gadfly journalist Anna Politkovskaya would take place on Putin’s birthday.

Putin was in his element. The USSR may have been run by an increasingly doddering and sclerotic Leonid Brezhnev, but the KGB was vigorous and flush with success. Penetration of the enemy’s embassies and crafty assassination in the name of the cause—what could be better? Since he was in his element, he thrived and so came to the attention of the people in foreign intelligence, the classiest and most coveted branch of service, since it meant foreign postings, action on the front line, access to goods. He was called in by the foreign-intelligence people for a series of conversations. They liked what they saw and sent him to Moscow for a year’s worth of advanced training at the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School. Named for Felix Dzerzhinsky, often called with jocular affection “Iron Felix,” the founder of the first Soviet secret police, the school specialized in “skills enhancement” and had itself suffered greatly in the purges of 1937–38, when practically the entire teaching staff had been shot.

Nowadays, in one measure of progress, the KGB Higher School, a sprawl of yellow-brick buildings in southwest Moscow, is so famed for its computer experts that the lampposts outside the institute’s grounds are festooned with posters offering high-paying jobs in IT.

Nineteen seventy-nine, the year Putin spent immersed in his studies and training at the KGB Higher School, was a time of tectonic shifts within the Islamic world, and between the Western and Islamic worlds. The Iranian Revolution ousted the pro-Western shah and replaced him with a theocratic government. Radicals seized the holy places of Mecca, and the Saudis could not expel them without outside, i.e., French, help. In late December the USSR invaded Afghanistan in what would prove a protracted, failed, and fatal war, instrumental in the collapse of the system and, ultimately, in the rise of Vladimir Putin.

After returning to Leningrad from Moscow, his skills enhanced, Putin worked for three and a half years in the First Directorate, intelligence. Or did he? Some observers maintain that Putin also spent time in Directorate 5, which was charged with crushing dissent.

Andropov strove for “the destruction of dissent in all its forms” and, foreshadowing Putin, declared that “the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state.” He was, no doubt, sincere. Andropov had seen what had happened in Hungary. A small discussion group named after nineteenth-century poet Sandor Petofi begins considering reformist ideas and the next thing you know security officers are hanging from lampposts.

Two figures dominated the opposition landscape: the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, creator of the Soviet H-bomb and leader of the human rights movement. In 1971 an attempt had been made on Solzhenitsyn’s life in a Moscow store, where he was smeared with a gel most likely containing ricin from the KGB’s poison factory. He became violently ill, but Solzhenitsyn, who had survived World War II, the Gulag, and cancer, wasn’t easy to kill. In early 1974 the KGB simply put him on a plane and exiled him to the West.