Putin

Though Putin was adept at covering his own tracks and though most of the Dresden KGB’s records were burned in the final days of East Germany, a bit is known about one major operation in which Putin was involved. If NATO was the “main enemy,” the “main worry” was a Sudden Nuclear Missile Attack (SNMA) that would begin with Green Berets operating behind Soviet lines to thwart a Soviet response. It turns out that this at least was hardly extravagant Soviet paranoia. A May 2, 2015, New York Times article, “A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered,” on the retirement of Michael G. Vickers, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, states: “During the Cold War, Mr. Vickers was a member of the Green Berets assigned to infiltrate Warsaw Pact borders should World War III break out. His mission: Detonate a portable nuclear bomb to blunt an attack by the overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks.”

There were three Green Beret bases in West Germany, and it was the ambition of Directorate S to penetrate those bases. Putin was involved in searching through “mountains” of invitations from Dresdeners to relatives in West Germany to find any to people who lived near those bases. In any case, it all came to naught, not a single nibble worth mentioning. But success was always rare in any such operation. As one of Putin’s coworkers put it, to recruit a single Western agent was success enough for a career.

One agent Putin ran did not turn out too well. Klaus Zuchold was a Stasi officer recruited by Putin over a five-year period, only formally joining the KGB after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when KGB penetration of Germany became more important than ever. Just after the two Germanys were reunited, Zuchold, fearing exposure, surrendered himself to German intelligence, revealing that he had been run by Putin, who was also personally running a senior police inspector in Dresden.

Zuchold had immediately been charmed by Putin’s jokes about police, Jews, and the crude Russian soldiers who stole vegetables from Zuchold’s garden. “Putin is a man of few words. He is impenetrable and he mostly lets other people speak. He gives away very little but is clearly very driven and determined to get what he wants: friendly and seemingly very open, luring people into opening up but always in control. Whenever we drank together he always made sure he was at least three glasses behind everyone else.”

False modesty and professional ambiguity aside, Putin’s downplaying of his work was also quite sincere. The KGB was increasingly becoming an organization that processed paperwork. One agent quipped that Soviet intelligence runs on paperwork alone and [its] “main advantage … resides in its newly acquired ability to exist without undercover agents.” And, as one of Putin’s own colleagues put it: “Our work was seventy percent paperwork and sometimes was unbearably boring.”

KGB generals and liberal intellectuals rarely agree on anything, but such is Putin’s power to unite people that he has even brought these disparate groups together in their derision of his abilities as a spy. In her biography of Putin, The Man Without a Face, Masha Gessen writes: “Putin’s biggest success in his stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian university student, who in turn connected the Soviet agents with a Colombian student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born U.S. Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks.”

KGB colonel Sergei Tretyakov, who ran Russian intelligence operations in the United States from New York after the fall of the USSR and who attended the Red Banner Institute at the same time as Putin did, was aghast at the very suggestion that he might have had anything to do with Putin afterward: “Of course I did not. Not only because we worked in different regions of the world, but first of all because I was a successful officer working in the Center and Putin was never successful in intelligence and never had a chance to work in headquarters. He was always kept in a provincial KGB station in a low and unimportant position.”

Putin is further belittled for receiving only one award, a bronze medal awarded him by the Stasi in 1988, and for only advancing one rank, from major to lieutenant colonel, in his more than four years of service abroad.

Putin, of course, doesn’t quite agree with these characterizations of himself. Responding to the charge that Dresden was a provincial posting, he said: “Probably. Actually, from that perspective, Leningrad is also a province. But I was always quite successful in those provinces.”