The FBI chief, Louis Freeh, had identified the 50 diplomats some time earlier, but the Clinton administration had declined to expel them for fear of spoiling the special relationship with Yeltsin, just at the end of Clinton’s term. So now, with a new man in the White House, and knowing that he himself would soon be leaving his job, Freeh decided to get this last piece of business out of the way.
Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser to the new president, recalled in an interview: ‘Freeh was very strong about the need to take action against this Russian network in the United States. My sense was that it’s something he had wanted to do for a long time, but for a lot of reasons in their last year of office, the Clinton administration felt the timing was not right, which meant it was an issue that the new president had to confront. Our judgement was that it could not be ignored. Action needed to be taken and it needed to be swift and early. These were real spies. They were not just diplomats. This was not being done for political purposes, or to send a signal. The decision was made. It was not going to get any easier by kicking a can down the road.’6
The task of telling the Russians fell to Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell. He called in the Russian ambassador, Yuri Ushakov, ostensibly for a courtesy call, a chance to meet the new secretary of state. Powell opened with some banter: ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’
‘Good things are for dessert,’ replied Ushakov.
Powell served the hors d’oeuvre. He politely explained that while there was a gentleman’s agreement that each side could have a certain number of spies in its embassies, the Russians had gone way over the score. ‘We’ve identified about 50 of them. And you will get notice tomorrow of who they are and they will be asked to leave the country within the next few days. So I need you to go back to the embassy, crank up your fax machine and let Moscow know about this right away.’7
Ushakov at once informed his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who hit the roof. ‘It was completely unprecedented,’ he recalls. ‘It was a politically motivated action. That was our assessment. And we thought it was done to show who rules the world.’8
When the news reached the Kremlin, it could not have hit a sorer spot. This was the job that Putin himself had done for 16 years; these were his fellow Chekists. He called a meeting of his Security Council – the ministers in charge of military, foreign and security matters. They decided to mirror exactly what the Americans had done – but make it worse for them. The head of the Security Council, Sergei Ivanov (also a former Soviet foreign spy), called the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and told her: ‘Our reply will be very cynical. We will expel 50 of your diplomats, but we will not do it immediately. We will spin it out over a period, and we will be very careful to choose not only real spies but “clean” diplomats as well. We will cause chaos in your embassy.’9
The tit-for-tat expulsions began. But the Bush team was anxious to move on. This had not been their initiative. Powell called his counterpart, foreign minister Igor Ivanov, to suggest that it was time to close the matter.
‘It’s not something we can just close,’ replied Ivanov. ‘We will expel 50. And if you expel more, so will we, soon we’ll have no diplomats left and it’ll just be you and me handling our bilateral relations.’
They agreed to call a halt. Ivanov flew to Washington on 18 May bearing a letter from Putin. The Russian leader was looking beyond the current tiff, stressing the same things he had spoken of with NATO’s Robertson: he wanted to restart the relationship, with a new type of partnership. Powell and Ivanov agreed that the two presidents had to meet. They chose a neutral venue – Slovenia – and a date – 16 June 2001.
It was here, in the sixteenth-century Brdo Castle, just north of the capital Ljubljana, that Bush and Putin had their blind date. Putin has a tremendous ability to mimic his interlocutor and win their confidence – the facility that made him a good KGB ‘mingler’. A well-connected Kremlin journalist, Yelena Tregubova, for whom Putin had a soft spot, described being taken out to a sushi restaurant by him when he was director of the FSB: ‘He is a brilliant communicator ... a virtuoso ... able to reflect like a mirror the person he is with, to make them believe he is just like them. He does this so cleverly that his counterpart apparently doesn’t notice it but just feels great.’10
In Brdo Castle Putin worked his magic on Bush. The American brought up an incident in Putin’s life that he had been briefed on, concerning a Christian cross which his mother had given him, and he had had blessed in Israel. Putin quickly understood that this resonated with Bush. ‘It’s true,’ he replied, according to Bush’s own account to the American journalist Bob Woodward.11
Bush says he told Putin he was amazed that a communist, a KGB operative, was willing to wear a cross. (Putin was not wearing the cross at this meeting, though he did bring it to show Bush at Genoa a month later.) ‘That speaks volumes to me, Mr President,’ Bush said. ‘May I call you Vladimir?’
Putin then described how his family dacha had burned down and the only thing he wanted to recover from the ashes was the cross. ‘I remember the workman’s hand opening, and there was the cross that my mother had given me, as if it was meant to be.’ He had Bush hooked.
The two presidents’ aides, waiting outside, were getting nervous as the private talks continued. Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, chatted with his opposite number Igor Ivanov. Powell recalled later: ‘Igor and I and the rest of the delegations were busy sitting round pretending to have a conference and discussing vital issues, but we were all just sitting there tapping our thumbs and our fingers on the table wondering what these fellows were doing.’12
Eventually the presidents emerged to hold a press conference. One journalist asked Bush a killer question: ‘Is this a man that Americans can trust?’ Still under the spell, Bush waxed lyrical: ‘I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.’
Putin could hardly believe it. He turned to Bush and said in a quiet, boyish voice in English, ‘Thank you, mister ...’ Bush’s aides gasped. Condi Rice murmured to a colleague, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re going to have some explaining to do over that one.’
Colin Powell later took the president aside and said: ‘You know, you may have seen all that but I still look in his eyes and I see K-G-B. Remember there’s a reason he’s fluent in German, he used to be the rezident [agent] in Germany and he is a chief KGB guy.’
Bush’s claim to have ‘seen into Putin’s soul’ would haunt him for the rest of his presidency.
Fighting the Taliban together
In less than three months the friendship would be put to the test. When terrorists mounted the world’s most devastating attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush and offer condolences and help.
Watching the coverage of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin was shocked but not entirely surprised. Only the previous day he had called Bush and told him he believed ‘something serious’ was in the making. This followed the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on 9 September, which Russian intelligence interpreted as a harbinger of worse to come. Russia had supported the Northern Alliance with arms and cash for several years in an effort to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
Putin at once called his security chiefs to the Kremlin and asked them what they could do to help. The first thing that occurred to them was to postpone a major naval exercise that was about to get under way in the Pacific, since this could be an unnecessary distraction for the US military. Putin called the White House, but could not speak to President Bush who was still aboard Air Force One, moving to a secure location. Condoleezza Rice took the call. She was in the White House bunker, where a decision had just been taken to put US forces on the highest level of alert, DEFCON 3.
Rice recalled later in a
n interview: ‘I told President Putin our forces were going on highest alert, and I remember him saying, “I know,” and it occurred to me, of course they know, they’re watching our forces go on alert! He said, “We are bringing ours down, we’re cancelling all exercises.” And at that moment I thought to myself, you know, the Cold War’s really over.’13
The Americans soon decided on their response to the attacks, which had been sponsored by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation operating out of Afghanistan with the support of the fundamentalist Taliban government there. When Putin asked what else he could do to help, the answer was clear: the only suitable places to launch an assault on Afghanistan, apart from US aircraft carriers in the region, were in former Soviet republics of Central Asia. And those republics – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan – while nominally independent, were states where Moscow had great influence.
Putin’s instinct was to ask the Central Asians to cooperate, and indicated this to the Americans. But then he ran up against unexpected opposition within his own government. The hardline Sergei Ivanov, now defence minister, was one of Putin’s closest allies – like him, a former KGB spy, but more urbane and better versed in Western ways. He was also Condoleezza Rice’s main channel of communication in Moscow. When she came to office as Bush’s national security adviser, Ivanov was her opposite number, and, even though he had become defence minister in March 2001, Rice liked him and (despite diplomatic protocol, which should have linked her with the new Russian national security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo) she retained the link. At the Ljubljana summit, according to Rice, Bush asked Putin, ‘Who should we call if we can’t get you and we need a trusted agent?’ Putin said, ‘That would be Sergei Ivanov.’ And Bush said, ‘That would be Condi.’
Just three days after the terrorist attacks, Ivanov, the ‘trusted agent’, suddenly went way off message with regard to Russia’s willingness to help. ‘I see absolutely no basis,’ he said while on a visit to Armenia, ‘for even the hypothetical possibility of NATO military operations on the territory of the Central Asian states.’
The Americans were confused by the conflicting signals. Suddenly the presidents of the Central Asian states, not counted among the world’s greatest democrats, became everybody’s favourites. Putin sent his national security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo, to sound them out. Bush sent his under-secretary of state, John Bolton, to the Uzbek capital Tashkent to win over President Islam Karimov, a man accused of some of the world’s most heinous human rights violations. The Americans were in no mood to quibble about such things now. Rice recalled later: ‘With Uzbekistan it just became a problem of what would be the price. Karimov needed money and he knew he had us over a barrel.’ And indeed, Bolton apparently found him bending over backwards to oblige: ‘I [was] all prepared for how hard it will be and he said, “Why aren’t you asking for a permanent base?” ’14
That was precisely what the Russians, and not just Sergei Ivanov, were worried about: the prospect of an American ‘presence’ – limited access to Central Asian bases for the purposes of their campaign in Afghanistan – turning into something more permanent, something more political.
Ivanov recalls: ‘We were concerned that once the Americans had a presence in the region, then “democracy promotion” would start. We know those countries very well – they were part of the same country [the Soviet Union] – and as we say in Russia, “the orient is a very intricate place”. We were afraid that political processes that were not very advantageous to us could start. And that proved to be true later. The leaders of those countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan – started complaining to us, because they had given the Americans everything they needed, but then they started working with opposition groups, building democracy.’15
This was one of the earliest indications that under Putin Russia considered the prospect of democracy on its borders threatening.
On Saturday 22 September Putin called his defence and security chiefs together for six hours of crisis talks at his dacha, hidden in the woods on a cliff-top overlooking the Black Sea at Sochi. Putin argued that it was not only in Russia’s interest to help America, but also in Russia’s self-interest. For one thing, Moscow had long been disturbed by the rise of Islamic forces in the Central Asian republics, fomented in part from Afghanistan. Russia itself could never again put military boots on the ground in Afghanistan after its catastrophic war there in the 1980s, but if the Americans were going to do it for them why should Russia oppose? Sergei Ivanov recalls: ‘We were counting on getting help in return. We knew where the training camps were in Afghanistan. I mean, we knew the exact map coordinates. Those camps trained terrorists – including those from Chechnya and Dagestan, as well as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan ... We were counting on the Americans to liquidate those camps. Or they would capture the terrorists and send them to us.’
Secondly, Putin linked the 9/11 attacks to the same worldwide terrorist threat that he faced in Chechnya. Supporting the Americans could only help garner support for (or at least mute criticism of) his own campaign against terrorism. The Russian leader had already spoken to the Americans about the links between al-Qaeda and the Chechen Islamists – indeed he claimed that Osama bin Laden himself had twice been to Chechnya. Now the Russians had a chance to help the Americans wipe out some of the sources of trouble within Russia itself. ‘We all have to understand,’ Putin told his team, ‘that the situation in the world has changed.’
The hardliners were won over. ‘Even the doubters agreed,’ Putin said in an interview. ‘New circumstances meant we had to help the Americans.’
After four hours, Putin left the meeting to call the American president and inform him of their decision. ‘It was a substantive conversation,’ Putin recalls. ‘We agreed on concrete steps to be taken straight away, and in the long term.’ He offered Russian logistical help, intelligence, search-and-rescue missions if American pilots were downed in northern Afghanistan, and even the right to military flights over Russian territory for humanitarian purposes. Most importantly, he told Bush: ‘I am prepared to tell the heads of government of the Central Asian states that we have good relations with that we have no objections to a US role in Central Asia as long as it has the object of fighting the war on terror and is temporary and is not permanent.’16 The last words were crucial. Ten years later (despite a Russian attempt to have them evicted in 2009), American forces still operate out of the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.17 They were asked to leave their base in Uzbekistan in 2005.
The American campaign was mainly going to involve air strikes, while the Afghans themselves (the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance) would be doing the fighting on the ground. Rice says that she and Sergei Ivanov were given responsibility for getting supplies to the Northern Alliance and preparing them to fight. Even as Putin was calling Bush from Sochi, Russia’s chief of staff, General Anatoly Kvashnin, was holding talks with a Northern Alliance leader in Tajikistan.
Russia, it seemed, was now totally aligned with the US in the war on terror. Sergei Ivanov claims that some days after the war began, Russian border guards on the Tajik frontier with Afghanistan were approached by representatives of the Taliban. ‘They said they had authority from Mullah Omar to propose that Russia and the Taliban join forces fighting the Americans.’ Putin referred to the same incident when the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, visited Moscow. ‘We gave them only one answer,’ said Putin in English, showing a crude Russian hand-gesture, a fist with the thumb pushed between the forefinger and middle finger. ‘We do it a little differently, but I get the point,’ laughed Rumsfeld.18
The American assault began on 7 October. It was Putin’s birthday. Together with the guests at his party, he watched the news of the first air strikes on television. Defence minister Sergei Ivanov turned to him and raised a glass of vodka: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, it’s a birthday present for you.’
The George ’n’ Vladimir show
It seemed that Putin had now answered that journalist’s question
in Ljubljana: was this a man Americans could trust? Delighted to be seen to be acting in concert with the West rather than against it, Putin now kept up the charm offensive, travelling first to Germany, where he impressed his hosts by making a speech to the Bundestag entirely in German.
He emphasised his country’s cooperation in the war on terror, and contrasted this with the slap in the face Russia had felt over the bombing of Serbia – an event now more than two years old but still rankling. ‘Decisions are often taken without our participation, and we are only urged afterwards to support them. After that they talk again about loyalty to NATO. They even say that such decisions cannot be implemented without Russia. Let us ask ourselves: is this normal? Is this true partnership?’
‘We cannot have a united Great Europe without an atmosphere of trust,’ he said, laying out a grand vision to put an end finally to the Cold War. ‘Today we are obliged to say that we are renouncing our stereotypes and ambitions and from now on will jointly ensure the security of the population of Europe and the world as a whole.’
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder fully supported Putin’s idea of involving Russia in ‘jointly’ ensuring Europe’s security. Even before this visit they had begun to think the unthinkable: that Russia might even become a member of NATO. Schröder recalled later in an interview that they had discussed what he called a ‘fairly visionary’ approach to foreign policy: ‘I had discussions with Putin about whether it would make sense for Russia to join NATO – and I thought that it made perfect sense, a good prospect for Russia and also for NATO.’19
A week later Putin was in Brussels for a meeting with NATO secretary general George Robertson, ready to push his luck. Robertson was taken aback when Putin opened the meeting by asking, ‘When are you going to invite Russia to join NATO?’20
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