As to what Putin did on official business during the period when he clearly was in Dresden, from 1985 to 1990, there are also questions. On January 10, 2000, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag published an interview with Günther Köhler, a former StasiI officer who knew Putin. Köhler said Putin called himself Adamov, spoke excellent German, and traveled frequently to West Germany, and that he was part of Operation Luch, designed to encourage the reformist movement in the East German regime.24 Köhler claimed that Putin tried to recruit Western businessmen and East Germans traveling to the West and that “he kept a book on East Germans who supported economic reform.”25 Other journalists who investigated Putin agree that he indeed worked as a recruiter26 and that he used the name Adamov in his dealings with non–East German citizens.27, II
Irrespective of his activities before arriving in Dresden, it is agreed that he spent the better part of five years in Dresden, until 1990, several months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In Dresden it appears that he was involved in espionage designed to steal as many of the West’s technological secrets as possible; in fact by the time the USSR collapsed, approximately 50 percent of all Soviet weapons systems were based on stolen Western designs. The success rate was lower in other areas of the economy, not because KGB operatives were not successfully stealing secrets but because the economy no longer had the capacity to respond. In a 2010 speech at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Putin recollected that in the late 1980s he realized, “The results of our own research, and the results of your foreign colleagues’ research that were obtained by ‘special means,’ were not actually introduced into the Soviet Union’s economy. We did not even have the equipment to introduce them. And so there we were, working away, gathering away, essentially for nothing.”29
But the greatest speculation about Putin’s activities in Dresden concerns whether he was part of the mysterious Operation Luch, which means “ray” or “sunbeam” in Russian. Much is not known about Luch. It is referred to in the Mitrokhin ArchiveIII as a long-running operation to monitor opinion within the GDR leadership and population and to examine the efforts of the West to “harm the building of socialism” inside the GDR. Particularly after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, where a large number of KGB operatives had been sent in advance,30 the Soviets did not restrict their operations in Eastern Europe to formal state-to-state intelligence operations. While the formal purpose of intelligence cooperation was to coordinate actions against the West—Putin himself described his work as gathering information about NATO, the “main opponent”31—the KGB also had an interest in monitoring the political situation inside the Socialist Bloc, which had only become more fragile after the 1968 invasion. For this purpose, in East Germany sometime in 1973 they established Operation Luch.32 By 1974 the KGB was so focused on the need to monitor events not only in the West but also in the Soviet Bloc that “the section of the Karlshorst KGB responsible for Luch was raised in status to a directorate.”33
In conception Luch appears to have been an extension of Operation Progress, started by Andropov after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in which Soviet illegals were infiltrated into Bloc countries to test public opinion, monitor allied intelligence capability, provide an independent source of intelligence to the Soviet leadership, and engage in active operations—including the kidnapping of dissidents.34 Naturally the knowledge that KGB operatives were active within an allied and sovereign country created a delicate situation. In 1978, for example, Andropov and Stasi chief Erich Mielke signed an agreement acknowledging that the Soviets could “recruit GDR citizens for secret collaboration” but only for “solving tasks of intelligence and counterintelligence work in capitalist states and in West Berlin” and only with the knowledge of the Stasi, strongly indicating that the Stasi did not approve of the KGB’s secretly recruiting their own officials. The 1978 protocol put strict limits on the number of KGB liaison officers who could be placed alongside their Stasi counterparts, limiting the “overall number of liaison officers from the Representation of the KGB with the MfS [Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Stasi] of the GDR” to thirty, “of which 15 are assigned to District Administrations of the MfS of the GDR.”35
This laughably small number was undoubtedly never adhered to, but the fact that it would be included in a protocol shows the East Germans’ sensitivity to the issue. The GDR foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf later estimated that by 1989 there were about a thousand “pure” KGB intelligence operatives, including liaison officers in the GDR, excluding military and signals intelligence, for a total of five to seven thousand.36 In a 1981 meeting, Mielke and Andropov discussed extensive measures that would have to be taken to ensure that the nascent Solidarity movement in Poland did not spill over and affect the populations in their two countries. Both agreed that the key was close cooperation and the use of “party methods” to maintain control of the working class. Additionally at this meeting, Andropov recognized the role of the Stasi in stealing high-tech and defense secrets from the West, thanking Mielke for “all your information provided, especially on West German tank production, defense technology, and the NATO manual.” He promised that the East Germans would also receive information from the KGB, at which point Mielke chimed in, “The quality is crucial!” Mielke wanted in particular to cooperate to “acquire even more new technology for our economy.”37 Clearly Mielke was making every effort to maintain East Germany’s status as first among equals in its relationship with Moscow.
As Gorbachev’s reforms of glasnost’ and perestroika began to unleash further protest movements throughout the Communist world, the KGB leadership became more and more alarmed by the situation both in Eastern Europe and inside the USSR. A meeting between Mielke and General Ivan Abramov of the KGB’s Fifth Chief DirectorateIV took place in 1987 in which Abramov openly admitted that in the view of KGB senior staff, Gorbachev’s reform agenda was unworkable and destabilizing, and concluded that in the USSR “perestroika itself proceeds anything but smoothly and easily.” Mielke was direct in his response, noting that while a plan for dealing with threats to socialism may be passed, “at the end, nothing comes out of it. You talk, and they sign a good resolution. . . . Bobkov [director of the Fifth Chief Directorate] will give a good speech tomorrow at your [KGB] conference in Moscow. . . . Yet when he does not tell his people what they are actually supposed to do, the entire ideological explanation will not be of much value.”38 The situation in East Germany clearly became worse after Communist regimes in neighboring Bloc states came under pressure from wide-scale social movements like Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. After 1989, when the Hungarians opened their border with Austria, the mass and uncontrolled exodus of East Germans began, which ultimately led to the collapse of the regime after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.39
While Putin acknowledged that Operation Luch did have the objective of “working with the political leadership of the GDR,” he denied having any involvement with it.40 As the Soviet KGB leadership became more and more worried about the collapse of the GDR, especially after 1988, speculation arose that Luch was used not only to monitor the political mood of the country but also to recruit a set of agents who would “live on,” reporting to Moscow if a united Germany came to pass. On the Soviet side, this group was reputed to consist at the top level of twenty or so KGB operatives in East Germany, who reported directly to KGB chief Kryuchkov. Kryuchkov admitted both to visiting Dresden in 1986 to evaluate the readiness of Hans Modrow to succeed Erich Honecker, as Markus Wolf confirms, and to the existence of Luch, but he wasn’t sure of Putin’s involvement, saying elusively that he remembered faces but forgot names.41 Major General Vladimir A. Shirokov, who headed the Dresden office, also confirmed that their function was to work as the liaison between the KGB and GDR institutions, including the Stasi, the police, the border guards, the Customs Office, and the local party organs, “in particular the 1st Secretary of the Dresden district committee of the SED [East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity P
arty] Modrow.”42
Luch, and Putin’s role in it, became the subject of an investigation by the German Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) when Putin came to power in 2000. The Germans were concerned that Putin had recruited a network that lived on in united Germany. According to the London Sunday Times, “Several high-ranking officers of the former East German Stasi secret service who knew Putin personally were questioned recently in an effort to identify some of those he is believed to have recruited.”43 Horst Jemlich, the personal assistant to Dresden’s Stasi chief Horst Böhm and a Stasi agent for thirty years, knew Putin and was one of those questioned. He told the Sunday Times, “They questioned me about it for hours. But we in the Stasi knew nothing about the operation. The KGB mounted it behind our backs, recruiting in utmost secrecy. The plan was to prepare one day to let us fall and have new guys supply them with information. I only found out about Luch recently and felt betrayed. The Russians were playing a double game.”44 The list of agents recruited as part of Luch was never revealed in the West, either because it was burned or, more likely, because it was removed back to the USSR as the Berlin Wall was falling.
Putin indirectly admitted to running some of these agents himself when he spoke about the times after November 1989 when crowds threatened to storm the KGB building in Dresden after the collapse of the Wall. He decided to go out to calm down the protesters so that they would not break through, thus “saving the lives of the people whose files were lying on my desk.”45 Inside the KGB offices, staff members were busy burning all the files. Putin later stated, “We burned so much stuff that the furnace exploded.”46 He recounts that despite the local office’s efforts to get the Soviet military to come to their rescue, and in general to defend their positions in East Germany, “Moscow was silent. . . . I only really regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls . . . cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away. . . . We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.”47
The head of the Dresden office, Major-General Shirokov, confirmed Putin’s story that the furnace had exploded. In his memoirs he provided more details about the evacuation, saying that after the furnace exploded, they decided to place all the documents in a massive pit and use napalm to burn them. But when the soldiers responsible for delivering the chemical incendiary were delayed, Shirokov instead poured gasoline into the pit and set it on fire. This too was insufficient for dealing with all the documents, so ultimately they loaded what remained on twelve Soviet army trucks and repatriated all of it to Russia.48
Putin’s normal duties focused on obtaining high-tech secrets from the West. He certainly admits to recruiting agents who traveled to or were from the West.49 He also is said to have assumed the identity of Mr. Adamov, the director of a German-Soviet friendship society in Leipzig, where he kept a close eye on foreign visitors for possible recruits.50 The Sunday Times reported that Putin used his agents to penetrate the Siemens electronics giant via agents in its East German partner, Robotron, a state company that was one of only five mainframe and personal computer companies in the Soviet Bloc, providing computers to the KGB itself.51 The BND’s fear was that because it was believed that both the Stasi and the KGB had infiltrated Siemens via Robotron during this period, these links would live on after German reunification. This concern was heightened when Siemens received many favorable contracts early in the post-Soviet period, including those approved by Putin when he was head of the Committee for Foreign Liaison (Komitet vneshnikh svyazey—or KVS—also sometimes referred to as the Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, or External Relations) in St. Petersburg. The Western company that received the first contract for medical equipment in post-Communist St. Petersburg was Siemens. And one of Putin’s closest collaborators and a cofounder of the Ozero Cooperative,V Nikolay Shamalov, was the Siemens representative in northwestern Russia. Additionally whistleblower documents brought out of Russia in 201152 detail a multiyear scam involving funds that should have gone to building health clinics all over Russia but instead helped build what is called “Putin’s Palace” in the southern Russian town of Gelendzhik; these too involved contracts from Siemens.VI Still, there is no direct evidence that the KGB infiltrated Siemens or that Shamalov’s subsequent appointment as Siemens’s representative in the Russian northwestern region grew out of the KGB’s early interest.
In East Germany, Kalugin states, in response to complaints by East German leaders about the overly large size of the KGB presence (450 agents in East Berlin alone, he claims), agents, “particularly in the provinces,” as was Putin, were moved into joint ventures and trade missions, giving them a head start in learning about economic processes when privatization began in Russia in the 1990s.54 Given the ability of embassy staff and KGB agents in East Germany to buy goods in the West, they became highly involved in smuggling goods back to Russia in the 1980s.55 The USSR’s own long-standing ambassador to East Germany, Pyotr Abrasimov (who held the post of Soviet high commissioner in Germany), ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the GDR since 1962,56 was evidently himself implicated in supplying smuggled Western goods to the Central Committee,57 but because of his friendship with Brezhnev, according to Kalugin, the affair was hushed up until Andropov came to power, at which point he was recalled.58
As for Putin, many authors have written about his role in these activities and his acquiring coveted Western consumer goods. Masha Gessen recounts an interview with a former member of the radical West German group the Red Army Faction,VII who had regular meetings with Putin. He told her, “He [Putin] always wanted to have things. He mentioned to several people wishes that he wanted from the West.” Gessen writes that the Faction leader gave Putin a Grundig Satellite shortwave radio and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car. The Faction member particularly remembered Putin’s attitude toward paying for these items, an attitude that would reappear in the years to come: “The East Germans did not expect us to pay for it, so they would at least make an effort to say, ‘What do I owe you?’ And we would say, ‘Nothing.’ And Vova [diminutive for Vladimir, i.e., Putin] never even started asking, ‘What do I owe you?’ ”VIII
President Putin sizes up Robert Kraft’s 2005 Super Bowl Ring at Konstantin Palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, June 25, 2005. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko
In 1989–91, after the Berlin Wall came down and before the USSR collapsed, Putin, like all KGB officers, capitalized on his contacts with Stasi officials in East Germany who were themselves entering private business for the first time. They had also established dummy companies in the West through which they laundered funds and ran operations. The East German Ministry of Foreign Trade’s Commercial Coordination Division cooperated closely with the Stasi, and between 1987 and 1990 alone, 400 million West German marks left the country through dummy front companies.64
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, West German and U.S. intelligence services both rushed into East Germany to take over as many files and agent networks as possible. It is claimed that the CIA managed to acquire the complete card catalogue of all of East Germany’s foreign intelligence agents.65 But it would appear that at least some of the agents were willing to work for the KGB, and Putin seems to have been involved in trying to keep many of the die-hard loyalists on the payroll. One was Klaus Zuchold, a Stasi officer from Dresden who, in an interview with the Sunday Times in 2000, claimed he had known Putin since 1985 and admitted to having been recruited by him in January 1990.66, IX Eleven months later, as reunification was taking place, he claimed to have turned himself over to German intelligence and at the same time revealed not only the names of four East German police who had spied for the KGB for years but also a detailed biography of Putin’s time in Dresden. Stasi archives do confir
m that the GDR authorities complained formally and directly to the Soviets about the unauthorized Soviet recruitment of police and radio specialists, and they were given assurances that such recruitment would go through proper channels in the future.68 Putin was involved in the recruitment of GDR police, and documents show that he requested that Dresden Stasi chief Horst Böhm intervene to have a telephone line installed in the apartment of one of his main informers.X, 69 Zuchold said of Putin, “He showed me his wristwatch, which had an inscription from some KGB bigwig. He loved patriotic stories of Russia’s great past and popular heroes.” Zuchold also revealed that when visiting Putin in his apartment, Putin had showed off a new stereo bought during a trip to KaDeWe in West Berlin.70
The opening of the Stasi archives following German reunification allows a closer look into Putin’s German colleagues than into his KGB circle. Among the members of Putin’s inner circle who got their start with him in Dresden, the most notable example is Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi operative. Warnig worked in the Sector for Science and Technology (Sektor Wissenschaft und Technik, SWT), of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi from the Department for Rocket Science and Technology (XV/3). Stasi archives indicate that Warnig was recruited as an informer by the Stasi in 1974 and adopted the cover name Hans-Detlef.71 In hiring him, the Stasi district office noted, “The IM [Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, unofficial informer] candidate is willing and able to support our body. From the outset, the high level of commitment exhibited by the IM candidate in the solution of our organ’s orders should be emphasized.”72 The following year, 1975, he was hired full time by the Stasi, where his codenames were listed first as Arthur and then Őkonom, the Economist, given to him after he earned a degree in economics.73
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