Imperial Dreaming?

Putin is a man on a mission. We have been speculating as to what the mission is. It is a subject that deserves more attention. Russia under Putin is moving in a direction that is not in the interest of Europe or The US. To understand where Putin is going, it is important to know where he has been. That is not as easy as you may think. Never underestimate a potential adversary.

Portrait of Putin's Past
By J. MICHAEL WALLER Perspective
Volume X, Number 3 (January - February 2000) 1999)
American Foreign Policy Council

"Why is so little known about the KGB career of Russia's acting President Vladimir Putin? Most reporting on both sides of the Atlantic is thinly sourced, if sourced at all, and often conflicting. Was Putin a professional foreign intelligence cadre officer whose experience abroad exposed him to reformist ideas, as many claim? If so, how was he, the first Russian leader since Andropov to have lived abroad, and the leader who lived abroad the longest since Lenin, exposed to enlightened thinking from his isolated outpost in Erich Honecker's East Germany? If Putin wasn't a cadre intelligence officer, what was he?
Determining with which part of the KGB Putin identifies himself will help determine what shaped his professional formation and experience and could serve as a guidepost toward the direction in which he will lead Russia. The KGB was no monolith. Its sprawling bureaucracy and diverse functions employed polished spies steeped in Western ways, scholars, linguists, mathematicians, engineers, paper-pushing bureaucrats, guardsmen, and the ubiquitous thugs, snoops and dissident-hunters that formed the core of the KGB ethos.

The dearth of hard facts about Putin's KGB career and the official silence, combined with the Andropov-style myth-making about Russia's new leader (alleging him to have been everything from a quiet monitor of pro-glasnost' East Germans to a Russian James Bond who recruited hordes of Westerners), indicate that something about Putin's KGB past is hidden. We knew as much if not more in 1990 about Soviet KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov's intelligence career than we know in 2000 about Putin's."

Not even Russia's best journalists have been able to pin down the man who succeeded Boris Yel'tsin(1) German intelligence and counterintelligence officials give superficial, conflicting accounts of Putin, and the German press has been no better. Asked about Putin's work in Dresden from 1984 to 1990, a German BND intelligence spokeswoman said, "It's difficult to say exactly what he did."(2) Informed American intelligence veterans do not paint a uniform portrait either. While some aren't so sure, several interviewed for this article say with complete confidence that Putin was a Line X officer in Directorate T, the scientific and technology-theft unit of the First Chief Directorate.(3) That may well be, though most Directorate T officers had engineering and scientific backgrounds,(4) and Putin studied law. His thesis adviser at Leningrad State University says the law faculty produced "administrators, not lawyers," 70 percent of whom went into the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), with most of the rest going into local governments and the party apparat. Only a select few, he said, made it into the KGB.(5)

Upon graduating from law school in 1975, Putin reportedly worked at the Leningrad KGB office in Service No. 1, not the First Chief Directorate, trying to recruit foreigners. He remained on the job for nine years. However, no one can account for what he did at that time, and there is a question about whether he began his intelligence career in the KGB. An official biography of Putin posted on the Russian National News Service web site in 1997 states that Putin began his career as a GRU military intelligence officer. That information was deleted from subsequent biographies.(6) Finally in 1984 he took a year-long course at the KGB Red Banner Institute of Intelligence (now the Andropov Institute) for training abroad, and was assigned the following year to East Germany, where he remained until 1990.(7) Some official reports say his job in Dresden was to monitor East German political developments.(8)"

Much more at American Foreign Policy Council