The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (9 page)

Ludmila enrolled at Leningrad University, where she studied philology. She became pregnant with their first child about a year after the wedding. While she was pregnant, and for a few months after she had Maria, her husband was in Moscow, enrolled in a yearlong course that would prepare him for service in the foreign intelligence corps. She had known he worked for the KGB long before the wedding, even though initially he told her he was a police detective: such was his cover.

THAT PUTIN SEEMS not to have been conscientious about using his cover is probably an indication that he was not sure what exactly he was covering up. His ambition—or, more accurately, his dream—had been to have secret powers of sorts. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” he told his biographers. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.”

Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the
shadows. That is very much the role he ultimately achieved, but when he first joined the KGB, his prospects of ever having anything significant or remotely interesting to do seemed far from certain.

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. “Only the Central Committee of the Communist Party had the right to think in broad political categories,” wrote the last chairman of the KGB, whose task it was to dismantle the institution. “The KGB was relegated to collecting primary information and carrying out decisions made elsewhere. This structure excluded the possibility of developing a tradition of strategic political thinking within the KGB itself. But it was unparalleled in its ability to supply information of the sort and in the amount in which it was ordered.” In other words, the KGB took the concept of carrying out orders to its logical extreme: its agents saw what they were told to see, heard what they were told to hear, and reported back exactly what was expected of them.

The internal ideology of the KGB, as of any police organization, rested on a clear concept of the enemy. The institution thrived on a siege mentality, which had driven the massive manhunts and purges of the Stalin era. But Putin entered the service not only in the post-Stalin era but also during one of the very few, very brief periods of peace in Soviet history: after Vietnam and before Afghanistan, the country was involved in no ongoing armed conflict, covertly or openly. The only active enemies were the dissidents, a handful of brave souls
who drew a disproportionate amount of KGB force. A new law, Article 190 of the Penal Code, made it a crime to “spread rumors or information detrimental to the Soviet societal and governmental structure,” giving the KGB virtually unlimited power in hunting down and fighting those who dared to think differently. Dissidents, suspected dissidents, and those leaning toward activity that might be considered dissident were the objects of constant surveillance and harassment. Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it. A perfectly laudatory memoir of Putin written by a former colleague who defected to the West in the late 1980s mentions matter-of-factly that in Leningrad, Putin worked for the Fifth Directorate, created to fight the dissidents.

After university, Putin spent half a year pushing papers at the KGB offices in Leningrad. Then he spent six months going to KGB officer school. “It was an entirely unremarkable school in Leningrad,” he told his biographers—one of dozens across the country where university graduates got their secret-police qualifications. After graduation, Putin was assigned to the counterintelligence unit in Leningrad. It was a backwater of backwater assignments. Counterintelligence officers in Moscow spent their time trailing suspected or known foreign intelligence agents, almost all of whom worked at foreign embassies in the city. There were no embassies in Leningrad, and no one, really, to trail.

After six months in the counterintelligence unit, Putin was sent to Moscow for a one-year training course, and then returned to Leningrad, now assigned to the intelligence unit. It was another dreary assignment, and Putin was stuck in it, like hundreds, possibly thousands, of unremarkable young men who had once dreamed of being spies and who now waited for someone to notice them. But they had been drafted by the bloated KGB for no particular reason and no
particular purpose, so their waiting could be long and even endless. Putin waited for four and a half years.

His break came in 1984, when he was finally sent to spy school in Moscow for a year. There the thirty-two-year-old KGB major seems to have done everything possible to show just how much he needed this job. He wore a three-piece suit in sweltering heat, for example, to demonstrate respect and discipline. It was a wise strategy: spy school was, in essence, a very long, involved, and labor-intensive placement service—the students were studied carefully by the faculty, who would be making recommendations on their future.

One of Putin’s instructors criticized Putin for his “lowered sense of danger”—a serious flaw for a potential spy. His Mastery of Intelligence instructor—in essence, the communication coach—said Putin was a closed, not very social person. Overall, however, he was a good student, entirely devoted to his work at the school. He was even appointed class foreman—his first leadership position since he was elected class chairman in sixth grade—and apparently did his job well.

Barring an unexpected disaster, Putin knew he would be assigned to work in Germany: much of his work at spy school had focused on improving his language skills. (He would eventually become fluent in German, but he never managed to lose his thick Russian accent.) The big question at graduation, then, was whether he would be going to East or West Germany. The former, while unquestionably appealing because it was a foreign assignment, was not at all what Putin had been dreaming of for nearly twenty years by now: it would not be espionage work. For that, he would have to be assigned to West Germany.

WHAT ULTIMATELY happened fell just short of failure. Following a year at spy school, Putin would be going to Germany, but not to West Germany, and not even to Berlin: he was assigned to the industrial
city of Dresden. At the age of thirty-three, Putin, with Ludmila—who was once again pregnant—and one-year-old Maria, traveled to another backwater assignment. This was the job for which he had worked and waited for twenty years, and he would not even be undercover. The Putins, like five other Russian families, were given an apartment in a large apartment block in a little Stasi world: secret-police staff lived here, worked in a building a five-minute walk away, and sent their children to nursery school in the same compound. They walked home for lunch and spent evenings at home or visiting colleagues in the same building. Their job was to collect information about “the enemy,” which was the West, meaning West Germany and, especially, United States military bases in West Germany, which were hardly more accessible from Dresden than they would have been from Leningrad. Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.

Ludmila Putina liked Germany and the Germans. Compared with the Soviet Union, East Germany was a land of plenty. It was also a land of cleanliness and orderliness: she liked the way her German neighbors hung their identical-looking laundry on parallel clothes-lines at the same time every morning. Their neighbors, it seemed to her, lived better than the Putins were used to. So the Putins saved, buying nothing for their temporary apartment, hoping to go home with enough money to buy a car.

The Putins had a second daughter and named her Ekaterina. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds—a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all appearances, he was seriously depressed. His wife, who has described their early years together as harmonious and joyful, has pointedly refrained from saying anything about their family life after spy school. She has said only that her husband never talked to her about work.

Not that there was much to tell. The staff of the KGB outpost in Dresden were divided among various KGB directorates; Putin was assigned to Directorate S, the illegal intelligence-gathering unit (this was the KGB’s own terminology, denoting agents using assumed identities and falsified documents—as opposed to “legal intelligence gathering,” carried out by people who did not hide their affiliation with the Soviet state). This might have been his dream posting—except that it was in Dresden. The job Putin had once coveted, working to draft future undercover agents, turned out to be not only tedious but fruitless. Putin and his two colleagues from the illegal-intelligence unit, aided by a retired Dresden policeman who also drew a salary from the unit, tracked down foreign students enrolled at Dresden University of Technology—there were a number of students from Latin America who, the KGB hoped, would eventually be able to go undercover in the United States—and spent months gaining their confidence, often only to find that they did not have enough money to entice the young people to work for them.

Money was a source of constant worry, hurt, and envy. Soviet citizens viewed long-term foreign postings as an incomparable source of income, often enough to lay the foundation for a lifetime of good living back home. East Germany, however, was viewed as not quite foreign enough, by ordinary people as well as by Soviet authorities: salaries and perks there could hardly be compared with those in a “real” foreign land, which is to say, a capitalist country. Shortly before the Putins arrived in Dresden, the government finally authorized small monthly hard-currency payments (the equivalent of about a hundred dollars) as part of the salaries of Soviet citizens working in Socialist bloc countries. Still, KGB staff in Dresden had to scrimp and save to ensure that at the end of their posting they would have something to show for it. Over the years, certain conventions of frugality had set in—using newspapers instead of curtains to cover the windows, for example. But while all the Soviet agents lived in
the same sort of squalor, Stasi agents who had apartments in the same building enjoyed a much higher standard of living: they made a lot more money.

Still, it was in the West—so close and so unreachable for someone like Putin (some other Soviet citizens posted in Germany had the right to go to West Berlin)—that people had the things Putin really coveted. He made his wishes known to the very few Westerners with whom he came in contact—members of the radical group Red Army Faction, who took some of their orders from the KGB and occasionally came to Dresden for training sessions. “He always wanted to have things,” a former RAF member told me of Putin. “He mentioned to several people wishes that he wanted from the West.” This particular man claims to have personally presented Putin with a Grundig Satellit, a state-of-the-art shortwave radio, and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car; he bought the former and pilfered the latter from one of the many cars the RAF had stolen for its purposes. The West German radicals always came bearing gifts when they went east, the former radical told me, but there was a difference between the way Stasi agents received the goods and the way Putin approached it: “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 never even started asking, ‘What do I owe you?’”

Handing out assignments to RAF radicals, who were responsible for more than two dozen assassinations and terrorist attacks between 1970 and 1998, is exactly the sort of work Putin had once dreamed of, but there is no evidence he was directly connected to it. Instead, he spent most of his days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office). His day began with a morning staff meeting, continued with a meeting with his local agent, the retired police officer, and finished with writing: every agent had to give a complete accounting
of his activities, including Russian translations of any information he had obtained. Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. 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. Putin and his colleagues had high hopes for the sergeant, but by the time they obtained the manual, Putin’s time in Germany was coming to an end.

JUST WHEN THE PUTINS LEFT the Soviet Union, that country began to change drastically and irrevocably. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. Two years later, he had released all Soviet dissidents from prison and was beginning to loosen the reins on Soviet bloc countries. The KGB leadership as well as its rank and file perceived Gorbachev’s actions as disastrous. Over the next few years, a chasm would open up between the Party and the KGB, culminating with the failed coup in August 1991.

Watching the changes from afar, surrounded by other secret police officers—and no one else—Putin must have felt a hopeless, helpless fury. Back home, KGB leadership was pledging loyalty to the secretary general and his planned reforms. In June 1989, the head of the KGB in Leningrad issued a public statement condemning secret-police crimes committed under Stalin. In East Germany, as in the Soviet Union, people were beginning to come out into the streets to protest, and the unthinkable was quickly beginning to look probable: the two Germanys might be reunited—the land Vladimir Putin had been sent here to guard would just be handed over to the enemy. Everything Putin had worked for was now in doubt; everything he had believed was being mocked. This is the sort of insult that would have prompted the agile little boy and young man that Putin had been to jump the offender and pound him until his fury had subsided. Middle-aged, out-of-shape Putin sat idle and silent as his dreams and hopes for the future were destroyed.