The New Tsar (5 page)

By the time Vladimir joined, the KGB had grown into a vast bureaucracy that oversaw not only domestic and foreign intelligence matters, but also counterintelligence at home and abroad, military counterintelligence, enforcement of the border and customs, and physical protection of the political leadership and government facilities like the country’s nuclear sites. There were directorates that oversaw communications and cryptography, and that monitored telephone calls. The Sixth Directorate monitored “economic security” by policing speculation, currency exchanges, and other signs of deviant free-market activity. The
Fifth Chief Directorate, created in 1969 to “protect” the Constitution, enforced party loyalty and harassed dissidents in all walks of life. The KGB was more than just a security agency; it was a state within the state, ever in search of enemies within and without. It ostensibly served the interests of the Communist Party—and acted on its orders—but its vast powers also served as a check on the party’s power.
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Vladimir went to work at the Secretariat of the Directorate, the personnel office of the KGB’s Leningrad headquarters, housed in the same building on Liteiny Prospekt that he had visited as a teenager. Only now he was no Johann Weiss infiltrating the ranks of a foreign power. It was a time of relative peace, and the Soviet Union at the time was at war only with itself. He was a junior bureaucrat, twenty-three years old, pushing papers at work and still living at home with his parents without a room of his own. His was a drab office, populated by balding veterans of Stalin’s times who were old enough to remember the Gulag, if not the Terror of 1937. The young agent claimed to question the old ways, but he never rebelled against the KGB, certainly not in a way that would undermine his budding career by, as the saying went, “sticking out his ears.”
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After his initiation at a desk, he attended officer training at School No. 401 in Leningrad, one of the KGB’s regional training academies. Located inside a heavily guarded, six-story building near where the Okhta River meets the Neva, the school was “a kind of submarine” where cadets immersed themselves in classroom studies and physical training, cut off from the rest of society.
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For six months, he learned basic intelligence tactics, including interrogation techniques. The KGB’s ranks had swollen under Yuri Andropov, who served as its chairman from 1967 until 1982, when he became the paramount leader of the Soviet Union. Andropov became one of Vladimir’s heroes, a distant and yet revered leader. Andropov understood the limits of the Soviet system and sought to modernize it so it could catch up to the West, especially in economic affairs. The KGB sought out recruits who understood macroeconomics, trade, and international relations. Vladimir seems to have anticipated this with his studies at Leningrad State University, where he wrote a thesis on the principle of most-favored-nation status in international trade.
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Andropov wanted to turn the KGB into an elite cadre, and Vladimir was a believer. He represented a new generation in the KGB, the post-Stalin generation of recruits who were thought to be less ideological, too young to remember the horrors of Stalin’s regime.

Andropov was viewed, within the Soviet context, as a reformer, despite
his involvement in repression at home and abroad. He had been the Soviet ambassador to Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and was haunted for the rest of his life by the swift violence that could erupt and threaten one-party rule. He “watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts.”
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This “Hungarian complex” shaped Andropov’s belief that only force, wisely administered, could ensure the survival of the Soviet state and empire. Thus while Andropov might have wanted to modernize the Soviet system, he ruthlessly punished dissent against it. It was he who created the notorious Fifth Chief Directorate to combat ideological opposition, which led to the persecution of the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was he who, in 1969, created a network of psychiatric hospitals to persecute dissidents by classifying opposition to the state as evidence of mental illness.

Vladimir, blinkered by official propaganda or by indifference, rationalized and romanticized the KGB’s work. He believed the intelligence officer was the defender of law and order. In the summer of 1976, he emerged from the KGB’s academy as a first lieutenant. He did not return to the personnel department, but rather to the counterintelligence department, the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. He took part in operations not against the enemy outside, but against the enemy within. He became an apparatchik who sought, above all, to maintain social order and political control, though very little was known about his activities at the time. His friends, and even his colleagues, could never be sure exactly what he did, and he went to great lengths for many years to keep the details of his work secret. An officer who worked with him later stated as a matter of fact that he worked for the Fifth Chief Directorate, but no one could be certain.
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Although Vladimir would deny it, his colleague believed he was intimately familiar with the tactics the KGB employed against critics of Soviet power, including Solzhenitsyn and, later, Sakharov. Certainly, one of his closest friends in Leningrad, Viktor Cherkesov, became notorious for his work in the Fifth Chief Directorate against dissidents, including religious believers.
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And he felt no remorse or reservation about the KGB’s reliance on informants or collaborators. Although they sowed distrust throughout Soviet society, he believed that collusion with a feared police state not only was not wrong, but rather was essential to maintaining order. Ninety percent of the KGB’s intelligence, he once claimed, derived from ordinary Soviet citizens willingly or otherwise informing
on others, their coworkers, their friends, their relatives. “You cannot do anything without secret agents,” he said.
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Vladimir, evidently, collected and controlled agents during his stint in counterintelligence in Leningrad, especially businessmen, journalists, and athletes who had traveled abroad or met with visiting foreigners. Though his activities remain shrouded in secrecy even now, he had become something closer to the “cop” his coach had warned he would become if he went to law school. He lived a double life, but a far less dramatic and dangerous one than that of
The Shield and the Sword
. It was among this cadre that he forged friendships with men who worked with him in the shadows and would do so for years to come: Viktor Cherkesov, Aleksandr Bortnikov, Viktor Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov, and Nikolai Patrushev. In this close, closed circle of friends—all men—he found camaraderie among like-minded officers who reinforced what would become a stark, black-and-white view of the world.

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A
fter six months in counterintelligence, Vladimir transferred to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for intelligence operations beyond the Soviet Union’s borders. It was considered the KGB’s elite branch. Of nearly three hundred thousand employees of the security apparatus, fewer than five thousand served in the department.
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His study of German no doubt helped him land the post, and the KGB enabled him to continue to study two hours a day, three times a week.
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Still, he did not become a spy, and he did not go abroad. He remained in the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt, responsible for shadowing foreign visitors and diplomats stationed in the city’s consulates. Much of the work was analytical, and it was hardly demanding. As the Soviet Union’s second city, Leningrad was not exactly a backwater posting, but it lacked the cloak-and-dagger intrigues that swirled around the capital, Moscow. The KGB itself had begun to succumb to bloat and sclerosis, its swelling ranks resulting in a reduction of efficiency. For many agents, the youthful enthusiasm for the world of espionage inevitably succumbed to tedium and bureaucratic inertia. “It’s only in fiction that a lone man can take on the whole world,” a contemporary, Yuri Shvets, wrote of the era.
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Vladimir seemed content to toil in the lower ranks. Though described by one of his superiors as meticulous in his work,
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he displayed no driving ambition to climb through the organization. In 1977, his father
retired from the train factory and, as a disabled war veteran, received a small two-bedroom apartment—not even three hundred square feet—on Stachek Prospekt in Avtovo, a newly reconstructed district south of Leningrad’s historic district. The city’s postwar housing crunch was such that many families still lived in communal housing—even officers of the KGB did not automatically qualify for an apartment—and yet now, at twenty-five, for the first time in his life, Vladimir had his own bedroom, his own “little corner,” as Vera Gurevich called it.

With abundant free time, he careered around the city in the car his mother had given him and, according to his friends, continued to involve himself in street fights, despite the risk such indiscretions could cause his career. He was indifferent to risk and danger—he proudly recounted a poor performance evaluation that said as much—in part because his KGB service provided him some protection from the ordinary police. He bent the rules because he could. One Easter he took Sergei Roldugin, a classical musician who became a close friend, to a religious procession that he had been assigned to monitor, policing the faithful, people like his own mother. He impressed his friend by taking him to see the altar of the church, access to which was prohibited to laymen, suggesting that Putin had little reverence for the sanctity of the church. “Nobody can go there, but we can,” he told his friend. He was reckless and temperamental. On the way home from their church tour, as Roldugin recalled, a cluster of drunken students at a bus stop accosted them for a cigarette. Vladimir, clearly an unintimidating presence, rebuffed them so rudely that one shoved him. Putin threw him over his shoulder as if it were a match in the judo club.
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He told his friends he was a police officer with the Interior Ministry, and many, it seems, believed it. Soon, though, it became harder to disguise his actual position. Roldugin, who met him in 1977, quickly discerned the truth. It made him wary. As a musician, he had traveled abroad on visits monitored by KGB operatives barely disguised as officials of the Ministry of Culture. Roldugin disliked these ideological minders and learned not to speak freely around them. And yet here he was, becoming friends with one of them. Vladimir disarmed him finally by admitting his true profession, though even then Roldugin found it impossible to draw him out further. “I play the cello,” he once told his friend. “I could never be a surgeon—still, I’m a good cellist. But what is your profession? I know you’re an intelligence officer. I don’t know what
that means.” Vladimir humored him, but only a little. “I’m a specialist in human relations,” he said cryptically, and then refused to talk about it anymore.
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By 1979, Vladimir reached the rank of captain and was, at last, sent to Moscow to attend the KGB’s Higher School, which was named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. Dzerzhinsky remained a revered cult figure in the KGB, whose training manuals quoted his description of the intelligence officer’s essential characteristics: “a warm heart, a cool head, and clean hands.”
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At last, the First Chief Directorate seemed to be grooming him for service abroad. And yet, after a short course, he again returned to Leningrad and resumed the task of monitoring foreigners—with uncertain success. One supervisor described his work as “extremely productive,” but the senior KGB official in Leningrad during his career, Oleg Kalugin, said that the agency failed to uncover a single foreign spy on the loose in the city.
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His career seemed to stall just as the Soviet Union’s relative period of peace and détente began to face increasing turmoil at home and beyond—in retrospect, the first signs of the decay and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan after a bloody coup orchestrated by Andropov’s KGB and carried out by the military’s elite commandos wearing Afghan uniforms. The invasion began a futile operation to support the Communist government in Kabul that would cost the lives of thousands of soldiers, whose bodies were brought home in zinc boxes known by the code name CARGO 200 and kept shrouded in secrecy.

The election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in November 1980 further inflamed Cold War tensions and pushed the two superpowers ever closer to confrontation. The Kremlin and the KGB soon became obsessed with what Soviet leaders believed to be Reagan’s plans to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. At a conference in May 1981, an already ailing Leonid Brezhnev denounced Reagan as a threat to world peace, while Andropov announced that henceforth the ultimate priority of the security services was to uncover evidence of Reagan’s plan to destroy the country.
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This vast operation—code-named RYAN, after the Russian for “nuclear missile attack,”
raketno-yadernoye napadenie
—became the principal intelligence effort of KGB bureaus around the world and remained a paranoid obsession for the rest of the decade. Soon Vladimir Putin would play his part in it.