The New Tsar (8 page)

The Dresden outpost oversaw the KGB’s work in four of East Germany’s southern districts, Dresden, Leipzig, Gera, and Karl Marx Stadt. Major Putin and his colleagues involved themselves in intelligence operations, counterintelligence, analysis, and another of the Center’s growing obsessions, scientific and technical espionage—all focused principally on the enemy across the border, not far away. He shared a second-floor office with Usoltsev, who called the space their cell and Little Volodya his cellmate. The room had two desks, a safe for classified papers, and two telephones, though with only one line. Little Volodya initially feared
answering the phone, embarrassed by his struggle with the German language, though he eventually improved to the point that he could adapt the Saxon dialect.
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As a student, he had grown to love German culture, history, and literature, and now he immersed himself in it. “He sometimes knew more than I did,” Horst Jehmlich, a senior aide to Böhm, Dresden’s Stasi chief, recalled. The Russian often asked Jehmlich to explain idiomatic expressions in German, always hoping to improve his linguistic ability.
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Usoltsev was intrigued by his new colleague, his sense of humor and humble roots. His grandfather’s brushes in the kitchen with the grandees of the October Revolution notwithstanding, Little Volodya had no “high” relatives who could have helped advance his career. He was the chief’s pet and became the office’s Communist Party representative, leading weekly discussions on political events, but he did so with what Usoltsev perceived to be feigned, even ironic piety. He enjoyed middlebrow variety shows on German television and yet also read the classics prodigiously, favoring Russian satirists, like Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who savaged the stifling and corrupt tsarist bureaucracy of the ninteenth century.
Dead Souls
, Gogol’s masterwork skewering provincial venality and supplication, became a favorite novel. He joked irreverently about the loathsome traits of counterintelligence agents, which he had been, at least for a time. And he mocked Matveyev’s anti-Semitism, which was pervasive in the KGB, though he never did so to the chief’s face.

Little Volodya, Usoltsev thought, had a remarkable ability to adapt his personality to the situation and to his superiors, charming them and winning their confidence; it was a defining trait that others would notice. In their ample hours for discussion—often in the mansion’s basement banya—Volodya would reveal glimpses of individuality and even perilous free thinking. On November 9, 1985, they watched the Soviet broadcast of the dramatic finale of the world chess championship between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, which was seen as an ideological clash between the old and new guards. Almost all of the KGB cadre rooted for Karpov, the reigning champion and lauded hero of the Soviet Union. They thought that Kasparov, who was excoriated in the official press as the match unfolded, was an “extremely impudent upstart.” Little Volodya, on the other hand, showed “dangerous sympathy” for Kasparov. He relished his ultimate victory and was not afraid to say so.

What intrigued Usoltsev most of all was his colleague’s professed belief in God. In the KGB, it was “an inconceivable thing,” and Usoltsev, truly a godless Communist, marveled at his willingness to acknowledge any faith whatsoever, though the young major was careful never to flaunt it. He was so discreet, in fact, that Usoltsev was never completely sure that he was not using God as just another intelligence tactic.
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M
ajor Putin settled into life in Germany rather comfortably. For the first time in his adult life, he stopped practicing judo and gave up exercising regularly. Though never much of a drinker, he acquired a taste for beer, particularly Radeberger Pilsner, made in a small town near Dresden. He befriended a barkeep who would regularly fill his ration—a small keg—and he quickly added twenty-five pounds to his slight frame. Almost immediately after she arrived, Lyudmila became pregnant again, and their second daughter, Yekaterina, or Katya, was born on August 31, 1986. Usoltsev sensed that he was “slightly discouraged” that they did not have a son.

As a husband and father, he proved to be something of a chauvinist. He refused to help with shopping, cooking, or anything else to do with housekeeping, believing in a traditional division of marital roles. During a brief hospitalization when Lyudmila was pregnant in Dresden, he had been left alone for three days with Masha, and was nearly overwhelmed by the effort. He was “the provider and defender,” as Lyudmila put it, and she had to handle the rest. He was such a picky eater, refusing to touch dishes he did not like, that she lost patience cooking for him. When she complained, he quoted a Russian aphorism: “Don’t praise a woman, or else you’ll spoil her.” He never celebrated their wedding anniversaries.
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The demands on Major Putin at the office were not so onerous that they spoiled the couple’s weekends. The Putins, with a Soviet-made Zhiguli at their disposal, spent many traveling with their Russian neighbors—all security agents and their spouses. He joined a fishing club and with Lyudmila visited the forests and parks of Saxony. At least twice they visited Czechoslovakia, another Soviet satellite, once with Colonel Matveyev and his wife, Yevgenia. The Putins bought a stereo from the West and later an early Atari video game. They never traveled to West Germany, though, and while they regularly hosted Russian and German friends in their apartment, their social life included only those within a
narrow circle of German and Soviet intelligence agents. They became close to a couple, the Burkhards, who had a disabled child. When the couple later divorced, according to Horst Jehmlich, Major Putin helped the wife find work in Berlin. Compared to the people they knew back in the Soviet Union, the Putins lived a life of privilege and comfort, but one that was circumscribed. The wives were discouraged from making friends outside their immediate circle, which created an insular community that frayed nerves and fueled gossip and petty feuds. Their years in Dresden became “measured, settled, ordinary and monotonous.”
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Life became uneventful and, for Lyudmila, claustrophobic. Her husband never talked about his work at home, even though it loomed over everything. More than once he cautioned Lyudmila to avoid “undesirable” acquaintances she met. Even among the brotherly Germans, no one could really be trusted. Their real identities and intentions might not become evident for years, as the Putins would later find out when it was alleged that the West German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, had infiltrated the mansion on Angelikastrasse with a buxom agent who served as an interpreter. Her figure inspired her code name, BALCONY, and she was said to have befriended the Putins, and Lyudmila in particular. Lyudmila confided in her that theirs was a stormy marriage, that Vladimir was abusive and a serial womanizer.
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Whether the interpreter was a spy was impossible to prove; it might have simply been part of the disinformation war between rival intelligence agencies. In the craft of espionage, truth was never really the point.

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T
he KGB’s objective in East Germany was to gather intelligence and recruit agents who had access to the West. Major Putin’s part in this mission was routine, even tedious. The East Germans seconded two officers to the KGB’s office, and together they scoured the applications of those hoping to travel to West Germany. The goal was to determine who among them had relatives near the American and NATO military bases in Bad Tölz, Wildflecken, and Celle and to see whether, in exchange for a visa, they would collaborate with the KGB by reporting back anything unusual they might see. In 1986, the KGB’s leaders remained fixated on the risk posed by NATO, even as changes being introduced by a charismatic new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, promised a de-escalation of Cold War tensions. Their orders in particular focused on an obsession with the location of the Green Berets in Germany, which Usoltsev
thought ridiculous. The dull culling of lists for potential recruits was the Dresden office’s “first task,” he said, but eventually they abandoned it as a waste of time.
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Major Putin appeared in uniform on some days and in civilian clothes on others, depending on his tasks. He handled informants that he or others recruited in hopes of gathering information about economic, political, or military developments in the West and also within East Germany. The agents were the real spies, hiding their identities and activities and living in fear of betrayal; he was an administrator. He tracked businessmen or other foreigners passing through and paid particular attention to the city’s only Russian Orthodox Church, Saint Simeon of the Wonderful Mountains, compiling a dossier on its cleric, Archpriest Grigory Davidov, and its small flock of believers.
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Horst Jehmlich, the aide to Dresden’s Stasi chief, Horst Böhm, recalled that Putin focused his recruiting efforts on students “who might become important in their home country one day,” rising through the ranks of industry or government. That was how the KGB recruited Philby and the others at Cambridge to stunningly damaging effect, but Putin’s success, as far as anyone ever knew, paled by comparison. People had once aided the Soviet Union out of ideological conviction, but now most betrayed their nations for money, as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were then doing in the United States. What else did the Soviet Union at that point have to offer?

For each potential recruit, Major Putin would prepare paperwork and submit it to Böhm’s office for approval. “We had to guarantee that the people who were registered by our friends would not also be contacted by us,” Jehmlich explained. Even then, he said, the Stasi did not know everything the KGB did. The Dresden outpost also analyzed political developments and party leaders in West Germany and East Germany, searching for signs of opposition to Soviet policies that under Gorbachev were experiencing profound change. Operation LUCH, the long-running KGB effort to monitor the East Germans, continued to feed the Center with reports on their “dear friends,” even in the Stasi.

In 1987, Major Putin was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made one of Matveyev’s assistants, then ultimately his senior assistant. He effectively became the deputy chief of the Dresden outpost. His administrative duties grew with his promotions, but they also took him further from the active work of the real agents and spies. He was, as in Leningrad, an enforcer, the equivalent of an internal affairs officer, ever vigilant
for enemies inside as well as outside. A neighbor on Angelikastrasse, Siegfried Dannath, was once walking his dog when he stopped in front of the KGB office to engage in small talk with one of Putin’s colleagues. When Dannath’s wife photographed the men together with the mansion in the background, a Russian guard barked in alarm. He scolded the Russian and Germans alike, shouting that photography was strictly forbidden. Dannath quickly forgot about the encounter, but Lieutenant Colonel Putin sent a letter to the Stasi, requesting that the Dannaths be put under heightened surveillance as a precaution.
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In his official capacity, Putin had occasion to meet the East German leadership in Dresden, including Horst Böhm and Hans Modrow, the Communist Party secretary for the city, but his rank and position remained too low for familiarity. His duties included such mundane matters as seeing whether three visiting KGB officials could stay at a hotel at no cost (Moscow was evidently short on funds) or arranging free tickets for Soviet soldiers to watch a soccer match between Dresden’s team and Spartak Moscow. His only known correspondence with Böhm was a letter requesting help restoring telephone service for an informant inside East Germany’s wholesale trade enterprise. Putin seemed destined to remain an unprepossessing figure in the background.
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I
n 1987, the Stasi chief, Erich Mielke, signed a decree awarding Lieutenant Colonel Putin a gold medal on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That night, November 7, he and twelve other KGB officers joined their Stasi colleagues in the ballroom at the headquarters on Bautznerstrasse—the same building housing the prison—to listen to a speech by Horst Böhm. Böhm was a notorious hardliner, and his tone was deliberate, somber, and terrifying in its ideological certainty. The Soviet leader might be seeking a less adversarial relationship with the West, but Böhm warned that night that the intelligence agencies of the enemies of socialism had not relented at all. “The imperialist secret services have stepped up their activities to obtain any information that is or might be significant for further action” against East Germany and the other socialist nations, he thundered. And yet a month later Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington to eliminate some of the most dangerous weapons in Europe.

The Cold War was not over, but its thaw was foreseeable—just not to East Germany’s leaders. They became ferocious critics of Gorbachev’s
perestroika and glasnost, their denunciations filling the KGB reports cabled back to the Center. The assuredness of its leaders’ belief in East Germany’s unshakable future never faltered until it was too late. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet Union was falling behind the West—economically, scientifically, and militarily—and falling apart. Gorbachev’s first moves toward reforming the Soviet economic system, though endorsed by a newly “reformist” KGB leadership, began to expose dangerous fractures in the immovable state, and within the KGB itself. While his calls to modernize industrial and agricultural production had little immediate impact on the KGB’s power or perquisites, his policy of perestroika, announced at the 27th Party Congress in 1986, promised initiative and creativity in government and tolerated criticism. It was the beginning of the end of the rigid orthodoxy of the Brezhnev years.