Putin continues to deny having worked in the Fifth or having any dissident ideas, fancy or otherwise. Confiscated dissident literature, samizdat, no doubt circulated among KGB agents, sexy and forbidden as an errant issue of Playboy.
What’s the truth? There was a brief period in the early nineties when Russia was on a spree of liberty and the KGB archives were opened up to scholars and antiseptic sunlight. That didn’t last long, and it’s a safe bet that nothing of the sort will be coming along again any time soon. Given that, probably the truest thing that can be said is that it doesn’t matter greatly if Putin worked in the Fifth or merely collaborated with it from time to time or had in fact nothing to do with it. Though literature and life had already lent him a certain light ironic attitude, he was still defined by the virtue he valued most: loyalty. He was loyal to the KGB and its chief, Andropov. No matter what private sentiments he harbored, Putin would not have deviated an iota from KGB policy. He would have supported Sakharov’s exile, the use of psychiatric incarceration as punishment, and even Andropov’s ban on any public mourning for John Lennon in 1980. He was a company man.
And for that very reason he had to be proud and amazed when in November 1982 his boss became the boss of the whole Soviet Union. Andropov took the helm at a dark time. The invasion of Afghanistan had led to a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. A civilian airliner, Korean KAL 007, was shot down after having strayed over Soviet territory, a U.S. congressman among the 269 victims. Reagan branded the USSR the “evil empire” and called for implementation of “Star Wars,” a missile defense program that might have had little chance of success but which could bankrupt the Soviets if they tried to match it. Andropov began purging corrupt officials, which gave public morale a bit of a boost, but he mostly seemed interested in nabbing malingerers in bath houses and movie theaters, acting more like a truant officer than a tyrant enlightened with good intel.
Later it would emerge that Andropov was, like Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the security services, a bit of a poet. It could even be said that he created something of a unique literary genre—the brevity of life as mourned by one of its abbreviators:
There was even some poetic justice in Andropov’s death after less than fifteen months in power. Dying of renal failure, he was like the Soviet system, which could not purge itself of the poisons it secreted. The hagiography machine went into immediate operation after Andropov’s death. He was lent a cloying tragic aura and became the Saint Who Had Not Had Time to Complete His Mission on Earth. Someone else would have to do it.
Though whether or not Putin spent any time in the Fifth Directorate suppressing dissent must remain conjecture, there is no question that he was viewed within the KGB as an intelligence agent who should be trained for the plummiest of assignments, service abroad.
And thus it was that in the Orwellian year of 1984 Major Vladimir Putin, now a married man, traveled again to Moscow, this time to spend a year at the Red Banner Institute, which had just been renamed the Andropov Red Banner Institute. This was the highest and most elite school, accepting only three hundred pupils a year and of such state significance that to even reveal its address was considered treasonous.
One of the odder side effects of Gorbachev’s glasnost and the greedy turbulence of the Yeltsin nineties was that many top KGB officers rushed to cash in by writing tell-all books about their clandestine careers. Remarkably, most of them proved closet liberals just waiting for the chance to breathe free. Since these were top KGB officials, including one general, Oleg Kalugin, they all had studied at the Red Banner Institute. For that reason, we have a pretty fair idea of Putin’s experience there after arriving in July 1984. The course was spartan and severe, with reveille at 6:45 a.m. and lights-out at 11:00 p.m. Classes were held six days a week, with students able to leave the institute grounds only between 3 p.m. on Saturday and 9 a.m. on Monday. Putin’s wife would come to Moscow to visit him once a month, and he got back to Leningrad a couple of times during the year. Though a married man, a major in the KGB, and a student at the highest intelligence school, Putin had not lost any of his street-brawler ways. During one trip home, pestered by a punk in the Leningrad metro, he socked him so hard he broke his own arm. Putin was very worried, telling his friend Roldugin: “They’re not going to understand this in Moscow. I’m afraid there are going to be consequences.”[81]
But there weren’t any consequences for Comrade Putin, or Comrade Platov, as he was known in the school, where everyone’s name was changed. In addition to studying German, he took a class in the structure of the KGB, which was labyrinthine. It consisted of nine chief directorates. The First Chief Directorate, dealing with foreign intelligence, was the one everyone wanted to work in and the one for which Putin was being groomed. That First Chief Directorate had four directorates of its own: “S” (illegal intelligence), “T” (scientific and technical intelligence), “K” (foreign counterintelligence), and “RT” (intelligence work carried out among foreigners on Soviet territory). But that was just the beginning. There were also two services, one for processing information received, the other for processing disinformation. These services were further subdivided principally by geography and importance into sixteen departments (actually fifteen, since the Thirteenth Department, perhaps out of superstition, did not exist). The United States and Canada were Department 1.
The lectures on U.S. and British intelligence were the most riveting because this was the enemy you had to know before you could go up against him. There was some time for the firing range and martial arts during the daily exercise hour. Some recruits would spend time with a Soviet parachute division learning how to jump from planes, hand-to-hand combat, survival in the wilderness. One officer reports shooting a grand total of three cartridges during his training, and for many even that was a waste of time. Of course tradecraft—brush contact, dead drops, eluding surveillance, and the use of espionage high tech—was essential, but in the end espionage was a mind game. It was the art of seducing someone into betrayal.
The person in charge of training and evaluating Putin was Colonel Mikhail Frolov. “I taught the art of intelligence. What does intelligence mean? It’s the ability to come into contact with people, the ability to select the people you need, the ability to raise the questions that are of interest to our country and our leaders, the ability to be a psychologist, if you will.”[82] Putin himself would later, in conversation with a friend, describe himself as a “specialist in human relations.”[83]
Putin had won Colonel Frolov’s interest and respect by appearing at a lecture in a three-piece suit on a ninety-degree day when even Frolov was wearing short sleeves. Frolov pointed him out as an example to the others: “Look at Comrade Platov, now!”[84]
On the basis of that and other incidents Frolov “decided to try him out in the role of division leader. At the Red Banner Institute, division leader was not just some sort of illustrious title. A lot depends on the division leader. You need organizational abilities, a certain degree of tact, and a businesslike manner. Putin had all of that.”[85]