Putin worked out of a two-story building at 4 Angelikastrasse directly across the street from Stasi headquarters. The KGB and the Stasi worked very closely together, too closely sometimes for the young, ambitious General Horst Böhm, head of the Dresden Stasi, who jockeyed for more leeway from their ally and conqueror, who had full rights to act as they would in the USSR with the one exception of not being able to arrest East German citizens. General Böhm would become especially incensed when KGB officers like Putin would poach ex-Stasi who were still being used by the Stasi.
Putin, for his part, was a bit shocked by East Germany, which he called “a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier.”[98]
Simon Wiesenthal, renowned Nazi hunter, said that when it came to their own citizens, the Stasi were “worse than the Gestapo.”[99] The entire society was infested with agents and informers. According to very rough estimates, the USSR had 1 agent per 6,000 people, the Gestapo, 1 per 2,000, and the Stasi 1 per 166, which, if informers and part-time informers were included, came to something like 1 per 6.5, meaning it was statistically impossible to have a dinner party without at least one person being an informer.[100]
Wiesenthal goes on to say of the Stasi: “They not only terrorized their own people worse than the Gestapo, but the government was the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel of the entire Eastern Bloc. They did nothing to help the West in tracking down Nazi criminals, they ignored all requests from West German judicial authorities for assistance. We have just discovered shelves of files on Nazis stretching over four miles. Now we also know how the Stasi used those files. They blackmailed Nazi criminals who fled abroad after the war into spying for them.”[101]
Unlike in Leningrad, where he may have been involved in suppressing dissent in addition to counterintelligence, there is little question what Putin’s assignment was in Dresden. He was in Directorate S, illegal intelligence, which, among its many tasks, prepared agents to penetrate the enemy with forged documents. According to Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, author of Inside the KGB, who worked in Directorate S himself, an illegal was “a Soviet citizen, a KGB officer holding military rank, who has undergone special training and who has been documented as a citizen of a foreign country.” By contrast an illegal agent “can either be a Soviet citizen or a foreigner. He is not a KGB officer, he does not hold illegal rank, and has been brought into intelligence to do a onetime operation.”[102] Illegals could remain undercover for decades.
One of Putin’s tasks was to find and screen candidates to be illegal agents, knowing it unlikely that many of them would qualify. Putin describes his work in the bland and general terms designed to reveal nothing: “The work was political intelligence—obtaining information about political figures and the plans of the potential opponent…. We were interested in any information about the ‘main opponent, NATO.’ … So recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job. It was very routine work.”[103]
Though Putin himself put a bland gloss on it, he was working in the part of foreign intelligence, Directorate S, that was the place where there might be a touch of action and danger, the only place that was even remotely Bondish, as one of Putin’s colleagues would put it.
Directorate S had a special status both because of the successes it could achieve and the dangers it posed to Soviet foreign policy. As Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhnin write in The Sword and the Shield: “The records of Directorate S revealed some remarkable individual achievements. KGB illegals successfully established bogus identities as foreign nationals in a great variety of professions ranging from Costa Rican ambassador to piano tuner to the governor of New York.”[104]
But it was a high-risk game Putin was playing. KGB major Kuzichkin writes of the difference between espionage performed by members of the diplomatic staff and that carried out by illegals using forged passports of the host nation. The former have diplomatic immunity, whereas “if a KGB mission abroad should misfire and a political scandal ensue, intelligence officers can expect no mercy from the Politburo…. At best, a culprit may be thrown out of the KGB without a pension. At worst, criminal proceedings may be instituted against him.”[105]
Though Putin was adept at covering his own tracks and though most of the Dresden KGB’s records were burned in the final days of East Germany, a bit is known about one major operation in which Putin was involved. If NATO was the “main enemy,” the “main worry” was a Sudden Nuclear Missile Attack (SNMA) that would begin with Green Berets operating behind Soviet lines to thwart a Soviet response. It turns out that this at least was hardly extravagant Soviet paranoia. A May 2, 2015, New York Times article, “A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered,” on the retirement of Michael G. Vickers, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, states: “During the Cold War, Mr. Vickers was a member of the Green Berets assigned to infiltrate Warsaw Pact borders should World War III break out. His mission: Detonate a portable nuclear bomb to blunt an attack by the overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks.”[106]
There were three Green Beret bases in West Germany, and it was the ambition of Directorate S to penetrate those bases. Putin was involved in searching through “mountains” of invitations from Dresdeners to relatives in West Germany to find any to people who lived near those bases. In any case, it all came to naught, not a single nibble worth mentioning. But success was always rare in any such operation. As one of Putin’s coworkers put it, to recruit a single Western agent was success enough for a career.
One agent Putin ran did not turn out too well. Klaus Zuchold was a Stasi officer recruited by Putin over a five-year period, only formally joining the KGB after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when KGB penetration of Germany became more important than ever. Just after the two Germanys were reunited, Zuchold, fearing exposure, surrendered himself to German intelligence, revealing that he had been run by Putin, who was also personally running a senior police inspector in Dresden.
Zuchold had immediately been charmed by Putin’s jokes about police, Jews, and the crude Russian soldiers who stole vegetables from Zuchold’s garden. “Putin is a man of few words. He is impenetrable and he mostly lets other people speak. He gives away very little but is clearly very driven and determined to get what he wants: friendly and seemingly very open, luring people into opening up but always in control. Whenever we drank together he always made sure he was at least three glasses behind everyone else.”[107]
False modesty and professional ambiguity aside, Putin’s downplaying of his work was also quite sincere. The KGB was increasingly becoming an organization that processed paperwork. One agent quipped that Soviet intelligence runs on paperwork alone and [its] “main advantage … resides in its newly acquired ability to exist without undercover agents.”[108] And, as one of Putin’s own colleagues put it: “Our work was seventy percent paperwork and sometimes was unbearably boring.”[109]
106
Thom Shanker, “A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered,”
107
Mark Franchetti, “Agent Reveals Young Putin’s Spy Disaster,”