Putin is only intermittently visible in the ten years between entering the KGB and surfacing in Dresden, East Germany, in 1985. Odd had it been otherwise. He was now a soldier on the “invisible front.” As his friend noticed, this offered the secret satisfactions of knowing what others did not know and being able to do what others could not. He was being initiated into a secret elite. Part of that initiation was a new relationship to oneself that relieved him of the need to be sincere. The difference between the inner and the outer man, which might be called hypocrisy in a common Soviet citizen, was, in the case of a KGB officer, an operational necessity. In KGB training there is also an element of self-mastery that would have been familiar to Putin from martial arts, except that now it was used to manipulate others. Upon entering any training facility an agent would be given a new last name, to break his conditioned response to his own name, to free up his relationship to his own identity, the easier to slip into aliases and disguises.
Another force would begin shaping any new recruit, imperceptibly but implacably. Paranoia was both the strong suit and an occupational hazard of the KGB. Their task was to be suspicious. History had clearly demonstrated that it was always better to err on the side of excess suspicion. The KGB would agree with the Sicilian proverb that says To trust is good, not to trust is better.
But the trouble with paranoia is that it cannot set limits on itself, and so grotesqueries are committed. For example, when the Soviets wanted to transfer submarines from their southern bases to those in the north, they would not send them out by the short and easy route through the Black Sea, then to the Mediterranean and out to the Atlantic, from where they would pass over Scandinavia to Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. That route would expose the submarines to the spying eyes of NATO. To avoid that unacceptable risk, the subs were placed on floating dry docks, covered with tarps, and hauled on a fifty-one-day journey through the country’s internal river system as detailed in the book Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War: “Only the nineteenth century Mariinsky Canals presented a true problem. Too shallow and too old, they often required the crew to pull the dock along and at the locks old women and pack animals pitched in to force the old controls to do their job.”[64]
Old women! Pack animals!
But there was nothing new in any of that—a Frenchman who served in the tsar’s armies in the late 1500s said of Russia: “This is the most distrustful and suspicious nation in the world.”[65]
After some on-the-job training in counterintelligence, Putin received his first schooling between February and July 1976 in KGB School 401 in the Okhta region of Leningrad, a school he calls in “no way distinguished,”[66] which is either an accurate characterization or a way of deflecting attention from the subject.
His training there was no doubt largely operational—tradecraft, surveillance and avoiding surveillance, the art of recruitment. One danger KGB agents faced was that the sources they were developing were in fact working for the other side, “dangles” as they were called. For that reason it was recommended that a KGB officer meet with a potential source at least seven times before beginning to work with him, the “first stage of operational development.”[67]
KGB School 401 may also have had something of the boot camp about it. In a description of another such school Major Yuri Shvets, author of Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, observes: “We parachuted from planes, mastered a variety of weapons, learned to plant mines, negotiated a napalm-drenched obstacle course, captured ‘prisoners’ for interrogation, ‘blew up’ bridges, and ‘destroyed’ enemy supply lines.”[68]
Putin had entered the KGB just as it was undergoing a fundamental change in course in part influenced by, of all things, an American movie, if one is to believe the post-Soviet station chief for foreign intelligence in New York City, Sergei Tretyakov, who writes that the 1975 Robert Redford film Three Days of the Condor “convinced the KGB generals that the CIA was spending more money and putting more effort into analytic work than the KGB was,”[69] and on that basis a shift of emphasis occurred between the operational and the analytical.
Though the KGB was undergoing certain changes in the mid-seventies, the organization bore the clear impress of its leader, Yuri Andropov, who would not only be Putin’s commander in chief but his hero and role model as well. Andropov was the only person before Putin to pass from being chief of the security services to head of state. When Andropov took the helm of the USSR in 1982, the choice was even welcomed by a portion of the dissident intelligentsia who, along with Andrei Sakharov, believed that the KGB was “the least corrupt institution in the country.”[70] Moreover, it was assumed that the KGB possessed the best information and therefore had to realize that the country was in critical need of reform.
Andropov had been traumatized by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, which he, as Soviet ambassador, would treacherously and viciously suppress. But first, as historian Christopher Andrew put it, “he had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple.”[71]
But Andropov would not be given long to show what course he would set for the Soviet ship of state. In fact, his initial actions—raiding movie theaters for people shirking work, enforcing labor discipline—betrayed a petty, fussy cast of mind, not the broad horizons of a reformer. He had served a little more than a year when he suffered renal failure that first debilitated him, then took his life. It is the great paradox of Andropov’s life that his kidney problems had caused him to travel to the south of Russia to take the waters. On his sojourns there he became friendly with the local party boss, who in time became his protégé and whom Andropov introduced to the highest political circles in Moscow. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.
Putin joined Andropov’s KGB in 1975 as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft linked up in space. It was the height of the euphoria of détente, a policy of rapprochement and the relaxing of tensions that Nixon and Brezhnev had launched in the early seventies. Like the “reset” under Putin, détente would end in suspicion, recrimination, and invasion—that of Afghanistan in late 1979.
Not that the KGB itself ever took détente all that seriously. In fact, during Putin’s first year at work in the Leningrad KGB, it was involved in a complex, risky, and ultimately highly successful operation directed against the American consulate in Leningrad. “Beginning in 1976, the KGB successfully installed sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment and burst transmitters inside 16 IBM Selectric typewriters used by the staffs of the Moscow embassy and Leningrad consulate, which copied everything being typed on the machines, then periodically broadcast their take to KGB engineers manning listening posts just outside…. In the end, the NSA concluded that the Soviet eavesdropping operation had most likely compromised every document typed on these 16 electric typewriters over a period of eight years from 1976 to 1984.”[72]
Putin at this time was a low-level operative, fresh from law school with a quick six months’ training behind him. But he was working in the field of counterintelligence. On both sides, it was assumed that certain embassy, consulate, and mission personnel were spies, but the question always remained, precisely which ones? To determine that was the task of counterintelligence. The material gleaned from the bugging of the electric typewriters would have been valuable in determining which of the Leningrad U.S. consulate’s personnel were intelligence officers. At the least, Putin’s task would have been facilitated by this information, and he would also have shared in the general rise in esprit de corps that a successful operation always brings to an organization.
65
Jacques Margeret,
70
attributed to Sakharov; Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,
71
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin,
72
“Soviet Cold War Tapping of the US Embassy in Moscow. A Post-Mortem,” September 15, 2012. See also Sharon Maneki, “Learning from the Enemy: The Gunman Project,” National Security Agency, 2012.