Yeltsin, suffering from ill health, alcoholism, and under threat of removal due to the massive corruption in Russia, kept the strong young Putin by his side. Here Putin cultivated the public image of an unabashed KGB officer who mastered judo and politics. Putin even created his own public relations videos. In 1998 he became Director of the FSB, the Office of State Security, now centralizing all power both foreign and domestic. In August 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin to the office of Prime Minister and the Duma approved his appointment shortly thereafter.
Once he was appointed Prime Minister he would find a reason to quickly launch a second brutal war in Chechnya that would eventually kill over fifty thousand people—terrorism. As the political campaign started, terrorists detonated four apartment complexes in Russia and Dagestan, killing over three hundred citizens. When Putin hit the stumps and came out as a pit bull on a Russian nationalist platform against terrorism, he rose in popularity. When Yeltsin resigned the Presidency, Putin became President in accordance with the Russian constitution.
American Journalist David Satter, who investigated the apartment bombings, believes that a failed Hexogen bomb with advanced military detonators found in the city of Ryazan used technology and materials exclusive to the Russian army. The men caught planting them were FSB officers.5 In response, Satter, author of a book on Putin’s rise to power—Darkness at Dawn—was expelled from Russia in January 2014. Virtually all other high profile activists who investigated this attack ended up assassinated, including the ex-KGB officer Litvinenko, who was poisoned with an extremely rare Polonium-210 radionuclide while drinking tea. The substance could only have originated in Russian nuclear reactors. He died three weeks later.
School of the Second Profession
During Putin’s time at the KGB, “active operations”—shorthand for direct espionage—drew on a rich history. Russia had a long tradition of court espionage and intrigue among the European kingdoms. As far back as anyone could remember, the ancient methods of spying formed the basis for every thought and action of the Tsars. It was far more sophisticated in some ways than today, due to its heavy reliance on solid tradecraft and observation techniques in a world limited by foot and horse. The KGB taught its officers the traditions of using manual codes and ciphers, slow surveillance, concocting poisons, reading secret inks, and forging of false handwriting as skills to master and to appreciate.
Most importantly, learning to read people, their wants, dreams, likes, dislikes and desires—all to get them to betray their own country—was the most basic and oldest of all lessons in the Russian intelligence foundations.
Every one of the Russian Emperors and Tsars established secret intelligence collection; maintaining court influence required advanced information on plots and betrayals, as well as the occasional murder. The Oprichnina, established in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, was the first known Russian intelligence agency. They were six thousand horse guard uniformed in all-black cavalry clothes, and their coat of arms was “The Broom and The Dog”—to sniff out and sweep up anyone opposed to Ivan.6 Their duty was simple. They were the police, bodyguard, and spies tasked to detect, hunt down, and kill Ivan’s enemies. When the Oprichnina outlived their usefulness, Ivan dissolved the organization in 1572, but in seven years they set the pace for state terror and espionage.
In 1697 Peter the Great established the Preobrazhensky Office; Empress Anne established the Chancellery for Secret Investigations in 1731, and Peter III had an organization called the Secret Bureau. All of these state organs opened illicit letters, listened to whispers at keyholes, assassinated enemies, and intercepted couriers. But it was Emperor Nicholas I who set up the Third Section. This group went far further than any of the previous amateurish gendarmerie. They did not just open letters from mistresses; the Third Section was the first agency to truly train, maintain and deploy professional Russian foreign intelligence officers for missions targeting foreign countries.
As rulers gained power they used increasingly brutal secret police tactics. Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II, established the Okhrana, an organization that set the precedent of being completely above any law while acting in the defense of the realm. They carried out mass surveillance, arrests without warrant, summary executions as they saw fit—all in the name of the Tsar. They operated as deep cover spies in the European courts and ran spy networks in France, Switzerland, and Britain. While they watched and killed revolutionaries and anti-government plotters of all stripes, the Okhrana’s specialty was to infiltrate and suppress dissidents living abroad. Somehow these agencies could not stop the spread of ideologies and none had a great impact on the coming communist uprising. Tsar Nicholas II was well informed of the Communist unrest in his armed forces, but his secret police were either unable or unwilling to stop the Russian Revolution, or his death—along with his family—at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
In February 1917, over four hundred thousand industrial workers in St. Petersburg revolted and with the aid of the Russian army, overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. Vladimir Iliych Lenin gave them that revolution and in 1917 he knew, better than most, the necessity for a secret agency to prevent a Royalist counter-revolution. One of his first acts was to establishe the All Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage, known simply as the Cheka, from the Cyrillic acronym.7
The first director of the Cheka was Felix Dzerzhinsky. The coat of arms for the Cheka organization was the Sword on a Shield. Dzerzhinsky organized his agency to be an absolutely ruthless internal security tool. To Dzerzhinsky the Cheka “…Stood for organized terror… Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution… We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stop crime at its inception.” That philosophy permeates the belief system of every Russian secret service officer up to today. So famed was Dzerzhinsky that a statue known as the Iron Felix stood in in Lyubyanka square—also known as Dzerzhinsky Square—in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB for almost seventy years. Although the statue disappeared after the failed coup of 1991, the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, still occupies the offices at that location.
With the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Broz Stalin took over. During this time Stalin used the secret police forces to arrest and execute an estimated 50 million people in order to maintain order among citizens. In 1930 the NKVD appeared, and later established the Administration of Special Tasks. Their job was to infiltrate agents and convert socialist supporters of the revolution in Western and fascist countries, in addition to exterminating dissent among potential NKVD backsliders. During the 1930s some of the great successes would be to develop spies in British and American universities and recruit members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, including Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, an officer of the British Secret Service MI6, Guy Burgess, and Don McLean.
After more than a decade of tumultuous leadership, Lavrenti Beria expanded the NKVD, which was under the OGPU, to the point where a separate organization needed to be created. This became NKGB, in charge of internal security, espionage, and guerilla activities in World War II. When Stalin died in 1953, Beria tried to replace him, but the politburo arrested, tried, and executed Beria in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev would head the new soviet government and on March 13, 1954 formally established the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security”) or KGB. It would be responsible for all facets of state security including internal security, police, and border patrol, and for the next four decades would operate a ruthless campaign against the West—as well as the citizens of the Soviet Union.