Putin

In the end it was time for Frolov to write his evaluation of Putin. It was quite positive but included some negative characteristics as well—“he was somewhat withdrawn and uncommunicative. By the way, that could be considered both a negative and a positive trait. But I recall that I also cited a certain academic tendency among his negative aspects. I don’t mean that he was dry. No, he was sharp-witted and always ready with a quip.” Perhaps most important for the long haul was the notation concerning Putin’s “lowered sense of danger.” It was a criticism Putin took very much to heart, saying: “I had to work on my sense of danger for a long time.”

Despite these criticisms, Frolov recommended Putin for assignment. Putin would thank him fifteen years later by inviting Frolov to his inauguration as president in 2000.

In the end, a high-ranking commission would both examine the reports on a candidate and summon the candidate himself for an interview and, on that basis, decide what use the KGB would make of him. In Putin’s case that decision was: FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE. EAST GERMANY, DRESDEN.

3 DRESDEN

Of course life in East Germany was very different from life in Russia. The streets were clean.

—LYUDMILA PUTINA (PUTIN’S WIFE)

Once known as the Florence of the Elba, rococo Dresden was firebombed by British and American planes in February 1945 even though the city presented very little value as a military target. The real motivations were revenge for the German bombing of civilian populations in England and also to hasten the end of the war, which in the event was less than three months away. Statistics on casualties vary wildly, from 150,000 (higher than the death toll of Hiroshima) to revisionist lows of around 35,000, based on the contention that the Nazis themselves had inflated the original figures to demonstrate that they were not the only ones to inflict savageries on the innocent. Some of those victims had an odd afterlife, as noted by the legendary chief of Stasi foreign intelligence, Markus Wolf: “We had the advantage of being able, for example, to use the identities of people killed in the Dresden bombings as covers for the agents we settled in the West.” In any case, it is not statistics or posthumous exploitation that gives the true feel of the carnage but a line from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, who was there during the firestorm and wrote that there “must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.”

A bit of a backwater, Dresden was not one of the most coveted foreign postings, but plummy enough considering that by 1984 KGB salaries there were supplemented by $100 a month in hard currency and East German stores offered such exotic luxuries as bananas. Western European cities might be more attractive, but Dresden was East Germany’s third-largest city, and any German city was important. “As the Soviet Union’s westernmost satellite, East Germany was the front line in the battle against capitalism. The protection of Soviet security and military forces stationed in East Germany against defection and Western espionage was as vital as the suppression of any anticommunist stirrings among the populace,” writes John O. Koehler in Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police.

Dresden’s out-of-the-wayness offered other advantages to Markus Wolf, who said that intelligence work was “very boring … a banal trade of sifting through huge amounts of random information in a search for a single, enlightening gem or illuminating link, so I varied my routine by insisting on running ten or twelve agents personally. As far as I know I was the only chief of any of the world’s principal intelligence agencies to do so. This gave me the opportunity to get out and meet them from time to time in safe houses in the Berlin suburbs or—what I preferred—in Dresden and other places where there were fewer Westerners.”

Dresden was also the home base of the twentieth century’s greatest atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, who settled there in 1959 after serving nine years in a British prison for passing secrets to the Soviets. For many years Fuchs was deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research just outside Dresden, and Wolf would confer with him on scientific and technical questions.

“Blond, athletic, simpatico,” as one colleague described him, Putin arrived in Dresden in late summer 1985 just as the USSR’s new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was launching his brilliant, doomed career. Putin would be in Dresden for nearly all the Gorbachev years; for him glasnost and perestroika would always be more echo than experience.