The Plot to Hack America

From 1985–1990 Putin was assigned to No. 4 Angelikastrasse, the KGB offices in Dresden, located in what was then East Germany. There he ran East German academics and businessmen across the Iron curtain and helped them spy or recruit sympathetic West Germans for the KGB. Most interestingly, he used agents with the East German computer company Robotron as cover stories for agents to steal computer technology secrets from the West with the help of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin’s pattern of theft using advanced information systems would come up again and again in his future. For this assignment, the KGB awarded Major Putin a Bronze medal.

During the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a crowd of East German protesters gathered outside Putin’s office and threatened to storm the building. Putin received orders to conduct emergency destruction of his field site’s files. The beginning of the end had come for Communism in Germany and the KGB needed to sanitize its many satellite offices before they abandoned them.³ For a short period he was also assigned to Directorate K, the KGB’s Counterintelligence division. This unit was designed to hunt spies, and his experience would build on a natural mistrust of people, a tendency that would come to serve him well in his future. Putin officially resigned from the KGB in August 1991 after the KGB old guard attempted to overthrow the government and keep communism in place. He went to work at a University in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg.

Anatoly Sobchek, Mayor of St. Petersburg launched Putin’s political career. Vladimir was made Deputy Mayor of the city and appointed chair of foreign economic relations. The innocuous sounding body was actually a gold plated prize in the immediate post-Soviet era. It was Putin’s job to liquidate Soviet assets and real estate in St. Petersburg and control the buying of foodstuffs and assets for a population that was just feeling freedom for the first time in seventy years. His position brought in billions of dollars to the mayor and his friends in the second largest city. Needless to say this job required the toughness and guile of a former spy, but it also showed him how to work the new class of oligarchs that would make money hand over fist.

In the post-Soviet period, St. Petersburg became known as the “Gangster Capitol.” During that period under President Boris Yeltsin, Putin was alleged to have been stealing food and siphoning funds off from the sale of assets and reconstruction. However when corruption accusations hit Mayor Sobcheck and Yeltsin, Putin showed loyalty and stood behind those who backed him up when he was rising. Sobchek, a reformer would later die in suspicious circumstances, some say poisoning, after returning to St Petersburg to stump for Putin in February, 2000.⁴

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