Vladimir Putin’s Past As Stasi Apy In East Germany

ID card betrays Vladimir Putin’s past as Stasi spy in East Germany

Vladimir Putin was based in East Germany between 1985 and 1990

For almost 30 years Vladimir Putin’s Stasi identity card lay undiscovered in a Dresden archive.

When it was unearthed this week, it ignited new interest in the Russian leader’s career as a KGB officer in East Germany in the 1980s. The document demonstrated the close ties that Mr Putin and his Soviet spymasters in Moscow forged with the ruthless Stasi, the Ministry of State Security.

It was also a reminder of how his experience in East Germany, or the GDR, between 1985 to 1990, would sculpt his world view.

Mr Putin, 66, has always been coy about his time as a spy abroad. In a book of interviews published in 2000 called First Person, he said he was a case officer involved in “the usual intelligence activities”, studying political leaders and parties and trying to glean data about the “main opponent” — Nato.

He also described how he gained 25lbs in East Germany by drinking three-litre kegs of beer, while his wife, Lyudmila, a former air hostess, enjoyed a better standard of living than in the Soviet Union and admired the industry of local women, who hung out their laundry to dry at 7am.

Last year Mr Putin offered another titbit about his KGB life, telling state television that his career had been dedicated to work with “illegals” — the long-term sleeper agents who infiltrate enemy states.

His US biographers, Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill — now a Russia adviser to President Trump — suggest three major theories about Mr Putin’s work in East Germany.

One is that the KGB was focused on recruiting East Germans who had relatives in the West, and Mr Putin may have travelled undercover to West Germany himself. Another is that he concentrated on compromising and recruiting westerners visiting Dresden.

A third is that Mr Putin was involved in Operation Luch (Lightbeam), a supposed KGB operation that was set up either to steal technological secrets or to recruit top officials in the East German Communist Party and ensure their support for the reformist agenda of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Stasi identity cards were commonly given to KGB officers but the free movement they enabled would surely have been useful if Mr Putin was infiltrating the fraternal GDR.

What is clear is that his experience in Dresden was pivotal in his life and shaped his outlook for decades to come. In December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall fell, excited crowds gathered outside the Stasi headquarters in the city. Having ransacked the German office, the protesters approached the nearby KGB building.

Siegfried Dannath, one of the demonstrators, recalls that a Russian officer appeared at the door and told the crowd his men had orders to shoot. It was Mr Putin, who went back inside to seek military back-up from Soviet forces stationed in East Germany, only to be told they could not act because “Moscow is silent”.

“That business of ‘Moscow is silent’ — I got the feeling the country no longer existed, that it had disappeared,” Mr Putin would later recall. “It was clear that the [Soviet] Union was ailing. And it had a terminal, incurable illness under the title of paralysis. A paralysis of power.”

Within two years, he would resign, disillusioned, from the KGB, and go into politics in St Petersburg as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated. His ascent to head of the FSB, the KGB successor, to prime minister and then to president gave him a platform to extinguish that memory of weakness and restore Russia’s lost status.

Steven Lee Myers, author of The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, said in an interview that Mr Putin was “appalled” by what he had seen in Dresden and it had “a profound influence on the rest of his life and political career”.

“He clearly didn’t like the idea that a crowd of people can take over. That seems to be his worst fear. And that’s the thing which really stuck with him,” Mr Myers said.

“Putin’s crackdown in Chechnya, all the actions he took to strengthen the vertical of power, reining in Russia’s governors and oligarchs, more recently his reaction to events in the Arab Spring, in Libya and in Ukraine — he sees this all of a piece: if you let the masses take over there’s going to be chaos.”

Mr Putin has since surrounded himself with former military and intelligence veterans. In his wider circle are KGB officers who also served in East Germany, such as Sergey Chemezov, now head of the Rostec, state technology corporation, and Nikolay Tokarev, president of the Transneft pipeline giant.

Last year, the pair joined Mr Putin to make a surprise visit to a man celebrating his 90th birthday in a modest apartment on the edge of Moscow. That individual was Lazar Matveyev, the KGB liaison officer to the Stasi in Dresden in the 1980s — and their former boss.