Word: kgb
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Early in his presidential campaign, George W. Bush was on a four-mile run with a reporter when he began ruminating on the nature of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB lieutenant colonel who had become Russia's President. "Anyone who tells you they've figured Putin out," Bush said, "is just blowing smoke." Months later, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, his soon-to-be National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, stood near a cocktail-party buffet table with a glass of white wine in her hand and predicted a gloomy future for U.S.-Russian relations. "There...
...soul mate. But the U.S. President judges people quickly and bluntly, and from their first meeting at Camp David last February, Bush aides confirm, his gut told him he liked Blair. There they had a long conversation about the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, whom Bush dismissed with "once a KGB man, always a KGB man." Blair had invested a lot of time getting to know Putin. He thought he was seriously trying to change Russia and suggested that Bush take a second look--which he did. (That has paid off enormously in terms of Putin's support since Sept...
...been pulled across the road to block its path, and stared at the dead bodies of young people who a few hours earlier had been dancing in an improvised disco at the foot of the TV tower. After the attack, we journalists spread out across the city, fearing a KGB round up (staff at our Intourist hotel had warned us), and took refuge in the apartments of local people, who took us in without question. There, a few nights after the massacre, I watched Gorbachev talk vaguely but ominously on TV of the need to introduce controls over the media...
...through the various institutions of power, discussing who was still with Gorbachev, who had already turned against him. This week I looked back through notes of one such conversation. The military commanders have not yet gone, he said almost dreamily that April. The Communist Party has, though. And the KGB is behaving with a "strange artificial neutrality," he remarked: It no longer kept the Kremlin informed about what was going on in the country...
...August 1991 as a comic affair, there was no reason at the time for thinking it would end that way. The military had already drawn blood that year in the Baltics. Many of its leaders were horrified at the collapse of their super power. Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB and later to be the moving force in the August coup, had all but accused Gorbachev of high treason in a closed session of parliament. But still, the putsch fizzled. The first ominous lull turned quickly into a baffling loss of momentum. Soon after the events, the story leaked...