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Yuri Kobaladze, a onetime KGB general turned businessman, says Putin's life changed when he bumped into former Leningrad law lecturer Anatoli Sobchak in a corridor early in 1990. Sobchak asked what he was doing. "I'm doing nothing," Putin replied. "My career's not a success because they told me to come back here. I have nothing to do here." "Join me," said Sobchak. Sobchak was dazzling the city with his promises of democracy and reform. Putin was ready to make a "real break," says a close Putin aide. "People had the feeling Sobchak was someone they could...
Throughout his university years, Putin was ever in pursuit of his KGB dream. Judo had made him determined, resolute, hardworking, and he put those talents to work earning solid grades. "If you told him what he had to do, he learned it," says Polokhov. Putin had little time for social life and never joined the sportsmen's friendly drinking. Recalls Polokhov: "I think he was really born to work for the KGB...
Finally, in 1984, Putin was sent to the KGB Red Banner Academy and Foreign Intelligence School 101 to prepare for service abroad, then posted to East Germany. Few concrete facts have emerged about his career there, and observers disagree about the quality of his service, from brilliant James Bond to third-rate flop. The known outlines--and the way his career ended--suggest something unremarkable. "He was no superspy," admits one of his young Kremlin aides. "His line was political intelligence" aimed at recruiting Western agents. Putin says his work involved ferreting out information on the U.S.S.R.'s political enemies...
Lieut. Colonel Putin came home to a Russia that was radically altered. While he had been tasting the ways of the West, his country had roiled through the reversals of perestroika. Moscow Center's talent spotters took no interest in him, and he was given a low-rent KGB "cover" job assisting the rector at his old Leningrad university, a position normally reserved for a retiring agent. He was unsure how he fit into the new order, says a close aide. Worse, says Polokhov, who met him again in 1990, Putin was "hurt that the state did not want...
...elevated to head of the FSB, the Yeltsin-era successor to the KGB. On the day he walked into the headquarters on Dzerzinsky Square, he said, "I'm home at last." But Moscow's top boys regarded the mere lieutenant colonel with disdain, says a former agent: "We considered Putin a little bit too short in stature." He went to work replacing top echelons with St. Petersburg friends and launching an unpopular campaign to cut jobs. Meantime, citizens were troubled by the way Putin's FSB continued to persecute environmental activists and initiated official monitoring of the Internet...