Putin on call with his security cabinet: "We will not allow our enemies to destabilize Russia" (Reuters)
Russian President Vladimir Putin may never have been the high-ranking and daring Soviet spy as the whole world knew, an investigation by the German news magazine Der Spiegel revealed.
The stories about Putin's exploits as an intelligence officer during the 80s vary: the Cold War era is shrouded in mystery and he himself never referred to the period, but many stories published in Russia and around the world portrayed him as a hero who, among other things, single-handedly defended KGB offices from looters and carried out top-secret missions - such as meetings with members of the Red Army faction, An armed far-left group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, carried out terrorist attacks in West Germany in 1977 and was responsible for the murder of dozens of people and the wounding of about <> people.
According to his Wikipedia article, between 1985 and 1990, Putin was stationed in Dresden, and for his outstanding service during this period he was awarded the Stasi Order of Merit of the National People's Army. After the collapse of the East German regime, he was called back to the Soviet Union.
According to one of the stories about the Russian president that has been circulating for several years, Putin was a 35-year-old officer in the Soviet secret service, the KGB, on a top-secret mission in East Germany. He maintained contacts from Dresden with the terrorists of the Red Army faction in West Germany and provided them with weapons and orders. Putin is alleged to have held several secret meetings between the KGB, East Germany's Ministry of State Security and the Baader-Meinhof gang in which attacks on prominent targets, such as the 1989 assassination of Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Ehrhausen, were discussed.
The story of Putin's alleged ties to the notorious terrorist gang has found its way into two international biographies written about the Russian president — including the bestseller "Putin's Web" by British journalist Catherine Belton. Apparently, the same source served as a witness anyway: an alleged former Red Army faction member who revealed the story anonymously.
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But according to Der Spiegel's report, most of Putin's work was actually limited to banal and routine administrative tasks. According to a quote from one of Putin's former colleagues in Dresden's KGB office, "His work consisted mainly of endless examination of requests for visits by relatives from West Germany or searching for potential informants among foreign students at the University of Dresden."
The report claims that Putin is rarely mentioned in the records of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Where he is referred to in the records is only about things like his birthday or management tasks, and there is no evidence to back up the stories mentioned earlier.
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Another famous story about him is that in 1989 he dealt alone with protesters who planned to storm KGB headquarters, but Der Spiegel claims that this probably never happened. "According to one version, a lonely little man stood at the entrance to the nearby Stasi headquarters and watched the scene from a safe distance, and in any case it cannot be proven that the current Russian president was even there," Der Spiegel reported, adding that "it is impossible to trust the witnesses who were quoted and told about courageous actions allegedly carried out by Putin in the ranks of the KGB.Horst
Yahmelich, a former Stasi officer who also worked in Dresden, He told Der Spiegel that Putin was nothing more than a "mission boy." Putin officially retired from active KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel, but Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB officer and fierce critic of Putin, said in a 2015 interview with Radio Free Europe that the Russian leader had lied and was "just a major."
The magazine concluded that there was nothing in the Stasi archives to suggest that Putin was anything more than a risk-averse official. "Sometimes the line between fact and fiction seems to blur," wrote Sven Rubel and Wolfgang Taitz, co-authors of Der Spiegel's investigative report, who concluded that today's Russian president was probably not a senior KGB agent.
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