UNDERSTANDING THE MOSCOW COUP

OF AUGUST 1991
By Gordon Logan

The recent celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the coup have been low key, and it is striking
that the Russian Communist Party and the coup’s supporters are now taking care not to refer to
the “Western conspiracy” – a theme that has become embarrassing since my revelations on
Cryptome, and in the Bulgarian press.

The most important facts about the coup are:

1. that KGB Chairman Kryuchkov was the key figure and initiator of the coup, and triggered it in
a fit of pique against the better judgement of his closest advisers (who were not members of the
GKChP). The members of the GKChP were roped in at the last moment, using various pretexts,
the main one of which was the forthcoming Union Treaty. Kryuchkov’s mental condition had so
deteriorated that he was incapable of providing any planning or leadership. It should be noted
that  the signing of the  Union Treaty was not quite the disaster that the coup supporters have
portrayed it as, for Gorbachev had agreed that it would be followed on August 26th with a State of
Emergency voted by the Supreme Soviet, which meant that the Centre would remain in control.

2. that Gorbachev knew that Yeltsin had brought key figures of the military over to their side, and
that the coup would probably fail (see Chernyaev, Anatoli. Six Years with Gorbachev. Chap. 9).
However Gorbachev did not realize that Yeltsin would be the new master after the failure of the
coup.  A key Yeltsin ally was the commander of the Soviet air force, Marshal Yevgeni
Shaposhnikov, who threatened to bomb the Kremlin during the coup, and a few months later
betrayed Gorbachev by transferring the Soviet nuclear deterrent to the President of Russia, which
was the Soviet Union’s real coup de grace.

3. that the accounts of the coup now being presented in the world media testify to the
unprecedented hegemony of  intelligence agencies over available news. The inevitable corollary
of this hegemony is ‘information warfare’, known humbly in the old days as ‘journalism’.  At a
seminar at Cambridge University on May 18th, the problem was discussed of 'opposition groups'
using the Internet as 'a platform for free discussion, and the promulgation of uncensored
information' [sic] – all this in the context of a discussion on hackers breaking into the Pentagon
and Microsoft! Lunch and dinner with coffee were served. Similarly MI6 has been inviting
journalists to lunch in Ceaucescu Towers with complementary wine in order to keep the
following (and a lot of other things) out of the British press. I in my turn have also been getting
free lunches and a lot of whisky from journalists, but they still don’t publish. Maybe I would get
better results if I footed the bill… Incidentally, British journalists have an astonishing appetite.
Do they not get fed? Is that how the Secret Government control them? Read on:

Remnick, Resurrection. p. 6  “According to leaders of the failed coup in 1991, the real coup, the
undermining of Soviet power, was an intricate plot devised by Gorbachev and Yeltsin with help
from ‘foreign agents' in the West.”
One of the plotters, Gen. Varennikov, had insisted on being tried and in early August 1994  was
found not guilty. At the time of Varennikov’s acquittal, Yeltsin said that “the full truth about the
coup cannot be told”. Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov also talks of the coup being
'orchestrated' by someone from the West (in his book Understanding Russia - in Russian).
General Lebed has written: "There was no putsch as such, it was a provocation, planned with
genius, carried out brilliantly, large-scale and unprecedented, where roles were set down for
both the clever and the stupid."

THE RUN-UP TO THE COUP - JUNE 1991

DUMA 8.6.91 p. 1

US VICE PRESIDENT  DAN QUAYLE STOPS FOR A FEW HOURS IN SOFIA

Front page photograph of Quayle in front of Alexander Nevsky cathedral

Caption: ‘US Vice-President Dan Quayle maintained total neutrality during his meeting with
some of the people of Sofia’.

The  communist ‘Duma’ report says that Quayle was whistled by opposition supporters when he
said that the communist-dominated Parliament “represented unity and strength”. People had no
doubt been hoping that he would express political support for the opposition, which were facing
elections four months later. The  report of Quayle’s neutrality, combined with the fatal medical
certificate that I had been given, caused me  to write the letter dated 10th June 1991  revealing the
involvement of new, squeaky clean communist leader and KGB appointee, Alexander Lilov,  in
the murders of Georgi Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova. (There had been an understanding
between the KGB and the West that Lilov should remain in charge behind the scenes in Bulgaria
and be responsible for covering up for both himself and British double agent, Mercia
Macdermott). The letter was faxed to Britain and intercepted by both sides, thus causing a highly
personal, and secret, confrontation between the West and  KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.
In Sofia, people who had associated with me behaved as if  in a state of severe shock after the
10th, presumably because of interrogation by the State Security, which would have wanted me  to
know who had tipped me off about Lilov. In fact, nobody had: it had been a shrewd guess, which
was to be confirmed by subsequent investigation and tip-offs.

PODKREPA 11-18.6.91 p. 1

Front page story about Quayle’s visit beginning with the following sentence:

“With his Bulgarian visit the American vice-president belies the joke that  Americans don’t know
their geography, and leaves us with the hope that Malta is a only a port, and not a promise.”

The reference to Malta concerns the secret agreement made at the Malta summit of December
1989 between Bush and Gorbachev to leave Bulgaria in the Soviet sphere of influence.

FAKS 14.6.91 p. 1
STATE DEPARTMENT FLATTERS GORBACHEV

Soviet Television announced that Secretary of State James Baker had told the US Senate that
Perestroika was “perhaps the biggest revolution of the twentieth century, which was why it
needed the support of the United States”.

Baker was pouring oil on very troubled waters. On 17th  June, KGB Chairman Vladimir
Kryuchkov made an exceptionally inflammatory secret speech to the Supreme Soviet to the effect 
that  CIA agents were undermining the Soviet Union (a strange claim since Aldrich Ames was
giving Kryuchkov full information on CIA agents and operations). The real reason for
Kryuchkov’s anger was elsewhere. Kryuchkov, as head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB
in 1978, had personally persuaded Yuri Andropov to agree to the Bulgarian request for technical
help in the murder of Georgi Markov. This resulted in the  use of the tell-tale poison pellet that
pointed to the KGB - a blunder that Kryuchkov was extremely sensitive to, and for which he
demoted Kalugin.  He believed that the British had given me Lilov’s name as a tit-for-tat 
because the KGB had confirmed to me that Georgi Markov’s murder had been initiated by the
British double agent, Mercia Macdermott. Kryuchkov’s speech set the stage for the attempted
‘constitutional coup’, when Prime Minister Pavlov attempted to convince the Supreme Soviet to
give him some of Gorbachev’s powers.

On 20th June, James Baker had a secret meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Bessmertnikh in
Berlin and told him to warn Gorbachev of the danger of a coup. Gorbachev addressed the
Supreme Soviet on 23rd June and mollified the hardliners.

On 21st June, Soviet Ambassador to Sofia, Viktor Sharapov, sends Col. Arkadii Nikolov to deliver
a packet and a bundle of letters from Bulgarian army officers to Soviet Defence Minister Yazov.
Yazov meets Nikolov and provides him with assurances. Nikolov reports that ‘Bulgaria’s future
is assured’ when he returns to Sofia, but refuses to give any further details. In early August,
Bulgarian Chief of Staff Gen. Radyu Minchev plots to take over from the  Minister of Defence,
Gen. Mutafchiev. His plot is nipped in the bud by President Zhelev, who  fires him.

24 CHASA

THE SEVEN OFFER A SEAT TO THE SOVIET PRESIDENT

British Prime Minister John Major has invited Soviet President Gorbachev to attend the G7
meeting  in London. Major also announced before Parliament that he had invited Gorbachev to
remain in London for bilateral meetings after the discussions with the leaders of the Seven.

The purpose of keeping Gorbachev in London, after the rejection of his request for financial aid
for his country's uncertain economic reforms, may have been to provoke Kryuchkov into
triggering the coup, on the understanding that Gorbachev could return to Moscow after Yeltsin,
Shaposhnikov et al had restored the President's authority.

EVENTS IN SOFIA AND MOSCOW IN AUGUST 1991

On  the morning of Monday, August 5th, the author announced publicly at a press conference that 
socialist/communist leader  Alexander Lilov  was responsible for the murders of Georgi Markov
and Lyudmila Zhivkova. (reported in Demokratsiya 6.8.91 p. 1-2 under the headline ‘Englishman
accuses Lilov of involvement in the Markov murder’). Lilov responded on page 6 of ‘Duma’ the
next day with a long letter to the editor of  Demokratsiya complaining that my ‘evil libel was a
part of the ‘personal war’ against the BSP’.

Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb. p. 448

On August 6th, after Gorbachev and his family had flown to the Crimea for their summer
vacation, Kryuchkov called two of his top aides and told them to write a detailed memorandum
analyzing the situation in the country in terms of  instituting an immediate state of emergency.
The  two KGB officials were joined by General Pavel Grachev of the Ministry of Defence.  After
two days at the KGB's posh recreation and work complex in the village of Mashkino, the working
group told Kryuchkov that a state of emergency would be an extremely complicated affair
politically and might even cause further disorder in the country.

On 9th August, there was a TV debate between Lilov and Dimitrov in which my accusations were
raised. Lilov did not defend himself well, his oily smile being wholly inappropriate in view of the
nature of the accusations, which were not only true, but extremely plausible to the Bulgarian
public.

On Monday 12thAugust I circulated an inflammatory leaflet in Bulgarian ‘proving’ Lilov’s role in

the Markov murder to journalists. I delivered copies to Les Buchanan, Deputy Head of Mission
of the British Embassy, and  Doug Smith, Political Officer of the US Embassy, and to the
Socialist Party, and faxed  an English translation to several  numbers in Britain on the 14th and
15th. The leaflet contained the following  remark:

“Vice President and former Minister of the Interior, Atanas Semerdzhiev states that people from
his ministry may have been involved, but that they were not the organizers of the murder.”

with the inflammatory comment:

“Vice President Semerdzhiev’s remark is very important and means that the organizers (or the
organizer) were up in the Politburo and not in the State Security.”

Of course, Semerdzhiev really meant that the organizers were  MI6 and Mrs. Macdermott. I was
rewarding his relative discretion  by  threatening to decapitate both his intelligence service and
the Socialist Party, which was what happened, the following day, and on December 12th ,
respectively.

On Tuesday, 13th August, at 2 p.m. I visited Philip Dimitrov, President of the Coordinating
Council of the opposition in his office and placed a piece of paper on the coffee table in front of
us. The paper had the following written on it: “Lilov is responsible for the murders of Georgi
Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova, and for the campaign to change Turkish names. but behind him
is British double agent Mercia Macdermott.”  I told Dimitrov that the information could be used
to tame the communist intelligence service.
That week, and probably on that day,  President Zhelev confronted his two intelligence chiefs
and fired them. Rumours of political crisis swept the capital that week.

DEMOKRATSIYA  2.9.91 p. 1

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE MAY BE CHANGED

“During the last few days it became clear that the change could no longer be kept secret from
journalists, there was a ‘leak’ to the effect that dismissals were going to take place because
President Zhelev had learned about the Moscow coup from his wife, and not from the security
services. The problem with that idea, is that the changes in the National Intelligence Service were
planned before the  events in the Soviet Union.”

It is worth noting that Demokratsiya was the newspaper that was closest to the presidency. In a
recent interview with Hristo Hristov, when asked about the firing of his intelligence chiefs,
former President Zhelev said he was not sure when it happened, and would have to check his
files. He did however concede that it was before the Moscow coup, and not after.

DEMOKRATSIYA  4.9.91 p. 1

“Much speculation has been caused by the slow reaction of the Chief of the  President’s office,
who did not inform [journalists] of the changes in the Intelligence Service at the time they
occurred.” (The newspapers ‘Demokratisiya’, ‘24 Chasa’ and ‘Faks ‘ reported the changes,
before they were announced officially. The presidential decree appointing the new intelligence
chief is dated 30th August.)

168 CHASA 20.8.91 p. 20

Interview with Alan Weinstein of the Center for Democracy

“In some of the new democracies of Central and Eastern there is hardly adequate oversight of the
intelligence services. The President of Bulgaria himself, Zhelyu Zhelev complains that he doesn’t
know whether the KGB is still at work in Bulgaria.”

Translation of interview by David Aikman from Time magazine.

Weinstein’s comment is remarkably  well timed,  in the light of President  Zhelev’s removal of
the intelligence chiefs.

24 CHASA 31.8.91 p. 3

CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

“The Director Rumen Toshkov and the Deputy Director Radoslav Raikov are on leave. A decree
is expected from President Zhelev announcing their dismissal. Sources within the National
Intelligence Service say that the reason lies not only in their insufficient competence, but also in
serious doubts about their  loyalty. Mr. Toshkov had close connections with his Soviet
counterparts and with certain people in the leadership of the Bulgarian Socialist Party.”

Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb. p. 448

On August 14, Kryuchkov called the working group together once more  and told them to work
out documents for a state of emergency. They had no time to lose. By the 16th, a draft of the first
declaration of the State Committee for the State of Emergency was on Kryuchkov's desk. At two
o'clock that afternoon, Kryuchkov called in his deputy Genii Ageyev and told him to form a
group to go to Foros in the Crimea to plan the disconnection of Gorbachev's communication
system with the outside world. 

In Gorbachev’s memoirs he states that Yeltsin phoned him at Foros on 14th August. Yeltsin
discussed the hardliners' intentions and may have signalled that the coup was now on.

VECHERNI NOVINI 6.1.92 p. 7

Extracts from interview in Paris Match with Ulysse Gosset And Vladimir Fedorovski, authors of
‘The Secret Story of the Coup d’Etat’.

P.M. In your book you hint that a man from the KGB informed you about the coup. How did that
happen?

U.G. The KGB agent warned us on 14th August that Gorbachev would be removed by the party
hardliners. He was a high-ranking KGB officer in plain clothes […] he didn’t want to be
recognized so he wore an anorak with the hood over his head, which concealed his face. Like the
secret services, he fixed a meeting with us in a well-known public place, where he turned up and
we followed him. This informer had told Alexander Yakovlev (Gorbachev’s former adviser), and
a year earlier he had warned Edward Shevardnadze of preparations for seizure of power. During
the coup, he  continued to inform the reformers of what was happening in the conspirators’ camp
He wasn’t the only one. Boris Yeltsin also had KGB informers in the army and the state
bureaucracy. He was informed of the movement of the military units.[…] There was to be no
mass repression until the coup was legally confirmed by the Supreme Soviet, which was
dominated by conservatives, and its slippery President Lukyanov.

On Friday 16th August the US Mediterranean Fleet docked in the Bulgarian port of Varna for the
first time in history. Somebody in the State Department had decided that Uncle Sam should join
the party…

OTECHESTVEN VESTNIK 24.10.91 p. 1

“Yeltsin answered that on the 19th August, during the most dramatic hours for Russia, the world
and democracy, the first person to call on Yeltsin’s only working telephone was, unexpectedly,
[Bulgarian President] Zhelyu Zhelev. […] Yeltsin said that this was the beginning of a personal
friendship, and called the visit a historic occasion. […] From Boris Yeltsin I heard words that one
doesn’t hear every day. […] The two emphasized that direct contacts between them had begun on
19th August with their first telephone conversation.
If one knows the background, it is not at all surprising that Zhelev was the first foreign statesman
to call Yeltsin.

Remnick, Resurrection.

p. 15  ''The Soviet Union was doomed to collapse as a multinational empire. But it was an
entirely different matter when this historical moment would happen',” said Galina Starovoitova.
''My feeling is that the disintegration was inevitable but the historical moment, the timing, was
accidental. If it hadn't been for a number of subjective factors -and not just the personal feud
between Yeltsin and Gorbachev - it all could have happened thirty or fifty years later than it did!”

Starovoitova says the timing was accidental. That is a clear rejection of the idea that the union
treaty had precipated the coup. What are  the ‘subjective factors’?

RUSKA PRESA No. 1. 6-20th April 1992 p. 8

Headline: POLITICAL PRISONER No. 1

Translation from Russian into Bulgarian of  extract from interview with Lyudmila Lukyanova,
wife of Anatolii Lukyanov. Interviewer was Yuri Izyumov of ‘Glasnost’, where the interview
first appeared.  Lukanov had been a prisoner in ‘Matroskoi tishine’ since August 1991, and no
journalists had been allowed to see him.

Yuri Izyumov: There is a theory that the August events which led to the temporary removal of the
CPSU from the political scene and to the coup d’état were a well worked out operation. Some
people believe that the nerve centre of the operation was the democrats, others say it was the
Western secret services. What is your opinion on the matter?

Lyudmila Lukyanova: I don’t exclude the theory that the appearance of troops in Moscow was 
planned by Gorbachev himself, as a reaction to his deteriorating relations with Yeltsin. So as to
put pressure on him. But events didn’t work out  as Gorbachev had planned. They think that the
end result wasn’t at all what he had expected. It is difficult to believe that a person like
Kryuchkov would undertake such a major operation without the help of Gorbachev. There is also
a belief that at the bottom of  the whole operation lies another person, who has remained in the
shade. It is very likely that it was he  that caused the GKChP to do what it did. Time will clarify
the roles of the others.

Jeff  Trimble of Time magazine wrote after the coup that “Boris Yeltsin talks enigmatically about
a ‘ninth’ participant in the coup”.

Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova. Boris Yeltsin. A Political Biography. Weidenfeld and
Nicolson. London.  1992. p. 267

This chapter contains more questions than answers.

            The Gorbachev drama has had a happy ending: finally free, he returned late at night to a
liberated Moscow.
            The plotters have been arrested, and Gorbachev is testifying, either as a victim or as a
witness – it is not clear which.

            He has set up his own presidential commission to investigate the “coup” and insists that
the trial be held behind closed doors, lest State secrets be divulged.

            In the Russian White House, the subject is taboo. Even talkative Sukhanov refuses
outright to discuss those three days, though he spent them at Yeltsin’s side. We feel we have run
into a wall. But there is plenty of curiosity: the putsch chapter, yet unwritten, was the main reason
Yeltsin asked to see our manuscript  […]  finally one of Yeltsin’s supporters, unable to hold back,
remarked on the “mad theory.” “In America, your guys know everything better than we do. Bush
knows everything. He knew from the start that the coup was doomed. Just be patient – it’s not
time yet.”

So our plot has a happy ending without a real dénouement. It’s not time yet.

We know who the hero of August was – Boris Yeltsin. His triumph over the conspirators
exceeded even his election  victory and endowed his reign with an extra dose of legitimacy.
Henceforth his real inauguration date would be the 19th of  August. The country had voted for a
President and a knight in armor had shown up in addition.

Who then was the villain, if villain there was?

Whatever his name was, he was, without realizing it, “part of the power that would alone work
evil, but engenders good.” A midwife to history, a catalyst to wreck stagnation, a street sweeper
for the nation, he ended up by wrecking everything he had launched a coup to retain: the Empire,
the ideology, the Party, the KGB."

Who is the villain, if not one of the eight conspirators? The description best fits Soviet
Ambassador, KGB General Viktor Sharapov, who in spite of the fact that he spent two days
visiting Bulgarian politicians to enlist their support during the coup, was the only Ambassador
not to be recalled to Moscow, in order to cover up his no doubt crucial role in the coup itself.  I
was as surprised as anybody else when the coup was announced. I called the Deputy Head of
Mission, Les Buchanan on the Monday and apologized for the mess. He said it came as a
surprise to him, but sounded strangely unconcerned. Since I had kept him and the Americans
informed, I concluded that something had been cooked up behind the scenes.

Bulgarian politicians argued well into 1992 about the Bulgarian connection with the Moscow
coup, and a parliamentary inquiry was set up to investigate the link. The Russians got   KGB
generals Bakatin and Kalugin to deny it. They even sent a delegation to Sofia to deny it, but the
speculation continued, with repeated demands for the recall of Soviet ambassador Sharapov, who
had kept his job because of the cover-up, much to the anger of many Bulgarians.

It is notable that since the author started making the above revelations, the decade of whining in
Moscow about a 'Western conspiracy' being behind the coup has ceased, and was noticeably
absent during the last few days, which were of course the tenth anniversary.

FAKS 13.9.91
WHY DID KRYUCHKOV MAKE SUCH A MESS OF HIS COUP?

Telegraf 5.12.91   Interview with Vladimir Kryuchkov

“We strengthened our forces round the Kremlin. That was on the 19th. But we simply weren’t
prepared and in the morning we hadn’t given any orders. After that, everything went wrong.
What we should have done on the 19th didn’t happen.”

On the day of the Moscow coup, 19th August, Bulgarian President Zhelev and British Prime
Minister, John Major, were the first two foreign heads of state to phone Yeltsin in the White
House in Moscow. On 1st September,  Major was the first foreign head of state to visit Moscow
after the coup. Three weeks later  Zhelev visited Washington and met President Bush.   A few
weeks later  Zhelev visited Moscow and was the first foreign head of state to establish diplomatic
relations with Yeltsin.

After the defeat of the coup, John Major sent a message of sympathy to President Zhelev because
of the turmoil I had caused, stating how he ‘sympathized with you and the Bulgarian people
during the recent events’. Major’s message is strange – given the fact that officially almost
nothing had happened in Bulgaria. The firing of the intelligence chiefs hadn’t yet been
announced, nor was Gen. Radyu Minchev’s thwarted attempt to take over the Bulgarian Defence
Ministry ever officially acknowledged although it was reported in the press, and he was
prematurely pensioned off.

I could have got out of Bulgaria in May – a former ambassador had offered me a one way ticket
back to London – but I reckoned that I had a window of opportunity that it would be a pity to
waste. My sudden death would have been too high profile for the KGB to try again, though I was
told in August, just before the coup, that they dearly wanted to. I availed myself of the offer of the
ticket a year later.

The last word goes to John Dickie, one of the innumerable MI6 denizens of Britain’s media.
(Incidentally, for a description (in conversation) of when and how they began to be infiltrated, I
am grateful to Mr. D. Keddie of Edinburgh.)

“The dossiers of the Bulgarian Secret Service revealed that the poison used in the umbrella ferule
to murder the dissident writer Georgi Markov in London in 1978 was supplied by the KGB.
Gorbachev’s glasnost not only transformed the atmosphere inside the Soviet Union, enabling
people to talk freely to one another and say what they though in public for the first time since
1917. Travellers from the West also enjoyed new freedom to talk to people and acquire
information. Diplomats, businessmen and journalists were able to mingle freely with ordinary
citizens who were no longer scared to speak their minds. One dramatic event changed the East-
West power struggle in terms of espionage and diplomacy: the coup that failed in Moscow on 19th
August 1991. The KGB bungled the operations designed to topple Gorbachev and turn back the
clock on reform. Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman who was one of the leaders of the
junta, failed to silence Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze at the outset.”

John Dickie, Inside the Foreign Office.  p. 220

The above quotation from Dickie’s book is curious and revealing. It is curious because it jumps
from 1978 to 1991, from the Markov murder to the  Moscow coup, via a remark about ‘travellers
from the West’ acquiring information.  Clearly someone has told Dickie something. If that
sentence about ‘acquiring information’ is supposed to apply to me, it is only partly correct.
Certainly, I had freedom in that I was operating in a new, transitional society in which there
were political alternatives and choices, which allowed me to split the communists, but
information didn’t fall in my lap. Getting it involved two attempts to liquidate  me – in 1984
when MI6 tried to trick the Bulgarians into killing me, and in 1991 when the KGB intended to kill
me after confirming that Mrs. Macdermott  had been a double agent. These incidents yielded 
crucial  information. Note that Dickie’s  first line is incorrect: almost nothing has come out of
the Bulgarian dossiers that he  refers to, other than the fact that Markov was murdered, and
about 25 documents indicating  that as a dissident he was deemed to be a major problem.

G.L.

This month’s Alan Rusbridger Award for Spinelessness

goes to editor of The Scotsman, Andrew Neil.
Well done, Andrew,
(but the knighthood still isn’t in the post).

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

REFERENCE: MR GORDON LOGAN

Mr Logan has high general abilities and is a skilled linguist and teacher. I came to know him well
during the three years (1986-89) of my appointment as British Ambassador to Bulgaria. Mr
Logan himself spent some twelve or more years in Bulgaria, at first teaching in an English-
medium school under the asupices of the British Council, then later in a French-medium Lycée
run by the French Embassy, and latterly as a free-lance teacher and translator, at times on behalf
of Sofia University. He did not have an easy time in Bulgaria, as his independence of mind made
him unpopular with authority, but he overcame his difficulties with courage and tenacity. He was
liked and respected by his pupils. He is adaptable, and a quick learner. I can recommend Mr
Logan for any post for which his teaching experience or his excellent knowledge of French and
Bulgarian may render him eligible.

[Signature]

J.H. Fawcett
22 June, 1993

Queen's Square,
Dent,
Cumbria LA10 5Ql

Tel: 05396-25470
Portrait of Putin's Past
By J. MICHAEL WALLER
American Foreign Policy Council

Why is so little known about the KGB career of Russia's acting President Vladimir Putin? Most
reporting on both sides of the Atlantic is thinly sourced, if sourced at all, and often
conflicting. Was Putin a professional foreign intelligence cadre officer whose experience
abroad exposed him to reformist ideas, as many claim? If so, how was he, the first Russian
leader since Andropov to have lived abroad, and the leader who lived abroad the longest
since Lenin, exposed to enlightened thinking from his isolated outpost in Erich Honecker's
East Germany? If Putin wasn't a cadre intelligence officer, what was he?

Determining with which part of the KGB Putin identifies himself will help determine what
shaped his professional formation and experience and could serve as a guidepost toward the
direction in which he will lead Russia. The KGB was no monolith. Its sprawling bureaucracy
and diverse functions employed polished spies steeped in Western ways, scholars, linguists,
mathematicians, engineers, paper-pushing bureaucrats, guardsmen, and the ubiquitous
thugs, snoops and dissident-hunters that formed the core of the KGB ethos.

The dearth of hard facts about Putin's KGB career and the official silence, combined with the
Andropov-style myth-making about Russia's new leader (alleging him to have been
everything from a quiet monitor of pro-glasnost' East Germans to a Russian James Bond
who recruited hordes of Westerners), indicate that something about Putin's KGB past is
hidden. We knew as much if not more in 1990 about Soviet KGB Chairman Vladimir
Kryuchkov's intelligence career than we know in 2000 about Putin's.

Not even Russia's best journalists have been able to pin down the man who succeeded Boris
Yel'tsin(1) German intelligence and counterintelligence officials give superficial, conflicting
accounts of Putin, and the German press has been no better. Asked about Putin's work in
Dresden from 1984 to 1990, a German BND intelligence spokeswoman said, "It's difficult to
say exactly what he did."(2) Informed American intelligence veterans do not paint a uniform
portrait either. While some aren't so sure, several interviewed for this article say with
complete confidence that Putin was a Line X officer in Directorate T, the scientific and
technology-theft unit of the First Chief Directorate.(3) That may well be, though most
Directorate T officers had engineering and scientific backgrounds,(4) and Putin studied law.
His thesis adviser at Leningrad State University says the law faculty produced
"administrators, not lawyers," 70 percent of whom went into the Ministry of Internal Affairs
(MVD), with most of the rest going into local governments and the party apparat. Only a
select few, he said, made it into the KGB.(5)

Upon graduating from law school in 1975, Putin reportedly worked at the Leningrad KGB
office in Service No. 1, not the First Chief Directorate, trying to recruit foreigners. He
remained on the job for nine years. However, no one can account for what he did at that
time, and there is a question about whether he began his intelligence career in the KGB. An
official biography of Putin posted on the Russian National News Service web site in 1997
states that Putin began his career as a GRU military intelligence officer. That information
was deleted from subsequent biographies.(6) Finally in 1984 he took a year-long course at
the KGB Red Banner Institute of Intelligence (now the Andropov Institute) for training
abroad, and was assigned the following year to East Germany, where he remained until
1990.(7) Some official reports say his job in Dresden was to monitor East German political
developments.(8)

Blank Biography 'Being Filled with Fiction'

Beyond that, details are murkier. What is known, according to Yevgenia Albats, is that
Putin's blank biography is being filled with fiction. "Among the myths that are already
building around Putin--some peddled purposefully by his staff--is that he was a career
intelligence officer, a member of the KGB's elite crew of superspies: well-educated, posted
abroad, sophisticated in the ways of the outside world, particularly in Western business
practices," writes Albats with a colleague. "Those jobs almost exclusively went to the sons of
the KGB and Communist Party elite, and that was a club to which Vladimir Putin never
belonged."(9)

One must conclude that Putin has something to hide. This suggests that whatever he did in
the KGB was not standard intelligence collection or agent operations--which continue to be
held in high esteem by most Russians--but something that would offend even the very
public that backs his campaign of "liquidation" and "extermination," in his words, of the
population in Chechnya.
That narrows things down to two: domestic spying/political repression, and involvement in
illicit "economic operations." Based outside the USSR in East Germany, Putin presumably
was a cadre officer in the First Chief Directorate, the most prestigious part of the KGB that
was spun off and renamed the External Intelligence Service (SVR) in 1991. That being the
case, he would have been far removed from repression and from the domestic political
spying that continued through perestroika. As likely as that may be, room for doubt exists--
and that doubt is cast from a very unusual source. Vladimir Kryuchkov, a career Soviet
foreign intelligence officer who headed the KGB between 1988 and the coup he helped to
hatch in 1991, led the First Chief Directorate when Putin was assigned to East Germany.
Kryuchkov said he traveled to East Germany frequently and knew his officers there. Putin,
he told Moskovsky novosti, was "not a cadres intelligence officer" and "certainly never
reported to me." Kryuchkov added that Putin "was commissioned by another part of the KGB
to work with us" in the First Chief Directorate.(10)

Kryuchkov did not specify which part of the KGB commissioned Putin, but he indicated
clearly that it was outside the First Chief Directorate. Lawyer-administrator Putin was
unlikely to have been an officer in communications and cryptography, border troops,
operational-technical work, guards or signals intelligence. He could have been with the
counterintelligence chief directorate, the economic counterintelligence directorate, or the
surveillance directorate, but why he would hide such connections is unclear. Or he could
have been attached to the KGB's rather mundane administrative units.

Radio Liberty analyst Victor Yasmann raises the possibility that Putin was an officer in the
Fifth Chief Directorate, the KGB division that served as the political police, ideological
enforcement and domestic spying unit. Though the Fifth was almost purely an internal
operation--it ran the informant networks and psychiatric prisons, maintained the secret
political dossiers on individuals, persecuted dissidents and religious believers, and served as
the backbone of the latter-day Soviet police state--it did maintain a foreign presence to
watch Soviet citizens abroad and to liaise with the political police sections in satellite
regimes like East Germany. According to KGB documents acquired by Yasmann, the KGB's
domestic directorates expanded their own lines of foreign intelligence functions in the late
1970s and early 1980s. The Fifth Chief Directorate conducted ideological intelligence
operations abroad, including agents of influence and working with the intelligentsia.(11)

While the First and Fifth Chief Directorates in the glasnost' period sought out Communist
leaders in Soviet bloc countries who supported Gorbachev-style reforms, the Fifth was also
at work in the region on another project, as East Germany's Gauck Commission discovered.
The Interlinked System for Recognizing Enemies was a KGB operation to monitor anti-Soviet
political dissent in East Germany and elsewhere. The de-Stasification Commission led by the
Rev. Joachim Gauck discovered the Interlinked System while uprooting and cataloguing the
Stasi networks. "Information concerning anything that qualified as a threat to the system
was sent there [to Moscow] and investigated," according to Gauck. "Particular cases were
analyzed and appropriate tactics were devised for them. It was enough for someone to be
considered--only potentially--an opponent of the system, and the appropriate actions were
initiated: He was put under surveillance and information was collected on him...and his case
would end up in headquarters in Moscow."(12)

We have few details about how the Interlinked System for Recognizing Enemies actually
worked, but the name alone suggests it was not a glasnost'-type of operation. Its modus
operandi that Gauck described and the consequent KGB liaison with the political police
divisions of bloc security services indicate involvement of the Fifth Chief Directorate.

The Fifth was the only part of the KGB to fall into total disgrace. It was officially abolished as
domestic criticism of the KGB swelled in 1989, but in fact was merely renamed.(13) By late
1991 it was broken apart. Most of the structure became the core of the new Tax Police, and
many of its officers went into politics or the private sector, with others reassigned to other
security posts. Some made their way to the top of the Russian internal security system.(14)

Returning from East Germany in 1990 after playing his bit part in the failure to retain Soviet
control, Putin reportedly was reassigned to the unprestigious personnel directorate, then
went into the active reserves at Leningrad State University as an assistant to the deputy
dean--a dead-end post that would have relegated him to snooping on foreign students and
on the university's widening international contacts. He quit the KGB, officially at least, in
1991 to serve as a deputy to his former law professor, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly
Sobchak. Here, Putin's vita is inconsistent: He says he quit in 1991, but his official Kremlin
resume says he resigned a year later.(15) Many St. Petersburg democrats believe the KGB
assigned him there: "Infiltrating newly emerging civic groups and other institutions was
common practice at the time," according to Albats.(16)

Leonid V. Shebarshin, a deputy chairman of the KGB from 1989 to 1991, says it is quite
likely that the KGB "sanctioned" Putin's move to Sobchak's office: "What Putin was doing in
his work in the Leningrad administration naturally was of some interest to the service." The
KGB, Shebarshin said, "was interested in having its own man in the administration."(17)
There, Putin earned the nickname "Stasi"(18)--not a name likely to be conferred on a
foreign intelligence officer, but a fitting one for a political enforcer.

Unabashed Chekist Identity

Putin expresses a stronger public attachment to the internal security organs than the foreign
intelligence services. "You now have your agent working under cover in the government," he
told FSB officers in a speech celebrating the 82nd anniversary of the founding of the
Bolshevik Cheka secret police in December 1999. The official government agency TASS
reported he was only joking.(19) ("Many a true word is spoken in jest," commented a British
correspondent>(20)) The rest of his speech was somber, warning against becoming too
warm to Western ways and allowing the chekisti to become marginalized. "Several years ago
we fell prey to an illusion that we have no enemies and we paid a dear price for that," he
said. Even during its worst times, in Putin's view, the chekisti could do no wrong. "The
bodies of state security have always defended the national interests of Russia," he
continued. "They must not be separated from the state and turned into a monster."(21)

Two days later, Putin received the new Duma leaders in his Kremlin office. It was the 120th
anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. Novaya gazeta reported that at the suggestion of an
unidentified member, the group toasted Stalin by his original name, Dzhugashvili. No one
has disputed the reports, and no evidence suggests Putin repudiated the toast; the contrary
appears to be true.(22)
T

he chekists seem always to be on Putin's mind. "One of his first remarks after being
appointed on New Year's Eve was to praise Russia's army of security services--FSB domestic
counterintelligence, SVR foreign espionage, the FAPSI communications agency and GRU, the
military's spies," Reuters reported. Putin pronounced, "The potential of the special services
will not just be maintained but increased."(23) In a long discussion with the Moscow PEN
writers' group, Putin tried to avoid answering questions about the KGB's role in Soviet state
terror and repression. A transcript of the discussion has him addressing the chekists' role in
the Stalin-era purges as follows: "Of course, one must not forget about the year 1937, but
one must not keep alluding only to this experience, pretending that we do not need state
security bodies. All the 17 years of my work are connected with this organization. It would
be insincere of me to say that I don't want to defend it."(24)

He tried to avoid casting any guilt on the chekisti for Stalin-era terror: "The state security
bodies should not be seen as an institution that works against society and the state; one
needs to understand what makes them work against their own people. If one recollects
those hard years connected with the activities of the security bodies, and the damage they
brought to society, one must keep in mind what sort of society it was. But that was an
entirely different country. That country produced such security bodies."(25)
Putin has a point. But he misses the far larger point: The Soviet Union and Communist Party
are gone and discredited though not entirely missed, while the chekisti and their entire
cultlike devotion to their Bolshevik terrorist heritage, as Putin himself manifested in his 18
December speech to the security officers and his reluctance to criticize the Stalin era, remain
a fundamental part of Russia's state security culture.

Less than two weeks after becoming acting president, Putin decreed the creation of what
Segodnya called a new "super special service" to merge sections of the FSB and elite police
units. Few gestures could express his mentality more vividly: One of the first orders of
government was to grant more and more power to the secret services. This new security
organ, apparently intended to root out official corruption, was just taking shape as this
article was written.

The Persecution of Environmental Activists

Days before President Yel'tsin resigned, Putin visited St. Petersburg and popped into the
local FSB office. He proclaimed himself "highly satisfied" with FSB operations, even though
that service was embroiled at the time in a scandalous prosecution of retired Navy Captain
Aleksandr Nikitin on charges of having committed "treason" for helping a Norwegian
environmental group write a study of military nuclear waste in the Arctic. Three days later,
the court threw out the charges and ruled that the FSB prosecution was illegal and violated
the constitution.(26)
Nikitin is the most prominent example of the harassment and persecution environmental
activists have endured in recent years, a development which began long before Putin
entered the Moscow scene. Another prominent case is Grigory Pasko, another former Navy
officer who spent 20 months in prison until his release last July. However, Putin embraced
the campaign against those seeking to discover and clean up nuclear waste. After he
became FSB chief in 1998, the harassment tempo quickened. Physicist Vladimir Soifer,
researching nuclear waste from a submarine accident, found his home raided in July 1999.
Other targets include: Vladimir Slivyak, an antinuclear activist accused of terrorism; Alexei
Kozlov, questioned for suspected ties to "terrorism"; and Yakov Kochkaryov, jailed in
September and reportedly forced to sign a "confession" admitting drug possession, a charge
he denies.(27) In Severodvinsk, a local newspaper editor admitted publishing "FSB-
fabricated lies" about Joshua Handler, an American Greenpeace colleague of Severodvinsk
environmentalist Alexei Klimov.(28) Justine Hamilton, a US student-exchange coordinator,
had to leave Russia after the FSB accused her of being a CIA spy.(29)

Lest there be any doubt about his personal involvement in the persecution of
environmentalists, Putin told Komsomol'skaya pravda in July 1999 that a crackdown was
necessary because the green activists are spies: "Sadly, foreign secret services ... very
actively use all sorts of ecological ... organizations" for espionage against Russia.(30)

At the Epicenter of Corruption

Apart from involvement in political repression, the only other activity in Putin's past that
could undermine his public appeal are claims that he had a hand in illicit "economic
operations." Curiously, he has been at the epicenter of such actions at every major post he
has held since serving in East Germany. However such allegations are hard to verify.

Dresden was the second-largest East German city for the illegal stripping of state resources
and laundering of hard-currency proceeds to the West, and Putin had his finger on the pulse.
Some reports link Putin to the Coordinating Committee (Ko-Ko), the East German
Communist Party organ that actually ran the resource theft, sale and hard-currency
laundering operations. At the very least, Putin could have seen how the operation worked
firsthand--a valuable experience for any Russian corruption-fighter (or his antagonist) who
could see exactly how the pillaging system worked.

In St. Petersburg, as a deputy to Sobchak, Putin rose to handle the city's foreign and hard-
currency operations. Investigative journalist Oleg Lurye of Novaya gazeta claims that Putin
was involved in a range of questionable deals, including the "scandalous privatization of the
Baltic Fleet and the Hotel Astoria in St. Petersburg," and with St. Petersburg organized crime
figures.(31) City council members accused Putin of "mismanagement" of export licenses for
local metals traders (in 1990, while he was still a KGB officer) and recommended that he be
fired. Elsewhere, Lurye quoted from Ministry of Internal Affairs documents alleging "criminal
activity--the exercise of official position for purposes of personal advancement--in regard to
Putin," adding that Putin's post in the St. Petersburg city government "significantly impedes
the activity of the investigative task force and allows [Mayor] A. Sobchak to feel relatively
secure."(32)

Putin became Sobchak's main protector. When Sobchak himself faced corruption charges in
1996, Putin reportedly participated in arranging his flight to France on a chartered Finnair
jet.(33) Sobchak did not return to Russia until Putin became prime minister.

After Sobchak's departure, the Kremlin tapped Putin. Albats reports that, contrary to popular
perception, economic reform chief Anatoly Chubais was not the one who brought Putin to
Moscow. Presidential property chief Pavel Borodin, she writes, hired Putin because he
needed "assistance in overseeing the Kremlin's extensive foreign economic assets, mostly in
the former Soviet bloc." Putin's East Germany experience made him the right candidate.(34)
Borodin would become Putin's second consecutive boss to fall amid credible corruption
allegations--in Borodin's case, in association with the Mabetex affair in which Swiss
authorities issued a warrant for Borodin's arrest. By that time, however, Putin had been
promoted. With Chubais' support, he became an aide to Valentin Yumashev, next to
Yel'tsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, in charge of the "oversight department" to enforce
loyalty among bureaucrats and regional governors across the Russian Federation.(35) Putin
was now a member of The Family--a loyal protector, not a corruption-fighter. In 1998, Putin
became director of the FSB.

Years of simmering scandals about corruption in the FSB, including allegations of contract
killings, bombings and hostage-taking, boiled over on Putin's watch in November 1998. FSB
officers called a Moscow news conference to claim fellow officers, in the words of one
accuser, used the service "to settle accounts with undesirable persons, to carry out private
political and criminal orders for a fee, and sometimes simply as an instrument to earn
money." They described a plot within the FSB to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky and
other acts of kidnapping and murder.(36)

An angry Putin had denied earlier allegations that the FSB was involved in extortion and
murder rackets, and admitted that an internal probe of the alleged plot against Berezovsky
had been terminated earlier in the year (apparently before he had been named FSB chief),
only to be restarted. He threatened to sue newspapers and dissident FSB officers if the
allegations were not proven true.(37)

While Putin did little if anything to combat corruption, he did everything possible to stand in
the way of those who tried. He ordered Procurator General Yuri Skuratov, who was building
corruption cases against members of The Family, to resign after the broadcast on state
television of a video showing a man who looked just like Skuratov in a compromising
position with two prostitutes. Putin publicly affirmed that the video was genuine, thus linking
himself in the open to the dirty-tricks campaign.(38)

Putin Leads a Change of Public Mood

Putin's actions and his rhetoric show that he is not a professional intelligence officer but a
political enforcer. As soon as he became prime minister, he unleashed a new way of thinking
in Russia that finds it acceptable to use indiscriminate lethal force against entire peoples in
order to achieve political goals. In so doing, he whipped up the worst of the Soviet mentality
that had lain fallow in the hearts of much of the Russian populace. "Russian politicians began
to use a new language--the argot of the criminal world," notes Sergei Kovalev, a former
dissident and lawmaker who served as President Yel'tsin's human rights chief. "The recently
appointed prime minister was the first to legitimate this new language" with his prison and
outhouse slang when referring to Chechnya.(39)

"Old terms took on a completely new meaning. Thus, the word 'terrorist' quickly ceased to
mean someone belonging to a criminal underground group whose goal was political murder,"
according to Kovalev. When the government talked of rounding up the Chechens into camps,
"apart from a handful of human rights activists, no one was shocked by these barbaric ideas.
The position of human rights activists themselves changed and the name acquired a new
meaning. Today, human rights workers and organizations are considered the country's
primary internal enemies, a 'fifth column' supported by Western foundations (read: secret
services), and conducting subversive activities against Russia."(40)

Western perceptions of Russian politics have not created a category for the type of coalition
ruling Russia under Putin; if one states support for economic reform and arms control, one is
logically a "reformer." The truth is much deeper. Kovalev argues that the Second Chechnya
War "was planned in advance" in order to promote domestic political goals. "It is a question
that is unpleasant even to contemplate. These plans do not bear the stamp of the older
generation of Communists or the fanatic younger supporters of Great Russian Statehood,
whose reactionary influence on the life of the country I so feared at one time," Kovalev
writes:

"Instead, they are in keeping with the bold, dynamic, and deeply cynical cycle of a new
political generation. It is unlikely that, after next March, President Putin will either resurrect
Soviet power or resuscitate the archaic myths of Russian statehood. More likely he will build
a regime which has a long tradition in Western history but is utterly new in Russia: an
authoritarian-police regime that will preserve the formal characteristics of democracy, and
will most likely try to carry out reforms leading to a market economy. This regime may be
outspokenly anti-Communist, but it's not inconceivable that the Communists will be
tolerated, as long as they don't 'interfere.' However, life will not be sweet for Russia's
fledgling civil society.(41)"

The young economic reformers around Anatoly Chubais who have so enamored the United
States are likely to embrace such a police state, in Kovalev's view, "as they have already
supported the second Chechnya war."(42)

One should expect a degree of economic reform under a Putin regime; few dispute the need
if Russia is to recover. One should also expect some aggressive prosecutions of high-profile
figures on corruption charges. They will, in all likelihood, be more political moves than
honest corruption-fighting, just as the Cheka used the corruption epithet to smash its "class
enemies," or as Andropov employed the KGB selectively to expose corruption to undermine
his Brezhnevite rivals. Any other way simply is not part of Putin's chekist genetic code.