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Vladimir Putin had long dreamed of a career in foreign intelligence. During the Second World War his father had served in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He’d operated deep behind enemy lines trying to sabotage German positions, narrowly escaping being taken prisoner, and then suffering near fatal wounds. After his father’s heroics, Putin had been obsessed from an early age with learning German, and in his teenage years he’d been so keen to join the KGB that he called into its local Leningrad office to offer his services even before he’d finished school, only to be told he had to graduate from university or serve in the army first. When, in his early thirties, he finally made it to the elite Red Banner school for foreign-intelligence officers, it was an achievement that looked to have secured his escape from the drab struggle of his early life. He’d endured a childhood chasing rats around the stairwell of his communal apartment building and scuffling with the other kids on the street. He’d learned to channel his appetite for street fights into mastering the discipline of judo, the martial art based on the subtle principles of sending opponents off balance by adjusting to their attack. He’d closely followed the local KGB office’s recommendation on what courses he should take to secure recruitment into the security services and studied at the Leningrad University’s law faculty. Then, when he graduated in 1975, he’d worked for a while in the Leningrad KGB’s counter-intelligence division, at first in an undercover role. But when he finally attained what was officially said to be his first foreign posting, the Dresden station Putin arrived at appeared small and low-key, a far cry from the glamour of the station in East Berlin, where about a thousand KGB operatives scurried to undermine the enemy ‘imperial’ power.[6]

When Putin came to Dresden, there were just six KGB officers posted there. He shared an office with an older colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, who called him Volodya, or ‘little Vladimir’, and every day he took his two young daughters to German kindergarten from the nondescript apartment building he lived in with his wife, Lyudmilla, and the other KGB officers. It seemed a humdrum and provincial life, far away from the cloak-and-dagger drama of East Berlin on the border with the West. He apparently played sports and exchanged pleasantries with his Stasi colleagues, who called their Soviet visitors ‘the friends’. He engaged in small talk on German culture and language with Horst Jehmlich, the affable special assistant to the Dresden Stasi chief, who was the fixer in chief, the lieutenant-colonel who knew everyone in town and was in charge of organising safe houses and secret apartments for agents and informants, and for procuring goods for the Soviet ‘friends’. ‘He was very interested in certain German idioms. He was really keen on learning such things,’ Jehmlich recalled. He’d seemed a modest and thoughtful comrade: ‘He never pushed himself forward. He was never in the front line,’ he said. He’d been a dutiful husband and father: ‘He was always very kind.’[7]