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The East German foreign trade ministry set up the Kommerzielle Koordinierung, appointing the garrulous Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski as its chief. Its mission was to earn illicit hard currency through smuggling, to bankroll the Stasi acquisition of embargoed technology. The KoKo, as it was known, answered first to Markus Wolf’s Stasi espionage department, but then became a force unto itself.[13] A string of front companies was set up across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, headed by trusted agents, some with multiple identities, who brought in vitally needed hard currency through smuggling deals and the sale of illicit arms to the Middle East and Africa.[14] All the while, the Soviet masters sought to keep a close eye on these activities. The KGB could access all the embargoed high-tech blueprints and goods collected by the Stasi.[15] Often, the Stasi complained that the intelligence-gathering was a one-way street.

At the time Putin arrived in Dresden, West Germany was becoming ever more important as a source of high-tech goods. The KGB was still recovering from a major blow in the early eighties, when Vladimir Vetrov, an officer in its ‘Directorate T’, which specialised in procuring Western scientific and technological secrets, offered his services to the West. Vetrov handed over the names of all the KGB’s 250 officers working on ‘Line X’, the smuggling of technology, in embassies across the world, as well as thousands of documents which provided a breakdown of the Soviets’ industrial espionage efforts. As a result, forty-seven agents were expelled from France, while the US began to develop an extensive programme to sabotage the Soviets’ illicit procurement networks.

The KGB was doubling down on its efforts in Germany, recruiting agents in companies including Siemens, Bayer, Messerschmidt and Thyssen.[16] Putin was clearly involved in this process, enlisting scientists and businessmen who could assist in the smuggling of Western technology into the eastern bloc. Robotron’s status as the biggest electronics manufacturer in East Germany made it a magnet for visiting businessmen from the West. ‘I know that Putin and his team worked with the West, that they had contacts in the West. But mostly they recruited their agents here,’ said Putin’s Stasi colleague Jehmlich. ‘They went after students before they left for the West. They tried to select them and figure out how they could be interesting for them.’[17]