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We may never know if Putin took his hunt further afield into the West. We cannot trust the authorised accounts of his KGB contemporaries. He himself has insisted he’d never done so, while his colleagues liked to tell instead of the long, lazy ‘tourist’ trips they took to neighbouring East German towns. But one of Putin’s chief tasks was gathering information on NATO, the ‘main opponent’,[27] and Dresden was an important outpost for recruiting in Munich and in Baden-Württemberg five hundred kilometres away, both home to US military personnel and NATO troops.[28] Many years later a Western banker told me the story of his aunt, a Russian princess, Tatiana von Metternich, who’d married into the German aristocracy and lived in a castle, near Wiesbaden, West Germany, where the US Army had its main base. She’d told her nephew how impressed she’d been by a young KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, who had visited her in her home and taken confession religiously, despite his background in the KGB.[29]

While Putin operated under the radar, in the background, the ground was beginning to shift beneath his feet. Parts of the KGB leadership were becoming ever more cognisant of the Soviet Union’s flagging capacity in the struggle against the West, and had quietly begun preparing for a different phase. Soviet coffers were running on empty, and in the battle to procure Western technology, despite the extensive efforts of the KGB and the Stasi, the eastern bloc was always on the back foot, always playing catch-up and lagging ever further behind the technology of the West. In an era when US president Ronald Reagan had announced a new initiative to build the so-called ‘Star Wars’ system that would defend the United States from nuclear-missile attack, the Soviet bloc ploughed ever greater efforts into securing Western technology, only to become ever more aware of how behind they were.

Since the early eighties, a few progressive members of the KGB had been working on a transformation of sorts. Ensconced in the Institute for World Economy in Moscow, they began working on reforms that could introduce some elements of the market to the Soviet economy in order to create competition, yet retain overall control. When Mikhail Gorbachev took office as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, these ideas were given impetus. Gorbachev launched the political and economic reforms of glasnost and perestroika, which aimed for a gradual loosening of control over the country’s political and economic system. Throughout the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was rising against the repression of Communist rulers, and Gorbachev pressed his colleagues across the Warsaw Pact to pursue similar reforms as the only way to survive and stay ahead of the tide of resentment and dissent. Aware that a collapse could nevertheless be on its way, a small handful of KGB progressives began preparing for a fall.