Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 33

As if seeing the writing on the wall, in 1986 Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s venerated Spymaster, resigned, ending his reign over East Germany’s feared foreign-intelligence unit, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, where for more than thirty years he’d ruthlessly run operations for the Stasi, known for his ability to relentlessly exploit human weaknesses to blackmail and extort agents into working for him. Under his watch the HVA had penetrated deep into the West German government, and had turned numerous agents thought to be working for the CIA. But now he’d somehow suddenly dropped all that.

Officially, he was helping his brother Konrad write his memoirs of their childhood in Moscow. But behind the scenes he too was preparing for change. He began working closely with the progressive perestroika faction in the KGB, holding secret meetings in his palatial Berlin flat to discuss a gradual liberalisation of the political system.[30] The plans they spoke of were similar to the glasnost reforms Gorbachev had launched in Moscow, where informal political movements were gradually being allowed to emerge and media constraints were being relaxed. But though the talk was of democracy and reform, the plan was always for the security services to remain in control behind the scenes. Later it turned out that Wolf had secretly remained on the Stasi payroll throughout.[31]

The signs are that Putin was enlisted to play a part in this process. In those days he served as Party secretary,[36] a position that would have put him in frequent contact with Dresden’s SED chief Hans Modrow. The KGB appear to have hoped that they could cultivate Modrow as a potential successor to the long-serving East German leader Erich Honecker, apparently even believing he could lead the country through modest perestroika-like reforms.[37] Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB foreign-intelligence chief, paid a special visit to Modrow in Dresden in 1986.[38]

But Honecker had refused to step down until the bitter end, forcing the KGB to dig deeper to recruit agents who would continue to act for them after the fall of the eastern bloc. Kryuchkov would always insist that he never met Putin then, and to deny that Putin played any part in Operation Luch, as did Markus Wolf.[39] But the West German equivalent of MI5, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, believed the reverse. They later questioned Horst Jehmlich for hours on what Putin had been up to then. Jehmlich suspected that Putin had betrayed him: ‘They tried to recruit people from the second and third tier of our organisation. They went into all organs of power, but they didn’t contact any of the leaders or the generals. They did it all behind our backs.’[40]