Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 34

Other parts of the Stasi also began secretly preparing. In 1986, Stasi chief Erich Mielke signed off on plans for a squad of elite officers, the Offiziere im besonderen Einsatz, to remain in power in case the rule of the SED suddenly came to an end.[41] The most important phase of securing the Stasi’s future began when they started moving cash via their smuggling networks through a web of firms into the West, in order to create secret cash stores to enable them to maintain operations after the fall. A senior German official estimated that billions of West German marks were siphoned out of East Germany into a string of front companies from 1986.[42]

Putin’s Dresden was a central hub for these preparations. Herbert Kohler, the head of the Dresden HVA, was closely involved in the creation of some of these front companies – so-called ‘operative firms’ – that were to hide their connections with the Stasi and store ‘black cash’ to allow Stasi networks to survive following a collapse.[43] Kohler worked closely with an Austrian businessman named Martin Schlaff, who’d been recruited in the early eighties by the Stasi. Schlaff was tasked with smuggling embargoed components for the construction of a hard-disc factory in Thüringen, near Dresden. Between the end of 1986 and the end of 1988 his firms received more than 130 million marks from the East German government for the top-secret project, which was one of the most expensive ever run by the Stasi. But the plant was never finished. Many of the components never arrived,[44] while hundreds of millions of marks intended for the plant, and from other illicit deals, disappeared into Schlaff front companies in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Singapore.[45]

These financial transfers took place at the time Putin was serving as the main liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi in Dresden, in particular with Kohler’s HVA.[46] It’s not clear whether he played any role in them. But many years later, Schlaff’s connections with Putin became clear when the Austrian businessman re-emerged in a network of companies in Europe that were central cogs in the influence operations of the Putin regime.[47] Back in the 1980s Schlaff had travelled at least once to Moscow for talks with Soviet foreign-trade officials.[48]