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Dresden was chosen as a meeting place precisely because ‘there was no one else there’, this former Red Army Faction member said.[79] ‘In Berlin, there were the Americans, the French and the British, everyone. For what we needed to do we needed the provinces, not the capital.’ Another reason the meetings were held there was because Markus Wolf and Erich Mielke wanted to distance themselves from such activities: ‘Wolf was very careful not to be involved. The very last thing a guy like Wolf or Mielke wanted was to be caught red-handed supporting a terrorist organisation … We met there [in Dresden] about half a dozen times.’ He and other members of the terrorist group would travel into East Germany by train, and would be met by Stasi agents waiting in a large Soviet-made Zil car, then driven to Dresden, where they were joined in a safe house by Putin and another of his KGB colleagues. ‘They would never give us instructions directly. They would just say, “We heard you were planning this, how do you want to do it?” and make suggestions. They would suggest other targets and ask us what we needed. We always needed weapons and cash.’ It was difficult for the Red Army Faction to purchase weapons in Western Germany, so they would hand Putin and his colleagues a list. Somehow, this list would later end up with an agent in the West, and the requested weapons would be dropped in a secret location for the Red Army Faction members to pick up.

Far from taking the backseat role often ascribed to him during his Dresden years, Putin would be among the leaders in these meetings, the former Red Army member claimed, with one of the Stasi generals taking orders from him.

As the Red Army Faction sowed chaos across West Germany in a series of vicious bomb attacks, their activities became a key part of KGB attempts to disrupt and destabilise the West, the former member of the terror group claimed. And, as the end loomed for Soviet power and the GDR, it’s possible that they became a weapon to protect the interests of the KGB.