Vladimir Putin has sworn his time as a KGB officer in Dresden was uneventful. There’s a lot of reason to doubt that claim
in 1985, East Germany was already living on borrowed time. On the verge of bankruptcy, the country was surviving with the help of a billion-Deutsche Mark loan from West Germany, while voices of dissent were on the rise. All around the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was increasing amid the misery and shortages of the planned economy and the brutality of state law-enforcement agencies.
One former KGB general who defected to the United States, Oleg Kalugin, later called these activities “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.” The former head of Romania’s foreign-intelligence service, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who became the highest-ranking eastern-bloc intelligence officer to defect to the United States, had been the first to speak openly about the KGB’s operations with terrorist groups.
But amid the tumult of German reunification, there was no political will to root out the evils of GDR’s past and bring the Stasi men to trial. The five-year statute of limitations on those charged with collaboration with the Red Army Faction was deemed to have passed, and the charges dropped away. The memory of their crimes faded, while the KGB’s involvement with the Red Army Faction was never investigated at all.
This former Red Army Faction member and his colleagues 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.
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