Putin’s exploits as KGB spy likely to have been exaggerated, investigation finds
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Vladimir Putin was not a Soviet super spy in East Germany in the 1980s but a plodding pen-pusher eager to please his superiors, an investigation has found.
Vladimir Putin was not a Soviet super spy in East Germany in the 1980s but a plodding pen-pusher eager to please his superiors, an investigation has found.
Germany’s Spiegel magazine investigated Mr Putin’s murky past on the suspicion that stories of his exploits as a KGB agent were exaggerated.
Mr Putin was a 32-year-old officer when he was sent to Dresden in 1985, a tense time with the Kremlin’s grip over its vassal states fracturing.
However, this probably didn’t happen, the magazine reported.
“According to one version [of the story], a single small man stood at the entrance to the nearby Stasi headquarters and watched the spectacle from a safe distance,” Spiegel said. “It cannot be proved that the current Russian president was even there.”
Spiegel also said that witnesses quoted widely on Mr Putin’s other alleged KGB heroics could not be trusted.
A story about Mr Putin helping anarchists in West Germany plot assassinations was based on testimonies from a serial liar with a criminal record, Spiegel said.
Another story of how he had groomed a German neo-Nazi leader into an informant was based on interviews with a former Stasi agent who has admitted that he embellished his statements.
In fact, there was nothing in the Stasi archives to suggest Mr Putin was anything other than risk-averse, the magazine said.
“Facts and fiction sometimes seem to blur,” Spiegel said. “Today’s Russian president was probably not a top agent.”
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