The identification card for Maj. Vladimir Putin found among Soviet-era personnel files in Germany. Vladimir Putin’s old East German se...
The former KGB officer and now Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin (66) was also a collabo of the most feared organization, the State Security Service, infamously know as Stasi the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic. It has been described as one of the most effective, repressive intelligence and secretive agencies ever been existed.
The German newspaper Bild reported, along with a photograph of the identification card, after 28 years the end of the GDR. The head of archive under Stasi Documented Authority (BStU) told Bild that the card would have let Putin enter Stasi offices unhindered and made it easier to recruit agents because he would not have had to mention his KGB affiliation.
Putin arrived in the German city in the mid-1980s on his first foreign posting with the KGB. On the night of 5 December 1989, he phoned Russia for orders as a crowd prepared to storm the KGB residence. The Berlin Wall had fallen less than a month earlier. “Moscow is silent,” he was told, according to a recent biography of the Russian leader. President Putin was said to have talked down the crowd with a bluff that they would be fired upon if they tried to enter the residence.
The German newspaper Bild reported, along with a photograph of the identification card, after 28 years the end of the GDR. The head of archive under Stasi Documented Authority (BStU) told Bild that the card would have let Putin enter Stasi offices unhindered and made it easier to recruit agents because he would not have had to mention his KGB affiliation.
At those times, the KGB secret agents of USSR and the Stasi were both partners in clandestine services until the fall of the Wall! , and so such an exchange of IDs should perhaps not be ruled out,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said. Some of the Russian leader’s most formative years, details of which remain secret, were spent in Dresden.
Putin arrived in the German city in the mid-1980s on his first foreign posting with the KGB. On the night of 5 December 1989, he phoned Russia for orders as a crowd prepared to storm the KGB residence. The Berlin Wall had fallen less than a month earlier. “Moscow is silent,” he was told, according to a recent biography of the Russian leader. President Putin was said to have talked down the crowd with a bluff that they would be fired upon if they tried to enter the residence.
Photographs from the Stasi archives have shown that other prominent Russian officials, such as the chief of the defence manufacturer Rostec, Sergey Chemezov, and the Transneft head, Nikolay Tokarev, served in Dresden alongside Putin. Some details of Putin’s KGB service remain secret, including whether his work in counter-intelligence also included surveillance of political dissidents in the Soviet Union.