Secret Agent Man

...As for harassment of the press, that has long been a fact of life in Russia's provinces: On a visit to Volgograd a few years ago, I asked a television journalist whether she, as a state employee—most regional television is state-owned—could report news unfavorable to the local government...

...In 1998, the agency began demanding that Russian Internet service J providers install technology linking their comi / puters to those at FSB headquarters as well...

...They may have divided loyalties, they may take more bribes than they used to, and it may be true, as one former agent said to me, that "ten years of work" are required "before [the services are] even able to conduct normal intelligence activity," let alone reimpose totalitarianism...

...Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB double agent in Britain, is equally scathing about "the gray mass of officers" who were sent to places like Dresden, Putin's only foreign posting...

...That was the year Yeltsin sent tanks to fire on his parliament—and simultaneously decided that the gaggle of squabbling democrats around him were not up to running the country...

...Another ecologist, Alexander Nikitin—who wrote about Putinfavors "managed democracy" —regular elections but without any serious opposition to the interests of the Kremlin...

...Indeed, the security services till now have been quite blatantly used in Russian politics not to stop corruption, but prevent corruption investigations...

...But his trial had ominous aspects: Two witnesses from the FSB, for example, testified that even the publication of material from open sources can be defined as a violation of state secrets, a crime punishable with prison...

...Several of Russia's major companies are also widely believed to have been founded with KGB money...

...Still, their division into foreign intelligence (SVR), domestic and counter-intelligence (FSB), border guards, Kremlin guards, and communications experts is not as thorough as it seems...

...He, like many others, suspects that both mafia and business structures do favors for the FSB and vice versa, citing the case of recent banking scandals in New York: "The mafia couldn't do such things if the security services didn't help them...

...And he was not just some faceless apparatchik: Andropov is still known for his fervent belief that "order and discipline," as enforced by the methods of the KGB—arrests of dissidents, imprisonment of corrupt officials, the creation of fear—would have restored the sagging fortunes of the Soviet Union...

...The SVR's Labusov received me in a small but carefully restored palace, complete with mock Biedermeier furniture and silk curtains, and seemed disappointed when I wanted to leave after an hour and a half...

...ecological damage to the Baltic Sea caused by Russia's Northern Fleet until his 1996 arrest and imprisonment for treason—was acquitted in December after the FSB's long prosecution...

...It is that sort of thing that makes Russia's "special services" difficult to dismiss out of hand...

...In that place and on that day, both so redolent of the bloodiest pages of Russian history, Vladimir Putin solemnly unveiled a plaque in memory of...

...These actions in part account for the near-hysteria with which Putin's triumph is being greeted by some former dissidents (among them Sakharov's widow, Elena Bonner), who have predicted the coming of a "new Stalinism...

...And we know who his heroes are...

...If Putin's track record is anything to go by, the use of the FSB to "restore order" on a grand, Andropov-like scale looks unlikely...

...The first to notice this were the small, independent, human rights and other activist groups, who were recently forced to go through a complicated re-registration process designed to put many of them out of business...

...He favors "managed democracy," to use the phrase of Russia's political scientists...

...Most observers date their "return" not from Putin's appointment to the prime ministership in 1999, but from 1993...

...Indeed, estimates of the FSB's current strengths, and of its ability to re-impose "order and discipline" on Russia, depend almost entirely on one's assessment of the relationship between those still inside the service, and those outside it, and how conspiratorial one feels those links to be...

...Over the past seven years, Yeltsin has increased their funding, beefed up their public image—books and articles have celebrated the glamorous lives of patriotic Soviet spies—and put them to work...

...In Moscow, methods are more sophisticated...

...Yet in some ways, we know far more about him than we ever knew about the very private Boris Yeltsin...

...If this is how Putin wants to proceed, can the former KGB really restore "order" and "discipline" to Russia...

...Before his election, Vladimir Putin may not have been very forthcoming about his economic policies, but his views on the Russian political system have been made clear...

...Their listening equipment may be a bit rusty...

...In fact, not long ago, a few weeks before the election, he took time out of his prime ministerial duties to enact a ceremony commemorating both...

...Notable is the case of Russia's former chief prosecutor, whom mysterious sources filmed cavorting with prostitutes just as his investigations were drawing closer to the personal finances of Boris Yeltsin—an incident that took place when one Vladimir Putin was running the FSB...

...He chose the site with care: the Lubyanka, once the headquarters of the KGB and its most notorious jail— prisoners exercised on its roof, and were tortured in its cellars—and now the home of the FSB, Russia's internal security services...

...An example of how this might work arose recently, with the peculiar attempt to intimidate the Voice of America journalist Andrei Babitsky...

...The myth of the wise, all-knowing, secret policeman, the "patriotic Chekist" promoted in a dozen 1930s films, is still propagated in Russia, and the legend of Andropov—if only he'd had time!— lives on outside the halls of the Lubyanka as well...

...We know, for example, how he interprets the history of his country in the twentieth century...

...But even if a "crackdown" on Russian oligarchs turns out to be beyond the scope of the modern FSB, that isn't to say that smaller ventures aren't well within its scope...

...There have been reports of housing shortages among officers, and even Labusov says that "of course we would all like to be paid more . . ." And for that matter, Russia's security services no longer form a single, all-powerful institution—the different branches have deliberately cultivated quite separate public profiles...

...But even if nine-tenths of Russia's nuclear arsenal were judged defective, no one would think of ignoring the bombs that remain—and the reimposition of totalitarianism is probably not Putin's aim in any case...

...Others, to put it bluntly, went into the world of organized crime...

...Putin's rise to prominence is a reflection of the increased power of the security services, not its cause...

...While many ex-agents think this an exaggeration, if only because it isn't clear why well-paid employees of private banks would want to cooperate with their poorer former comrades still working for the state, there is ample evidence that the former KGB has deep and complicated links to the larger Russian companies...

...This small patch of central Moscow still contains, in effect, an entire KGB village, composed of KGB buildings still serving the same purposes they always served: There is the FSB health clinic and the FSB club, FSB service flats and the FSB garage, the latter housed in the shell of a 17th-century church, one of the few in the city that has not been returned to its original use...

...He also took heed of the date: December 20, a day still known and celebrated by some as "Chekists Day," the anniversary (this was the 82nd) of the founding of the Cheka, Lenin's secret police...

...There is then, to many, something absurd in the idea of the FSB "cracking down" on corruption...

...Far more important than the institutional change is the dispersion of the old cadres...

...How can it crack down on itself...

...In the week running up to the presidential election, "someone" broke into the computer system of Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper that was about to print an article on Yeltsin's and Putin's election finances, and destroyed the entire issue...

...Some ("the stupidest," according to Gordievsky) stayed put and continue to form the backbone of the security services: There were no widespread sackings, no purges of the cadres, no democratic reeducation...

...In the disarray of the early 1990s, many officers left the service...

...According to Gordievsky, some went into Russia's nascent "security industry," a broad term that encompasses everything from the thugs who stand outside money-changing booths to the high-tech private intelligence operations of Russia's major companies...

...Nor was he ever a Russian James Bond: One former elite agent, based for many years in the West (I spoke to him in his slick offices in a new Russian bank) dismisses Putin as a "second-rate middle lieutenant...

...The services were, says Mark Galleotti, specialist in Russian security for Jane's Intelligence Review, "looking to regain ground just as Yeltsin was looking to regain control...

...Cynics point out that virtually every one of the KGB's former directorates still exists, often in the same office building, albeit under a new name...

...Within this new system, whose rules are still being worked out, the FSB can play a very useful role—and it has shown itself willing to do so already...

...Hardly surprising, then, that in recent months Putin, who first tried to join Andropov's KGB at the tender age of 15, has become the first postSoviet leader to openly link himself to the same set of beliefs: "Order and discipline" are favorite words in Putin's vocabulary too...

...He has laid flowers on Andropov's grave—and he has recreated what used to be called the KGB's Fifth Directorate, the department responsible for repressing political dissidents, under the new name of the Department for the Protection of the Constitution...

...BY ANNE APPLEBAUM Moscow Over the past few days and weeks, much has been made of the "mystery" of Vladimir Putin, the man who now runs Russia...

...Putin, although implicitly taking responsibility for the episode, has refused to apologize for it, on the grounds that Babitsky, a Russian citizen, is "not Russian": Real Russians, according to Putin, "obey the laws of their country," and don't sneak around behind Chechen lines, collecting information unfavorable to the state...

...Testifying in Washington before Congress, one former agent recently described in detail the methods by which the KGB set up banks and businesses, stealing millions of dollars of hard currency in the process...

...Both of his predecessors as prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Stepashin, were also former KGB agents...

...Yuri Andropov...

...Putin is not even the first leader of post-Soviet Russia to have ties to the world of espionage and repression...

...It's a system in which elections take place regularly, you can hold public meetings, and the thought police will not arrest you for complaining about the price of sausage—as long as you do not try seriously to oppose the interests of the Kremlin, publish seriously damaging information about the Kremlin, or create more than a token opposition political party...

...Walking the small side streets that lead off of Lubyanka square, one can almost believe that they are...

...Nevertheless, Putin is different: He is the first leader of post-Soviet Russia to identify himself openly as a "Chekist," using the term invented in Lenin's Soviet Union, and the first to express admiration for Andropov, both in words and deeds...

...Among his many cryptic statements in recent weeks, Putin has spoken of imposing a "dictatorship of law" on Russia, which sounds good if he means that blind justice will apply to everyone, but more ominous if it means that justice will be allocated only to those whom the president, and his security services, designate as "true Russians...

...the FSB's spokesman refused to receive me anywhere, for any length of time, for any reason...

...Rumor has it that Putin plans to put Cherkesov at the head of a new branch - ^ of the security services, possibly based on the existing "Kremlin guards," designed, in true imitation of Andropov, to "rid Russia of corruption" and provide the president with his own personal security apparatus...

...Since 1995, the FSB has had permission to open mail, tap telephones, and enter private residences without a court order—if ; Russia's "national security interests" (a term left . - undefined) are threatened...

...Alexei Yablokov, an ecological and political activist, was genuinely surprised to discover that his small lobbying group could not be officially registered, as the constitution did not accept that any organization other than the state could be defined as a defender of human rights, a decision he is fighting in the courts...

...Andrzej Grajewski, a Pole who has written a book about the FSB and follows its development closely, describes the three groups as "working in tandem...

...Babitsky was detained by the FSB in Chechnya, and then briefly vanished, allegedly "traded" to Chechen rebels, before he mysteriously reemerged in Dagestan, new passport in hand...

...Indeed, the idea that Andropov died "too early," and that Mikhail Gorbachev subsequently bungled the assignment is a sentiment common to many in the ranks of the former KGB, some of whom still see a conspiracy in his premature death...

...Putin was not, he says, part of that "cosmopolitan group of officers" that clamored for change in the KGB at the end of the 1980s...

...This is not to say that Putin is the second coming of Andropov...

...With a straight face, Boris Labusov, spokesman for the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency, listed for me the qualities of a typical, professional Russian spy: "a wide base of erudition . . . knows how to work with people . . . makes quick decisions . . . psychological strength...

...He has praised Andropov's "honesty and uprightness"—and has increased the FSB's role in army counter-intelligence...

...Increased harassment of small human rights and environmental organizations, particularly those investigating issues of nuclear pollution, i dates back two or three years now...

...In fact, minor incidents of police and security service harassment of people who pose awkward problems to the Kremlin began in the Yeltsin regime and continue more than is usually acknowledged abroad...

...They would take me off the air," she said, looking at me as if I were stupid...

...Putin may well go after some of the smaller crooks, or at least those who meet his definition of a crook...

...Among the many former KGB officers he has put in positions of power in Moscow is Viktor Cherkesov, now deputy director of the FSB, formerly chief of the Fifth Directorate in Putin's native Leningrad, and well known to that city's ex-dissidents...

...Still known, that is, and still admired...

...Preobrazhensky laughs aloud when asked who is more powerful, the Russian security services or Russian big business: "How would agents survive if the oligarchs didn't pay them bribes...

...Nor can Putin be held responsible for bringing what Russians call the "special services" back from the low point they reached at the beginning of the 1990s, when the Yeltsin regime excluded them, effectively punishing them for having participated in the coup against Gorbachev...

...A journalist based in Warsaw and London, Anne Applebaum is writing a history of Soviet concentration camps...

...They may also help account for his popularity...

...The less frequently examined question is whether, propaganda aside, he can do it...

...Andropov was director of the KGB for many years before briefly becoming, in 1982, general secretary of the Communist party...

...Are Putin's security services still up to the job...

...Konstantin Preobrazhensky, an agent who resigned in 1991 (he was "TASS correspondent" in Japan), calls the breakup "exaggerated," noting that agents "still have the same health service, they go to the same sanitariums, they use the same communications system...

...They got him before he finished the job," one ex-officer told me wistfully...

...Given that Putin has just come to power in Russia by virtue of a democratic vote, Andropov would seem, at first, an odd sort of hero...

...To put it even more bluntly, it is not at all clear that these organized criminals lost contact with their former comrades...

...Of course a few things have changed: Around the corner from the Lubyanka, what was once the KGB shop, where agents could buy goods unavailable to the average Soviet citizen, has now become a Western-style supermarket, in which not all of the modern FSB's employees would be rich enough to shop...