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Edinburgh: 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 Putin’s murky past on the suspicion that stories of his exploits as a KGB agent were exaggerated.
Instead of conducting vital missions to hold back the forces of democracy, Spiegel said that Putin was focused on “banal” administrative work during his KGB posting to Dresden, “endlessly sorting through travel applications for West German relatives or searching for potential informants among foreign students”.
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.
KGB officers were tasked with supporting East Germany’s Stasi secret police. Although the mission ultimately failed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, stories of Putin’s alleged valour have become legend.
Perhaps the most famous is how in December 1989 he single-handedly faced down protesters planning to storm the KGB headquarters.
‘Facts and fiction sometimes blur’
However, this probably didn’t happen, the magazine reported.
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