Is Putin lying about his past? Was he an elite spy or just a KGB errand boy?

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has often spoken about his past as an "elite spy" when he worked for the KGB, claiming he played an important role in the Soviet Union's intelligence apparatus.

However, a report released in 2023 claims Putin’s image as a rough and tumble intelligence officer is all wrong. He was really just a KGB errand boy. 

Stories from Putin’s past are difficult to come by according to Insider since that period in his life is shrouded in mystery. All we really know about the Russian president’s time as an intelligence officer is what’s been shared about it by state media and eyewitnesses. 

For example, one of the most common stories associated with Putin’s younger years is that of the time he single-handedly saved an East German spy office in Dresden from being looted by an angry crowd that had formed outside of it after the Berlin Wall’s fall. 

In 2009, a Russian state television documentary mythologized the incident in which it pulled eyewitness testimony of Putin’s actions and told the story of how the Russian President brandished a pistol in front of the crowd and urged them to fall back. 

"This is Soviet territory and you're standing on our border," Putin was quoted as saying by a witness according to a report from The Telegraph at the time. “I'm serious when I say that I will shoot trespassers." Putin apparently continued, the witness remembered. 

Another famous feather in the cap of Putin’s spy years was his involvement with the Red Army Faction, a far-left terrorist group in West Germany that was dedicated to sowing destrcution across the Federal Republic of Germany according to a Politico report. 

However, for all his alleged heroism in Dresden and clandestine support of left-leaning terrorist groups, Putin may have just been an administrative office drone based on reports from his former colleagues that paint a rather boring picture of his time as a spy. 

Der Spiegel noted in a bombshell report about Putin’s position in Dresden showed that he was probably not one of the Soviet Union’s top agents, nor was he the foreign intelligence officer that he’s made himself out to be since it was all administrative work. 

For example, Der Spiegel quoted one of Putin’s former colleagues who said their "work consisted primarily of endlessly reviewing applications for West German relatives' visits or searching for potential informants among foreign students at Dresden University."

That quote seems to have come from an earlier article Spiegel ran back in 2003. But there have been others that have said what Putin was doing in Dresden as a KGB spy was nothing more than simple administrative work.

“The KGB colleague Putin shared an office with on his arrival in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who was somehow permitted to write a book on those times, took care to emphasize the mundanity of their work,” wrote Politico’s Catherine Belton in 2020. 

Belton said Usoltsev was pretty short on details when it came to operations in Dresden but noted that while they did actively work to recruit undercover, about 70% of their job was spent writing “senseless reports,” and others had far worse to say about that time.

Horst Jehmlich was the last head of the East German secret police group known as the Stasi and he told Der Spiegel that Putin only played a minor role in Dresden, calling the Russian President an “errand boy.”

Der Spiegel also pointed out that the sparseness of files that remain on Putin’s time in East Germany calls into question whether what he was doing there was so explosive that they needed to be erased or if he was just too unimportant to be archived by the Stasi. 

The truth of Putin’s history as a spy probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes presented by his allies and his enemies. There is certainly evidence to prove Putin was involved in some very important operations in Dresden. 

For example, Klaus Zuchold was one of Putin’s Stasi recruits and has talked openly about the Russian President’s role as the handler of famed neo-Nazi Rainer Sonntag. But we also know Putin’s day-to-day activities were probably pretty boring office work. 

In the end, Putin was probably neither an elite spy nor just a dull office drone. He was most likely something in the middle, and beyond that, he turned out to be talented enough to rise to power in Russia in a way where he hasn’t let that power go in more than two decades.