Strongman (6 page)
Authors: Angus Roxburgh
‘You’ll be paying compensation for that, I hope,’ quipped Putin – ‘not entirely in jest’, according to one witness.
The visit achieved everything Blair wanted it to. Powell admits that Britain had felt excluded from the cosy relationship Yeltsin had had with the French and Germans (not to mention Bill
Clinton), and now Blair had ‘inserted himself’. As soon as the presidential election was out of the way – a mere formality, which Putin won with 53 per cent of the votes –
Blair followed up by bringing him to London. There was an uproar in the press as the ‘Butcher of Grozny’ was invited to meet the Queen at Windsor Castle.
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Blair did appear, for a time, to become Putin’s chief Western contact. In November, when the American presidential election hung in the balance as ballot papers were recounted in the state
of Florida, Putin called Blair for advice about whether he should call George W. Bush to congratulate him. Powell recalls: ‘Tony suggested he hold off for the moment until things were clear,
and he was very grateful and didn’t make the call. It was interesting. It illustrated a sort of relationship you wouldn’t normally have had with the Russian president, and it made us
feel our investment had been worth it.’
Part of the calculation, of course, was that British business would benefit from closer political ties, so during his April visit to London Putin was taken to meet a group of leading
industrialists. Lord John Browne, CEO of BP, was impressed: ‘He was a refreshing change.’ The businessmen listened to Putin promising laws that would be stuck to, and a crackdown on
corruption – and his cold, impassive demeanour made them feel he meant it. Three years later, watched by Putin and Blair at a ceremony in London, BP and a major Russian oil company, TNK,
signed a deal for a 50-50 partnership. At the time, BP’s $6.75 billion outlay represented the biggest ever foreign investment in Russia. Both sides were happy – though there would be a
bumpy road ahead, as Putin began to have second thoughts about selling off his nation’s strategic assets to foreigners.
Seeing Putin’s soul
As for America, Putin had already decided to sit out the rest of the Clinton term, and started putting out feelers to George W. Bush’s team. The Russians had long
expected a Bush victory. They even sent a team to the Republican Party Convention in Philadelphia at the end of July 2000. One of its members, Mikhail Margelov, a Russian senator and PR expert who
had worked in Putin’s election team, said it was part of the new United Russia’s outreach to ‘conservative parties all over the world’, designed to create a right-of-centre
‘brand’ for Putin’s party. They met Condoleezza Rice and other members of the Bush team – not for long, but long enough to get invited back to the inauguration in
January.
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On the day of the inauguration Rice sought out a Russian diplomat to convey a positive message on behalf of the new administration to Putin. Rice was a Russian-speaker and Soviet specialist, who
would be central to Bush’s Russia policy over the coming years. Her message held out the prospect of good, friendly relations – but certainly not of a reprise of the Bill
’n’ Boris Show. Rice’s view was that Clinton’s cosy relationship with Yeltsin had become too personalised, and far too soft when it came to calling the Russians to book for
their behaviour in Chechnya. In an article that appeared in
The Chicago Tribune
on 31 December 2000 she delivered a scathing denunciation of the Clinton policy:
The problem for US policy is that the Clinton administration’s ongoing embrace of Yeltsin and those who were thought to be reformers around him quite simply failed.
Clearly the United States was obliged to deal with the head of state, and Yeltsin was Russia’s president.
But US support for democracy and economic reform became support for Yeltsin. His agenda became the American agenda.
America certified that reform was taking place in Russia where it was not, continuing to disburse money from the International Monetary Fund in the absence of any
evidence of serious change.
Thus, some curious privatization methods were hailed as economic liberalization; the looting of the country’s assets by powerful people either went unnoticed or was
ignored. The realities in Russia simply did not accord with the administration’s script about Russian economic reform.
On top of that, Rice knew there were tough times ahead because Bush was planning to press much harder than Clinton ever did to pursue the goal of building a missile defence shield. She recalled
in an interview: ‘Bush had been very clear that a reorientation in the offence-defence relationship in arms control was going to be very important to him, and that the ABM treaty was an
impediment to missile defence.’
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Still, for Putin the change of occupancy in the White House augured well, and the Russians looked forward to getting on with building a new relationship with George W. Bush after his
inauguration in January 2001.
The Russians were in for a nasty shock. In March the Americans announced they were expelling 50 Russian diplomats who were working undercover as spies in Washington and New York. What the
Russians did not realise – and to this day (judging from our interviews) apparently still do not realise – is that the expulsions also came as a nasty surprise to the incoming Bush
administration! The Russians assumed Bush had decided to send a tough signal right from the start of his presidency. But in fact, he was merely clearing out a problem inherited from his
predecessor.
The FBI chief, Louis Freeh, had identified the 50 diplomats some time earlier, but the Clinton administration had declined to expel them for fear of spoiling the special relationship with
Yeltsin, just at the end of Clinton’s term. So now, with a new man in the White House, and knowing that he himself would soon be leaving his job, Freeh decided to get this last piece of
business out of the way.
Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser to the new president, recalled in an interview: ‘Freeh was very strong about the need to take action against this Russian network in the
United States. My sense was that it’s something he had wanted to do for a long time, but for a lot of reasons in their last year of office, the Clinton administration felt the timing was not
right, which meant it was an issue that the new president had to confront. Our judgement was that it could not be ignored. Action needed to be taken and it needed to be swift and early. These were
real spies. They were not just diplomats. This was not being done for political purposes, or to send a signal. The decision was made. It was not going to get any easier by kicking a can down the
road.’
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The task of telling the Russians fell to Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell. He called in the Russian ambassador, Yuri Ushakov, ostensibly for a courtesy call, a chance to meet the
new secretary of state. Powell opened with some banter: ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’
‘Good things are for dessert,’ replied Ushakov.
Powell served the hors d’oeuvre. He politely explained that while there was a gentleman’s agreement that each side could have a certain number of spies in its embassies, the Russians
had gone way over the score. ‘We’ve identified about 50 of them. And you will get notice tomorrow of who they are and they will be asked to leave the country within the next few days.
So I need you to go back to the embassy, crank up your fax machine and let Moscow know about this right away.’
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Ushakov at once informed his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who hit the roof. ‘It was completely unprecedented,’ he recalls. ‘It was a politically motivated action. That was
our assessment. And we thought it was done to show who rules the world.’
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When the news reached the Kremlin, it could not have hit a sorer spot. This was the job that Putin himself had done for 16 years; these were his fellow Chekists. He called a meeting of his
Security Council – the ministers in charge of military, foreign and security matters. They decided to mirror exactly what the Americans had done – but make it worse for them. The head
of the Security Council, Sergei Ivanov (also a former Soviet foreign spy), called the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and told her: ‘Our reply will be very cynical. We will
expel 50 of your diplomats, but we will not do it immediately. We will spin it out over a period, and we will be very careful to choose not only real spies but “clean” diplomats as
well. We will cause chaos in your embassy.’
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The tit-for-tat expulsions began. But the Bush team was anxious to move on. This had not been their initiative. Powell called his counterpart, foreign minister Igor Ivanov, to suggest that it
was time to close the matter.
‘It’s not something we can just close,’ replied Ivanov. ‘We will expel 50. And if you expel more, so will we, soon we’ll have no diplomats left and it’ll just
be you and me handling our bilateral relations.’
They agreed to call a halt. Ivanov flew to Washington on 18 May bearing a letter from Putin. The Russian leader was looking beyond the current tiff, stressing the same things he had spoken of
with NATO’s Robertson: he wanted to restart the relationship, with a new type of partnership. Powell and Ivanov agreed that the two presidents had to meet. They chose a neutral venue –
Slovenia – and a date – 16 June 2001.
It was here, in the sixteenth-century Brdo Castle, just north of the capital Ljubljana, that Bush and Putin had their blind date. Putin has a tremendous ability to mimic his interlocutor and win
their confidence – the facility that made him a good KGB ‘mingler’. A well-connected Kremlin journalist, Yelena Tregubova, for whom Putin had a soft spot, described being taken
out to a sushi restaurant by him when he was director of the FSB: ‘He is a brilliant communicator ... a virtuoso ... able to reflect like a mirror the person he is with, to make them believe
he is just like them. He does this so cleverly that his counterpart apparently doesn’t notice it but just feels great.’
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In Brdo Castle Putin worked his magic on Bush. The American brought up an incident in Putin’s life that he had been briefed on, concerning a Christian cross which his mother had given him,
and he had had blessed in Israel. Putin quickly understood that this resonated with Bush. ‘It’s true,’ he replied, according to Bush’s own account to the American journalist
Bob Woodward.
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Bush says he told Putin he was amazed that a communist, a KGB operative, was willing to wear a cross. (Putin was not wearing the cross at this meeting, though he did bring it to show Bush at
Genoa a month later.) ‘That speaks volumes to me, Mr President,’ Bush said. ‘May I call you Vladimir?’
Putin then described how his family dacha had burned down and the only thing he wanted to recover from the ashes was the cross. ‘I remember the workman’s hand opening, and there was
the cross that my mother had given me, as if it was meant to be.’ He had Bush hooked.
The two presidents’ aides, waiting outside, were getting nervous as the private talks continued. Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, chatted with his opposite number Igor
Ivanov. Powell recalled later: ‘Igor and I and the rest of the delegations were busy sitting round pretending to have a conference and discussing vital issues, but we were all just sitting
there tapping our thumbs and our fingers on the table wondering what these fellows were doing.’
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Eventually the presidents emerged to hold a press conference. One journalist asked Bush a killer question: ‘Is this a man that Americans can trust?’ Still under the spell, Bush waxed
lyrical: ‘I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.’
Putin could hardly believe it. He turned to Bush and said in a quiet, boyish voice in English, ‘Thank you, mister ...’ Bush’s aides gasped. Condi Rice murmured to a colleague,
‘Oh my goodness, we’re going to have some explaining to do over that one.’
Colin Powell later took the president aside and said: ‘You know, you may have seen all that but I still look in his eyes and I see K-G-B. Remember there’s a reason he’s fluent
in German, he used to be the
rezident
[agent] in Germany and he is a chief KGB guy.’
Bush’s claim to have ‘seen into Putin’s soul’ would haunt him for the rest of his presidency.
Fighting the Taliban together
In less than three months the friendship would be put to the test. When terrorists mounted the world’s most devastating attack on the United States on 11 September 2001,
Putin was the first world leader to call Bush and offer condolences and help.
Watching the coverage of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin was shocked but not entirely surprised. Only the previous day he had called Bush and told him he
believed ‘something serious’ was in the making. This followed the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on 9 September, which
Russian intelligence interpreted as a harbinger of worse to come. Russia had supported the Northern Alliance with arms and cash for several years in an effort to contain the spread of Islamic
fundamentalism.
Putin at once called his security chiefs to the Kremlin and asked them what they could do to help. The first thing that occurred to them was to postpone a major naval exercise that was about to
get under way in the Pacific, since this could be an unnecessary distraction for the US military. Putin called the White House, but could not speak to President Bush who was still aboard Air Force
One, moving to a secure location. Condoleezza Rice took the call. She was in the White House bunker, where a decision had just been taken to put US forces on the highest level of alert, DEFCON
3.
Rice recalled later in an interview: ‘I told President Putin our forces were going on highest alert, and I remember him saying, “I know,” and it occurred to me, of course they
know, they’re watching our forces go on alert! He said, “We are bringing ours down, we’re cancelling all exercises.” And at that moment I thought to myself, you know, the
Cold War’s really over.’
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