PUTIN’S PEOPLE
How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West
Catherine Belton
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020
Copyright © Catherine Belton 2020
Cover photograph © Getty Images
Catherine Belton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007578795
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780007578801
Version: 2020-04-29
To my parents, Marjorie and Derek,
as well as to Richard and to Catherine Birkett.
‘Russian organised-crime leaders, their members, their associates, are moving into Western Europe, they are purchasing property, they are establishing bank accounts, they’re establishing companies, they’re weaving themselves into the fabric of society, and by the time that Europe develops an awareness it’s going to be too late.’
Former FBI special agent Bob Levinson
‘I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.’
Sergei Tretyakov, former colonel in Russian Foreign Intelligence, the SVR, stationed in New York
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
PART ONE
1. ‘Operation Luch’
2. Inside Job
3. ‘The Tip of an Iceberg’
4. Operation Successor: ‘It Was Already After Midnight’
5. ‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’
PART TWO
6. ‘The Inner Circle Made Him’
7. ‘Operation Energy’
8. Out of Terror, an Imperial Awakening
9. ‘Appetite Comes During Eating’
PART THREE
10. Obschak
11. Londongrad
12. The Battle Begins
13. Black Cash
14. Soft Power in an Iron Fist – ‘I Call Them the Orthodox Taliban’
15. The Network and Donald Trump
Epilogue
Picture Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Vladimir Putin’s identity card as a Stasi officer
Putin in his Dresden days
Putin, Lyudmilla and Katerina, or Katya, in August 1986 (Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
Sergei Pugachev and Pavel Borodin
Boris Yeltsin and Yevgeny Primakov (Itar Tass/Pool/Shutterstock)
Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and her husband Valentin Yumashev (Shutterstock)
Yeltsin handing over the presidency to Putin, 31 December 1999 (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)
Putin shaking hands with Pugachev
Putin with Nikolai Patrushev (Alexey Panov/AFP via Getty Images)
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky (Alexei Kondratyev/AP/Shutterstock)
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev facing trial in 2005 (Shutterstock)
Igor Sechin and Gennady Timchenko (Sputnik/TopFoto)
Yury Kovalchuk (Alexander Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images)
Dmitry Firtash (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Martin Schlaff (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Konstantin Malofeyev (Sergei Malgavko\TASS via Getty Images)
Putin comforting Lyudmilla Narusova at the funeral of Anatoly Sobchak (Sputnik/Alamy)
Putin at his inauguration as president in May 2000 (AFP via Getty Images)
The evacuation of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre (Anton Denisov/AFP via Getty Images)
Putin reacting to the Dubrovka theatre evacuation (AFP via Getty Images)
A dinner party at Putin’s dacha, including Pugachev, Shevkunov,