For a number of years, a story has been circulating about the Russian president. It goes like this: During the 1980s, Vladimir Putin was on a top-secret mission in East Germany as a young officer in the feared Soviet secret service agency KGB. From the agency's station in Dresden, he purportedly maintained contacts with left-wing terrorists belonging the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany, supplying them with both weapons and instructions.
Putin is said to have repeatedly led conspiratorial meetings between the KGB, the East German Ministry for State Security (the notorious Stasi) and the RAF, at which attacks on prominent targets were also discussed – such as the assassination of Deutsche Bank CEO Alfred Herrhausen.
The narrative of Putin's alleged RAF connections found its way into two standard international works on the Kremlin leader's life – including British journalist Catherine Belton's bestseller "Putin's People." The same informant apparently served as the source in both works: an alleged former RAF member who was granted anonymity.
For quite some time, experts puzzled over who the source for the RAF story could be. Now, it seems, the mystery has been resolved: The person in question is believed to be Dietmar C. from the town of Dillingen in the western state of Saarland.
That fact could prove to be a serious problem for the credibility of the Putin narrative. It turns out that C., now 71, has been many things in his eventful life: a hippie, a bank robber, a key source of questionable revelations – but he was very clearly never a member of the RAF. Instead, he is considered a notorious fabulist and has several previous convictions, including for making false statements.
The case highlights a broader problem with some of the reporting that has been conducted into Putin's KGB past. Ever since the former spy ascended to become Russia’s leader, researchers, journalists and biographers have been combing through his years of service in East Germany from 1985 to 1990. In the eagerness to find new details, fact and fiction have sometimes blurred, and somewhere along the line, the man from Leningrad gained the reputation for being a Soviet super agent.
The literature is full of speculation about Hollywood-like special missions in which Putin is alleged to have been involved: a secret operation to overthrow the East German government; the establishment of a network of agents made up of defected Stasi employees; or the blackmail of a toxic materials researcher, on whom pornographic material was to be planted.
Even today, there is no convincing evidence for these stories. In the Stasi files that have been made public so far, there are only a few pages in which Putin is even mentioned at all. They cover rather banal events such as birthday greetings, administrative matters or German-Soviet friendship evenings, captured in slightly faded photographs.
The fact that there is so little about him in the files itself provides grounds for speculation: Were Putin's assignments so explosive that all traces were consistently erased from official documents? Or was he actually just performing routine work that was simply too trivial to be archived by the Stasi?
According to Horst Jehmlich, the chief aide to the last Dresden Stasi chief, Putin played only a minor role in the neighboring KGB station. Putin was more of an "errand boy" at the regional KGB station, Jehmlich told DER SPIEGEL. Although Putin sometimes signed requests to the Ministry of State Security (MfS), important matters were always clarified personally by the Soviet head of the KGB station – with the help of an MfS interpreter and without Putin.
Putin's former office neighbor at the KGB office in Dresden echoed Jehmlich's view. He said that his colleague was "a complete conformist" whose work consisted mainly of sifting through an endless stream of applications to visit family in West Germany or searching for potential informants among foreign students at the University of Dresden.
None of that served to diminish speculation about explosive special missions, especially since Putin himself has never made any explicit statements about the work he performed in East Germany. The legend of having been a top spy shrouded in secrecy isn't likely one that he finds particularly bothersome.
The wildest story to date – that of Putin's purported involvement in RAF terror – first surfaced in the 2012 biography "The Man Without a Face" by Masha Gessen. In it, an alleged "former RAF member" describes how members of the extreme left-wing terrorist group "occasionally came to Dresden for training sessions" and brought their contact Putin gifts from the West – a Grundig short-wave receiver, for example, or a stolen Blaupunkt car stereo. "He always wanted to have things," the informant told Gessen. The interview took place in Bavaria in August 2011.
Apparently the same anonymous source is quoted in Catherine Belton's 2020 bestseller "Putin's People." "We met there (in Dresden) about a half a dozen times," the alleged former terrorist claims in that book. According to the source, the RAF people would travel to East Germany by train and were picked up at the train station by Stasi agents in a Soviet-made sedan and driven to a safe house in Dresden, where, Putin and another KGB colleague would join them to discuss terrorist operations. "They would never give us instructions directly," the informant said. "They would just say: 'We heard you were planning this, how do you want to do it?'" Putin and his KGB colleague, the source said, would then make "suggestions" to the RAF fighters for attacks and sometimes recommended "other targets."
Citing her source, Belton writes that Putin "would be among the leaders" in these secret meetings in Dresden. Even a Stasi general, who was allegedly also present, would obey his orders, according to the source. At the end, the source said, the terrorists handed over their wish lists for weapons, which would then allegedly be delivered to secret locations by KGB agents and picked up by RAF members.
According to Belton's source, the terror of the RAF was at the time a "key part of KGB attempts to disrupt and destabilize" West Germany. The assassination of Herrhausen, which was allegedly also initiated by Putin and the KGB, also allegedly served this purpose. The head of Deutsche Bank was murdered in the Frankfurt suburb of Bad Homburg on November 30, 1989, in a bomb attack that remains unsolved to this day.
"I know this target came from Dresden," Belton's alleged RAF informant claimed."They were using us to disrupt, destabilize and sow chaos in the West." Belton doesn’t provide any further witnesses or evidence of a KGB background to the attack on Herrhausen in her book. In a footnote, she merely refers to the "former RAF member" she spoke to in March 2018.
By then, the story of Putin, the RAF and the secret meetings in Dresden was already circulating on the Internet, on the "Putinism" blog, for example. But in contrast to the source cited by Gessen and Belton, the alleged RAF member was named on the blog: Dietmar C.
Gessen left unanswered questions from DER SPIEGEL as to whether the alleged RAF witness had in fact been Dietmar C. Belton stated that she would not comment in order to protect her source. She said revealing any information would be a violation of agreements made to ensure the safety of the person in question. She did, however, say that she had viewed documents that "gave credence to this person's account." But Belton did not state which documents those were.
The source of the alleged RAF-KGB connection was treated less discreetly in the biography "Vladimir V. Putin" by German journalist Thomas Fasbender, published in 2022. In it, he quotes Dietmar C. by his full name. The book states that the source now has "no reservations about revealing his identity." The book claims that the source is the same person who had spoken to Gessen and Belton.
According to Fasbender, in a meeting with Dietmar C. in August 2021, the source again described the RAF meetings with Putin in Dresden and embellished them with additional details. He also claimed that the clandestine meetings were attended not only by Putin, but also by Sergei Ivanov, who later became Russia's defense minister. In addition, he alleged that terrorists from the French group Action Directe and the head of the Dresden Stasi district administration, Major General Horst Böhm, had also been present at times. And that Putin, who answered to the name "Vova" at the time, would sometimes"send him to fetch coffee."
Fasbender writes, however, that Dietmar C. had never been a member of the RAF, instead merely offering the group occasional assistance - as a French interpreter, for example. Readers don't have to believe Dietmar C.'s account, the author writes, but his story is "no less plausible than others."
Asked by DER SPIEGEL about the credibility of his source, Fasbender says that Dietmar C. "did not give the impression of being a storyteller or an impostor." However, this does not mean that "every statement he makes should be taken at face value."
Whereas Fasbender describes Dietmar C. as a "man with a left-wing radical past and a colorful life in the haze of terrorism" and the secret services, the German security authorities have no knowledge of the man's connections to the RAF, the KGB or the Stasi. Reporting conducted by DER SPIEGEL found that neither the Federal Prosecutor's Office, which is responsible for terror investigations, nor the counterintelligence unit of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, nor the Stasi archives have obtained any such information.
The last head of the Stasi Department XXII/8, which was responsible for surveilling the RAF on the orders of Minister for State Security Erich Mielke, also told DER SPIEGEL that he had never heard of the man.
Dietmar C.'s name is more familiar to the West German judiciary. Starting in the 1970s, he criminal record consistently grew, including crimes such as embezzlement, theft, coercion and violations of the Weapons Act. He served multiple prison sentences, and as recently as 2017, a Bavarian district court sentenced him to a fine for assault. According to the verdict, his federal criminal record contained "12 entries" at the time.
In addition to his criminal career, Dietmar C. also liked to share spectacular stories – often putting himself in the leading role. For example, he once told the investigative journalist Jürgen Roth a completely different version of his biography. In contrast to the story he told Fasbender, according to which Dietmar C. was a member of an anarchist "fighting association" in southern Germany in the early 1970s, where he allegedly came into contact with the RAF, he apparently told Roth that, "in the early 1970s," he had fought as a "mercenary" in Africa, in what was then Rhodesia.
In fact, according to a once close companion, Dietmar C. didn't fight for the RAF or in Rhodesia at the time – but served in Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr. He reportedly trained as a medic, stole equipment and deserted. The District Court in Marburg, Germany, in fact, convicted Dietmar C. of desertion in December 1972.
A few months later, in May 1973, the then-21-year-old was on trial again. As his former acquaintance told DER SPIEGEL, Dietmar C. belonged to a hippie group in Saarland that dreamed of emigrating to Canada and founding a rural commune. They planned to obtain the necessary money by robbing banks, but the group got caught. A juvenile court in Saarbrücken sentenced Dietmar C. to three years in juvenile detention.
Dietmar C. Also Claims To Have Met Osama Bin Laden
There's also another story where the facts don't quite match up with the timeline. According to Jürgen Roth's 2016 book "Schmutzige Demokratie" (Dirty Democracy), at the beginning of the 1980s, Dietmar C. spent "several years in Afghanistan" supporting the mujahedeen "in the fight against the Soviet troops." The book states that the man from Saarland had also met "several times" with Osama bin Laden, whom he had experienced as a very "calm personality."
The files tell a different story: Rather than having fought for "several years" in Afghanistan, Dietmar C. served another prison sentence in Germany in the early 1980s. According to the former acquaintance, Dietmar C. and an accomplice robbed a bank in Konz in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in December 1980. In September 1981, the Trier Regional Court sentenced C. to six and a half years in prison for predatory extortion. He landed another entry in his criminal record in October 1987 for "negligent driving without a license."
According to the files, Dietmar C. spent much of the 1980s in custody or under the watchful eye of the police, judiciary and parole supervisors. Just how he managed to find time for the Afghan mujahedeen, KGB agents and RAF terrorists in between remains his secret. An order of summary punishment issued by judicial officials in the city of Mönchengladbach also raise doubts about his credibility. He was slapped with a suspended sentence there in May 1995 for giving false testimony.
Shortly thereafter, in 1996, Dietmar C. hit the headlines as the suspected supplier of a hand grenade found at the scene of the kidnapping of Hamburg millionaire Jan Philipp Reemtsma. He was later arrested in Hungary on other charges and sentenced to a total term of imprisonment of 11 years for illegal explosives trafficking and aiding and abetting counterfeiting, among other infractions.
A Known Neo-Nazi in the Service of the KGB?
C. was extradited to Germany and has been living for the past several years in Bavaria. Today, he is a member of the board of directors of an association he founded himself, for which he works as a "legal adviser." In the official registry files, he does business under the name "Dr. Dietmar C."
It remains unclear how Dietmar C. might have obtained his academic title – he left written questions from DER SPIEGEL about all the events unanswered. When contacted by telephone, he admitted that he spoke with Masha Gessen, but not, he claimed, about trips to East Germany by the RAF. When asked if he had spoken to Catherine Belton about Putin’s time in Dresden, he replied: "About Putin in Dresden? No." Then about what? "I don't want to say anything about that. Ms. Belton should explain." He also claimed never to have spoken to the journalist Fasbender about the RAF taking trips to East Germany. Dietmar C. claimed to have no recollection of his written authorization for the book passages in question and the permission to mention his name, which DER SPIEGEL has obtained. He also said he didn't want to comment on the question of whether he himself had been with Putin in Dresden. Dietmar C. did, however, attach great importance to one thing: That he "at no time was a member of the RAF."
The supposed Dresden connection between the RAF and the KGB isn’t the only narrative that captured the imagination of biographers, journalists and Putin scholars. The reports range from Putin’s purported secret spy network to a known neo-Nazi whom the KGB man is said to have handled as an informant. There is no evidence for any of these episodes in the Stasi files that have been made public so far.
The titillating stories first began circulating at the beginning of 2000, when Putin had just become Russian president and hordes of reporters went in search of clues about his past. Britain’s Sunday Times reported on a "ring of 15 agents" that Putin had allegedly built. The Sächsische Zeitung newspaper wrote that among the secret inductees was the notorious Dresden-based neo-Nazi Rainer Sonntag, who was shot dead in 1991. And in the German daily Die Welt, one could read about an East German medical doctor on whom Putin's agents allegedly wanted to plant "pornography with young girls" in order to get him to feed false data about "chemical warfare" into a computer network.
Public broadcaster ZDF and the newsweekly Focus, meanwhile, also reported on a spy network, and the Reuters news agency made the story virtually official in May 2000. The spokesman for the Stasi records office, the news agency reported at the time, confirmed that Putin had set up an agent ring of former Stasi employees in 1990 to continue working for the Soviets after the end of East Germany.
However, the statement from the agency turned out to be false. In fact, the records office wrote the next day in a little-noticed "clarification" that it had neither knowledge nor documents "on the activities of the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in Dresden."
The journalists from various media had based their reporting primarily on the information provided by a dismissed Stasi employee named Klaus Z., who operated under pseudonyms such as "Peter Ackermann" or "Michael Mannstein."
The now 66-year-old did not have a glittering career at the Stasi. In the early 1980s, he initially worked as a low-level employee in Department XV of the Dresden district administration before being transferred to the less prestigious Department VIII in 1988. There, according to his personnel file, he dealt with "conspiratorial residential area investigations," among other things. The following year, he was transferred again and took care of "technical security" at Stasi properties.
Confessions to West German Intelligence
His superiors were ambivalent about the young lieutenant: On the one hand, he was characterized by a "high level of commitment and maximum utilization of working time," but on the other hand, he tended to get lost in the thicket of information. Because he always strives to "clarify facts down to the smallest detail," the comrade quickly loses sight of the big picture, his superiors noted.
Klaus Z. also provided a large number of details to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution after the fall of communism. Following his release from the Stasi, he traveled in frustration to Cologne during Christmas 1990 and offered his services to West German counterintelligence. At this point, a good year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the interest of the agent hunters for internal information from the Dresden Stasi field office was no longer all that pronounced. Their interest increased only when the conversation turned to the "friends" from the KGB.
Klaus Z. reported on an alcohol-filled party at the end of 1984, to which he had been taken by his wife, who was working for the East German criminal police at the time. At the party, he claims to have met a certain Georg S., who went by the nickname "Schorsch." Officially, he was with Department K1 of the Volkspolizei, the East German national police, but in reality, Klaus Z. reported, he worked mainly for the KGB.
Klaus Z. claimed to have met a Russian named "Volodya" during Stasi company sporting activities in 1985, and that they visited each other privately and went on excursions. Later, Klaus Z. claimed to have learned that "Volodya" was a contact of "Schorsch" at the KGB. Once it became clear that East Germany was soon to disintegrate, he said, they jointly considered whether Z. could henceforth work for the KGB in a conspiratorial capacity, but the plan was never implemented, he said.
Following his Cologne Christmas confession in 1990, Klaus Z. started a new life in West Germany - including a stint as a security man at public broadcaster ZDF. He fell off the radar at that point - until he surprisingly contacted his case worker at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution again in 1999. He said he had recognized "Volodya" on television, the Soviet intelligence man he had once met in Dresden. The person in question was none other than the recently appointed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
He claimed the he had played sports and went on excursions with him during that time in Dresden. He said that the last time he had met Putin was in January 1990, in his apartment, together with another KGB man. He said he spontaneously pulled out some paper from the cupboard himself and wrote a handwritten declaration of commitment to the KGB. But no one ever responded to it, he said.
In order to find out more details about Putin's KGB past, Klaus Z. was apparently supposed to try to reactivate his old contacts with "Schorsch," who in the meantime was working as a private detective in Dresden. The operation ended in a fiasco. Klaus Z. shared his knowledge about "Volodya" not only with the Cologne counterintelligence, but also with various media, which then spun the information he fed them into juicy stories.
ZDF, for example, had Klaus Z. reenact a scene in which he signs a self-written declaration of allegiance to Putin. The newsmagazine Focus presented him as a top source of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which it reported had uncovered no less than"15 German scouts in Moscow's service" – and seemed almost clairvoyant when reporting: "We haven’t heard the last from Putin."
Today, Klaus Z. lives as a pensioner in a communist-era building in a rural part of the eastern state of Saxony. When contacted by DER SPIEGEL, he proposed meeting in a "Greek national restaurant with a convivial meeting atmosphere." There, he was happy to discuss DER SPIEGEL's questions.
During the more than three-hour interview, he admits that much of the information about Putin that various media have attributed to him over the years was not based on his own experience at all. He says he researched some connections afterwards, with the help of newspaper reports, for example, and that he "combined" others on the basis of statements by "Schorsch" or other former colleagues.
An Alleged Blackmail Attempt
Moreover, much is based on pure conjecture, such as the story about the toxic substance researcher's alleged blackmail attempt: "Schorsch" had only made "rudimentary" allusions to this, Klaus Z. now says, adding that he subsequently combined the account with other information. Through research in a chronicle of the Medical Academy of Dresden, he ultimately came across a professor with whom "Schorsch's" information might fit. However, Klaus Z. did not know whether the man was actually involved with chemical warfare agents, if he was to be blackmailed by the KGB or whether Putin had anything to do with it. It’s no longer possible to contact "Schorsch." He died in 2010
Similar to the story about the toxic substance researcher is the matter of Putin's purported 15-agent spy cell. According to Klaus Z., he had also learned about this through hints from "Schorsch" at a party in a beer tent in Dresden shortly before the fall of the Wall. He had spoken of "troops" in other districts in East Germany. Z. understood "Schorsch" as meaning covert KGB colleagues. He says he knew that there were five agents working in "Schorsch's" Dresden KGB group and had simply extrapolated the number.
The allegation disseminated by some media that the Dresden-based neo-Nazi Rainer Sonntag spied for Putin's KGB network is also based on a bold interpretation of Klaus Z.'s statements. Sonntag moved in the criminal circles during East German times and served time and again in prison between 1972 and 1981, including for theft and for plans to escape to the West. In November 1985, he was deported to West Germany, where he worked in Frankfurt's red-light district and joined the far-right scene. After the fall of the Wall, Sonntag returned to Dresden and got into a fight in the local red-light district. In 1991, a pimp shot him to death.
At the time, "Schorsch" confided in him, Klaus Z. now says, that Sonntag had once worked for him as a police informer. Z. says he then conducted elaborate research on his own before drawing up a "time line." However, to deduce from this that Sonntag worked for the KGB or for Putin requires an active imagination. According to Stasi documentation, Sonntag was only considered a "candidate" for an informant position as an "unofficial criminal police employee" at the end of the 1970s, without success. Because of "deconspiracy," meaning the candidate had somehow deliberately or inadvertently revealed his connection to the secret police, the recruitment was broken off. There are no references in the file to connections with "Schorsch" or with the KGB.
Few Stasi documents exist about Putin himself. Among the few papers in which his name appears is a letter from 1989 in which he, representing the KGB liaison officer actually in charge, asks the Dresden Stasi chief for help. The letter references a KGB informant named Gerhard B., whose phone had been cut off. The former captain of the East German criminal police was considered a security risk because of drunkenness and debts and had been removed from service. Putin now asked the Stasi on behalf of his boss to unblock the man's telephone line, because he continued to provide support to the KGB.
The role of supplicant for a washed-up informer doesn't quite fit the image of a top spy. But it probably describes Putin's everyday life in the Dresden KGB station more aptly than the stories about terrorists and secret weapons caches.
In fact, things were far less glamorous in the Saxony KGB station than some non-fiction books claim. In one of the office's duties, Putin was quite familiar from his time as a secret service agent in Leningrad: the suppression of the opposition. As late as October 1989, Putin's superior, Major General Vladimir Shirokov, turned a student at Dresden Technical University in to the Stasi. "By means of the printer in his possession," the young man had duplicated an appeal from the democracy movement "New Forum" and distributed it among the students.
A few weeks later, the Wall fell and the communist Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime was history. On the evening of December 5, 1989, civil rights activists marched in front of the KGB station in Dresden's Angelika Strasse, where they came face to face with Soviet soldiers who were tasked with securing the area.
The scene provided the backdrop for the final myth about Putin's time in East Germany: According to one version, he heroically confronted the demonstrators, with a determined look and armed soldiers at his side. According to another version, a small man was standing at the entrance of the nearby Stasi headquarters, watching the spectacle from a safe distance.
Whether Putin was even there at the time cannot be proven.