[CTRL] Fw:The Man With A Mirror . . .

[Mrs. Jela Jovanovic, Secretary General]

-----Original Message----- SubjectThe Man With A Mirror . . .   The Man With A Mirror . . . By Jim Hoagland Thursday, February 10, 2000; Page A23 Western visitors find Russia's Acting President Vladimir Putin to be a confident, supremely well-briefed leader whose own preoccupations and interests mirror theirs. Two words spring to the lips of the diplomats, businessmen and other foreign specialists who have had recent contact with Putin: "pragmatic" and "clever." The former KGB agent and ex-boss of Russia's own spy agency conducts these sessions without notes or papers and usually with few or no aides, even when dealing with complex topics. He is crisp and focused in manner and does not give the impression of being eager to please. Instead, he subtly chips away at the dubious image that he knows he has in Western Europe and the United States because of his career in espionage and his current assault on Chechnya. He becomes passionate only when he insists that Americans and Europeans are also threatened by the terrorism and Islamic fundamentalists he fights in Chechnya. He is sure the West will eventually make common cause with Russia against this threat. "Russia is doing the dirty job for everybody," he said in one conversation. "He is the man with the mirror," says one American specialist who has studied Putin. "He holds it up and lets you see what it is you want to see in him. This is a basic art of an agent of deception, and he has mastered it brilliantly." When Putin welcomed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the Kremlin last week, he began a long discussion on Chechnya by referring to the Western and Soviet failure to halt the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, according to one report of the meeting. Albright has frequently cited this failure as the key to her world view. When he saw French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine last weekend, Putin was not citing Munich but emphasizing Russia's solidarity with Europe. Albright came away from their meeting perceiving Putin to be "more open-minded" on the Clinton administration's desire to amend the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But French officials found no such flexibility in their subsequent meetings with Putin and other Russian officials. France opposes ABM modification. Albright's reading in fact tracks closely with other authoritative signals the Russians have been sending out about a new willingness to discuss ABM changes after the March 26 presidential election Putin is almost certain to win. He hopes to have the worst of the Chechen campaign behind him by then and says he will seek a better working relationship with the United States and perhaps with NATO. A handful of Americans and Europeans agreed in return for anonymity to share candid impressions of Putin from meetings held before and since he replaced Boris Yeltsin on Dec. 31. All stressed the new energy and generational change Putin, 47, has brought to the Kremlin. These impressions, as limited as they are, take on importance in a vacuum of reliable information about Putin in Western intelligence and diplomatic files. "There are huge gaps in what we know, beyond what you would expect," says one senior Clinton administration official with access to sensitive information. "We deal with some significant mysteries here." Talk in Europe of Putin's having left the KGB under a cloud because of corruption suspicions is discounted by U.S. sources. It is clear there is resentment of Putin among his former colleagues in espionage, but that may come from the brutal housecleaning he undertook of the Federal Security Service, the KGB-successor agency, when Yeltsin put him there in July 1998. Putin fired 10 top generals and brought in younger people, largely from his native St. Petersburg. On a smaller scale, he is repeating this pattern at the Kremlin, acting decisively in building his own team. "He is a bit of a machine," says one Western official. Another adds: "The new leader in the Kremlin always holds out the image of being someone with whom we can work. But I have never heard it done with such attention to the details we care about." Western governments say they have little choice but to deal with Putin at face value and to test his promises of cooperation as he moves to consolidate power. But their public statements about Putin's record thus far seem to underestimate the elements of calculation and manipulation in his approach, and his seemingly visceral reaction to Chechens and other non-Russian minorities. On the other side of the mirror, in Russia, Putin's nationalist and authoritarian personality comes more sharply into focus. Echoes of Putin's KGB past can be heard in the Kremlin's conflicting, obviously falsified accounts of the fate of Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky, captured by Russian troops in Grozny and now missing. The Babitsky case is an important test of whether Putin values truth and human rights as well as efficiency and focus. And it provides the same test for Westerners quick to hail Putin as a refreshing change. © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company