How Putin flattered and deceived five US presidents
US leaders have come and gone while Russia’s autocratic leader maintains his grip on power.
In the 26 years since President Vladimir Putin came to power, he has sought to flatter, manipulate or deceive five American presidents, from president Clinton to president Trump. But Putin’s first moves to influence the actions of a US leader are said to have come while he was still a relatively obscure official in St Petersburg.
In 1996, Clinton flew to Russia’s second-largest city to meet Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor and Putin’s political mentor. During his fleeting, one-day visit, Clinton was whisked through the streets in an armoured car, taken to a windowless restaurant and kept far away from ordinary people.
“At the end of the trip, [Clinton] got back on Air Force One, and he was kind of ripped, [and] said ‘That’s one of the worst stops I’ve ever had, because I like to mix with the people,’” Strobe Talbott, who was the US deputy secretary of state under Clinton, recalled.
“Our ambassador at the time, Jim Collins, said: ‘Well, I think I know who’s responsible for this. It’s the deputy mayor, somebody named Putin’.
That’s the first time I ever heard the name, I think,” Talbott told Frontline, the American documentary show, in 2017.
Putin’s motive for isolating Clinton from locals was not clear. Yet, as a former intelligence officer, his distrust of the West would have been instinctive. While serving in the KGB in Germany, Putin was expected to, in his own words, “recruit” contacts to help him obtain information about political parties in NATO countries.
“He understands very well how to figure out what someone’s psychological make-up is and manipulate people. He’s very good at doing that,” said Angela Stent, a former intelligence adviser on Russia to the White House and now at the Brookings think tank.” The longer he’s been in office, the better and more experienced he’s got at it,” she said. “He’s been dealing with American presidents who mostly have very little experience of Russia and don’t really understand the country and the culture much and he can be quite charming to them, in his own way.”
Three of the five US presidents who have been in office during Putin’s rule – Clinton, Bush and Trump – have made positive comments about their relationship with him. Clinton said in 2013 that he had “a really good, blunt relationship” with Putin.
George W Bush is said to have privately described Putin as “one cold dude” before he was elected in 2000 but changed his tune at a US-Russia summit the following year.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” he said after their meeting in Slovenia. “I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country ... he loves his family. We share a lot of values.”
Bush, a born-again Christian, is likely to have had his impressions of Putin influenced by the Russian president’s story about an Orthodox cross that had been given to him by his mother. It was, Putin said, the only thing that had survived a fire at his home.
Some of the US officials present doubted the anecdote and wondered if it had been carefully crafted for Bush.
“[Bush] was attracted to that. And I remember saying to the president, ‘You know, I’m not so sure about that story,’” Condoleezza Rice, who was the national security adviser at the time, later said.
But Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB colonel who joined the Russian opposition movement almost 15 years ago, said that Putin’s experience in Soviet intelligence would not have provided him with any special skill to deploy against western leaders.
Gudkov said of the KGB unit that Putin was posted to in the 1980s: “They only conducted preliminary studies of people who could be considered potential candidates for recruitment. But they were prohibited from making direct contact with [potential] informants, as well as carrying out operations such as secret drop-offs. This was dreary and boring work. Putin was not some kind of bright, outstanding [KGB] employee who carried out dashing recruitments or did any kind of complex operational work.”
“I don’t think that his experience of working in the KGB is a determining factor in his political or negotiating capabilities. He gained far more experience in this field from communicating with the criminal world in St Petersburg,” Gudkov added, referring to Putin’s alleged contacts with crime bosses in the 1990s.
Putin has himself described his work in the KGB as “absolutely routine”. Yet there is little doubt that he prepares carefully before meeting western officials. In 1999, three years after hearing Putin’s name for the first time, Talbott, then the deputy secretary of state, went to meet him in his new role as head of the Russian national security council.
“With me, as with others, he wanted his visitor to know that he’d done his homework for the meeting by reading the dossier prepared by the intelligence services,” Talbott wrote in his book, The Russia Hand.
“He made several references to the details of my interest in Russia over the years, mentioning for example, the poets I’d studied at Yale and Oxford, Fyodor Tyutchev and Vladimir Mayakovsky.”
Such meticulous preparation is likely to give Putin an advantage in talks with Trump, who frequently ignores his own intelligence briefings and appears willing to trust the Russian leader more than Washington’s traditional allies.
“Trump thinks Putin is his friend,” John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, told the Kyiv Independent recently. “I don’t think Putin thinks he’s Trump’s friend at all. I think Putin thinks Trump is an easy mark.”
Like many others, Gudkov suspects there could be more to Trump’s willingness to take Putin’s side in matters of vital interest to the West.
“Trump first visited Russia in 1988, and I know a number of Russians who have maintained relations with Trump for decades. They know him well as a person and as a businessman. A figure like Trump would have definitely attracted serious attention from the Russian special services in the 1990s. As a potential candidate for recruitment, he was practically ideal,” he said.
In contrast to his attempts to charm Clinton and Bush, as well as win Trump’s confidence, Putin barely bothered to disguise his dislike of Obama and Biden, a feeling that seems to have been mutual.
Where Bush said he had looked into Putin’s soul, Biden says he told Putin to his face: “I don’t think you have a soul.” The Russian president replied: “We understand each other,” Biden said. He also called Putin “a killer”, sparking anger in Moscow.
Obama and Putin’s meetings were notoriously frosty, even if the two leaders sometimes tried to put a positive spin on Moscow-Washington relations. In 2016, during his second term, Obama called Putin “not completely stupid,” a backhanded compliment that raised eyebrows in Russia. Izvestia, a Russian newspaper, was apparently so worried about publishing the remark that it translated it as “[Putin] is very clever.”
Bush later came to regret his initial evaluation of Putin. “If I had looked into his eyes at the end of my presidency, I would have seen something different. He was infected with power and the lust for money,” he said in Kyiv in 2023.
Clinton’s attitudes to Putin were likewise not entirely positive. While he described the Russian leader as “smart and thoughtful,” he also accurately predicted that the ex-KGB man could eventually “get squishy on democracy,” according to a transcript of a call with Tony Blair in 2000.
As Trump reverses US policies towards Russia, it is difficult to predict what, if anything, could cause the maverick American leader to question his “great relationship” with Putin.
“I don’t believe that Putin is in any hurry to end the Ukraine war because I think he thinks that Russia can win more decisively,” said the Russian foreign policy expert Angela Stent.
“But, if he were to string this all along for a long time, at some point Trump, who wants a Nobel Peace prize and to be known as the Great Peacemaker, could get frustrated and maybe impose sanctions on Russia or do something else. But I think it would probably take quite a long time for that to happen.”
The Times
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