>Putin says he was inspired to go into the KGB as a boy by watching the spy
>thriller "The Sword and the Shield."
NYT March 11, 2000 Putin Tells Why He Became a Spy By CELESTINE BOHLEN OSCOW, March 10 -- Not Marx, not Lenin, but a hit movie of 1968 set a teenager named Vladimir V. Putin on the road to his career as a K.G.B. agent. Or at least that is how Mr. Putin, now Russia's acting president and the favorite in the election on March 26, described how, in ninth grade, he was smitten by the romance of working for the secret service. The movie, "The Sword and the Shield," depicted the heroic deeds of a Soviet double agent in Nazi Germany.
It came out the year that Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces swept Czechoslovakia, and that students in the West were challenging authority with street protests.
"It wasn't just a whim," said Mr. Putin, 47, in an interview published today. "I even went to the building that housed the K.G.B. In other words, I was thinking about it in real terms."
The lengthy interview, which appeared in today's issue of the daily newspaper Kommersant, gives a picture of a man who in many ways has never let go of a K.G.B.-era view that divides people into simple categories of patriots and traitors.
Not 10 years after a statue of the original Soviet security agency's founder was toppled in Moscow in the euphoria of Russia's early democracy, Mr. Putin put forward a more sentimental view of the secret service that once held Russian society in the grip of fear.
"Agents work in the interests of the state," he said, adding that "90 percent" of all intelligence was collected with the collaboration of ordinary citizens.
"It is one thing if it is based on betrayal and material gain," he said, "and it's quite another thing if it is based on ideological principles."
He called Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. officer who joined Russia's democratic movements, a traitor and "an absolute loafer."
As a ninth grader, Mr. Putin said, he walked into the K.G.B. building in his native Leningrad -- since rechristened St. Petersburg -- and went right up to the reception desk. He was told that the K.G.B. was not a volunteer organization but that if he would go ahead and get, say, a law degree, then maybe the K.G.B. might seek him out.
Mr. Putin got the message, and seven years later, as he was finishing his legal studies at Leningrad State University, he was approached by a professional recruiter for the K.G.B. That was the beginning of a 16-year career that ended shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the interview, one of six installments that will be published in book form next week, covering the whole of Mr. Putin's career, the acting president described how he felt as a K.G.B. agent in East Germany in 1989 when he found himself surrounding by a surging mass of demonstrators.
"A crowd gathered around the house where our intelligence group worked," he said. "The Germans had attacked their own security ministry. That was their internal business. But we were not their internal business. We were in serious danger. We had documents there. Nobody stirred a finger to protect us."
Fluent in German, Mr. Putin was able to hold off the crowd until he could telephone the nearby Soviet military headquarters. The response was chilling. "We can't do anything without orders from Moscow," he was told. "Moscow is silent."
"Moscow is silent," he repeated in the interview. "I got a feeling that at that time that the country no longer existed."
Mr. Putin described his separation from the K.G.B. after the attempted coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in August 1991 as a wrenching experience. When he later stashed his Communist Party card and other documents away in a desk drawer, he said he "made the sign of the cross over them" -- as if laying that part of his life to rest.
But last August, when President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed him prime minister at a time when the southern Russian province of Dagestan was under attack by Chechen militants, Mr. Putin said he again felt the call of patriotic duty.
"I made a decision for myself: my career is very likely to end here, but my mission, my historic mission -- sounds high-flown, but that is true -- is to resolve the situation in the Northern Caucasus," he said.
Mr. Putin made no apologies for the harshness of the war that followed, and he vowed to continue until all armed Chechen rebels were "scattered and destroyed."
"Perhaps after the presidential elections we should introduce direct presidential rule there for a couple of years," he said. "We must not abandon Chechnya as we have once already abandoned it.
"And indeed, we did a criminal thing then," he said, referring to the aftermath of the earlier war, of 1994-96.
Mr. Putin, a master judo wrestler whose public image is that of a tough leader, said he was not disturbed by repeated death threats from the Chechen militants.
"Only one thing can be effective in such circumstances -- to go on the offensive," he said. "You must hit first, and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet."
Mr. Putin was just as harsh in his assessment of Andrei Babitsky, the Russian reporter for the American-funded Radio Liberty who was arrested by Russian forces in Chechnya in January. Mr. Babitsky's arrest and subsequent swap to Chechen militants have raised alarms about the Kremlin's attitude toward press freedom.
"It is not good to collaborate with bandits," he said of Mr. Babitsky, who was one of the few journalists who reported on Russia's second war in Chechnya from the side of the Chechen fighters, commonly referred to in Moscow as bandits or terrorists.
Mr. Babitsky, who resurfaced last week, is being investigated by the Russian authorities, who according to some reports today are getting ready to charge him with assisting armed illegal militias.
When one of Mr. Putin's interviewers interjected to say that journalists are not combatants, he retorted, "What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun."
What about freedom of speech, Mr. Putin was asked. "We interpret freedom of expression in different ways," he said.
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