Strongman, The

get notice tomorrow of who they are and they will be asked to leave the country within the next few days. So I need you to go back to the embassy, crank up your fax machine and let Moscow know about this right away.’ 7
    Ushakov at once informed his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who hit the roof. ‘It was completely unprecedented,’ he recalls. ‘It was a politically motivated action. That was our assessment. And we thought it was done to show who rules the world.’ 8
    When the news reached the Kremlin, it could not have hit a sorer spot. This was the job that Putin himself had done for 16 years; these were his fellow Chekists. He called a meeting of his Security Council – the ministers in charge of military, foreign and security matters. They decided to mirror exactly what the Americans had done – but make it worse for them. The head of the Security Council, Sergei Ivanov (also a former Soviet foreign spy), called the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and told her: ‘Our reply will be very cynical. We will expel 50 of your diplomats, but we will not do it immediately. We will spin it out over a period, and we will be very careful to choose not only real spies but “clean” diplomats as well. We will cause chaos in your embassy.’ 9
    The tit-for-tat expulsions began. But the Bush team was anxious to move on. This had not been their initiative. Powell called his counterpart, foreign minister Igor Ivanov, to suggest that it was time to close the matter.
    ‘It’s not something we can just close,’ replied Ivanov. ‘We will expel 50. And if you expel more, so will we, soon we’ll have no diplomats left and it’ll just be you and me handling our bilateral relations.’
    They agreed to call a halt. Ivanov flew to Washington on 18 May bearing a letter from Putin. The Russian leader was looking beyond the current tiff, stressing the same things he had spoken of with NATO’s Robertson: he wanted to restart the relationship, with a new type of partnership. Powell and Ivanov agreed that the two presidents had to meet. They chose a neutral venue – Slovenia – and a date – 16 June 2001.
    It was here, in the sixteenth-century Brdo Castle, just north of the capital Ljubljana, that Bush and Putin had their blind date. Putin has a tremendous ability to mimic his interlocutor and win their confidence – the facility that made him a good KGB ‘mingler’. A well-connected Kremlin journalist, Yelena Tregubova, for whom Putin had a soft spot, described being taken out to a sushi restaurant by him when he was director of the FSB: ‘He is a brilliant communicator ... a virtuoso ... able to reflect like a mirror the person he is with, to make them believe he is just like them. He does this so cleverly that his counterpart apparently doesn’t notice it but just feels great.’ 10
    In Brdo Castle Putin worked his magic on Bush. The American brought up an incident in Putin’s life that he had been briefed on, concerning a Christian cross which his mother had given him, and he had had blessed in Israel. Putin quickly understood that this resonated with Bush. ‘It’s true,’ he replied, according to Bush’s own account to the American journalist Bob Woodward. 11
    Bush says he told Putin he was amazed that a communist, a KGB operative, was willing to wear a cross. (Putin was not wearing the cross at this meeting, though he did bring it to show Bush at Genoa a month later.) ‘That speaks volumes to me, Mr President,’ Bush said. ‘May I call you Vladimir?’
    Putin then described how his family dacha had burned down and the only thing he wanted to recover from the ashes was the cross. ‘I remember the workman’s hand opening, and there was the cross that my mother had given me, as if it was meant to be.’ He had Bush hooked.
    The two presidents’ aides, waiting outside, were getting nervous as the private talks continued. Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, chatted with his opposite number Igor Ivanov. Powell recalled later: ‘Igor and I and the rest of the delegations were busy sitting round pretending to have a conference and discussing vital issues, but we were all just sitting there tapping our thumbs and our fingers on the table wondering what these fellows were doing.’ 12
    Eventually the presidents emerged to hold a press conference. One journalist asked Bush a killer question: ‘Is this a man that Americans can trust?’ Still under the spell, Bush waxed lyrical: ‘I looked