Strongman, The

the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.’
    Putin could hardly believe it. He turned to Bush and said in a quiet, boyish voice in English, ‘Thank you, mister ...’ Bush’s aides gasped. Condi Rice murmured to a colleague, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re going to have some explaining to do over that one.’
    Colin Powell later took the president aside and said: ‘You know, you may have seen all that but I still look in his eyes and I see K-G-B. Remember there’s a reason he’s fluent in German, he used to be the rezident [agent] in Germany and he is a chief KGB guy.’
    Bush’s claim to have ‘seen into Putin’s soul’ would haunt him for the rest of his presidency.
    Fighting the Taliban together
    In less than three months the friendship would be put to the test. When terrorists mounted the world’s most devastating attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush and offer condolences and help.
    Watching the coverage of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin was shocked but not entirely surprised. Only the previous day he had called Bush and told him he believed ‘something serious’ was in the making. This followed the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, on 9 September, which Russian intelligence interpreted as a harbinger of worse to come. Russia had supported the Northern Alliance with arms and cash for several years in an effort to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
    Putin at once called his security chiefs to the Kremlin and asked them what they could do to help. The first thing that occurred to them was to postpone a major naval exercise that was about to get under way in the Pacific, since this could be an unnecessary distraction for the US military. Putin called the White House, but could not speak to President Bush who was still aboard Air Force One, moving to a secure location. Condoleezza Rice took the call. She was in the White House bunker, where a decision had just been taken to put US forces on the highest level of alert, DEFCON 3.
    Rice recalled later in an interview: ‘I told President Putin our forces were going on highest alert, and I remember him saying, “I know,” and it occurred to me, of course they know, they’re watching our forces go on alert! He said, “We are bringing ours down, we’re cancelling all exercises.” And at that moment I thought to myself, you know, the Cold War’s really over.’ 13
    The Americans soon decided on their response to the attacks, which had been sponsored by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation operating out of Afghanistan with the support of the fundamentalist Taliban government there. When Putin asked what else he could do to help, the answer was clear: the only suitable places to launch an assault on Afghanistan, apart from US aircraft carriers in the region, were in former Soviet republics of Central Asia. And those republics – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan – while nominally independent, were states where Moscow had great influence.
    Putin’s instinct was to ask the Central Asians to cooperate, and indicated this to the Americans. But then he ran up against unexpected opposition within his own government. The hardline Sergei Ivanov, now defence minister, was one of Putin’s closest allies – like him, a former KGB spy, but more urbane and better versed in Western ways. He was also Condoleezza Rice’s main channel of communication in Moscow. When she came to office as Bush’s national security adviser, Ivanov was her opposite number, and, even though he had become defence minister in March 2001, Rice liked him and (despite diplomatic protocol, which should have linked her with the new Russian national security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo) she retained the link. At the Ljubljana summit, according to Rice, Bush asked Putin, ‘Who should we call if we can’t get you and we need a trusted agent?’ Putin said, ‘That would be Sergei Ivanov.’ And Bush said, ‘That would be Condi.’
    Just three days after the terrorist attacks, Ivanov, the ‘trusted agent’, suddenly went way off message with regard to Russia’s willingness to help. ‘I see absolutely no basis,’ he said while on a visit to Armenia, ‘for even the hypothetical possibility of NATO military operations on