A Spy In The House Of #Putin

By Aleksandr Manheim, Daisy Sindelar

The relationship between Russian Prime Minister and probable future President Vladimir Putin and his wife of 28 years, Lyudmila, has been alternately portrayed as a nightmare union and a love story for the ages.

While the truth probably lies somewhere in between, new revelations about Putin's KGB career in East Germany suggest marital harmony was not high on the future leader's agenda.

Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, a journalist and expert on German intelligence, says he has proof a female West German spy was able to infiltrate the Putin household during the family's five-year stay in Dresden, East Germany. Her discovery? That Putin was an enthusiastic womanizer and a violent bully who beat his wife.

Schmidt-Eenboom, who has written numerous books and papers on Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency, maintains that the agent, a young woman operating under the name Lenchen, or Lenochka, was tasked with digging up information about the KGB's military and economic activities in southern Germany.

"But she quickly became friends with Lyudmila Putina and became a kind of trusted confidante for her," he says. "Lyudmila told her that Vladimir frequently beat her, and often cheated on her, that he had had trysts with other women."

Schmidt-Eenboom, whose revelations were first published in the German newspaper "Berliner Zeitung," has dismissed suggestions that the information was given to him in order to discredit Putin as he prepares to resume his role as Russian president next year.

The reporter claims he first heard the story of Lenchen -- who also went by the nickname "Balcony" because of her buxom chest -- while talking to a former senior BND official earlier this year.

"Of course, as a journalist, I needed to find a second source," he says. "Several weeks ago, I managed to meet with a contact at the Verfassungsschutz, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, who also had this information at his disposal."

Lenchen, he says, was a Baltic German who spoke Russian and German with equal fluency -- a skill that made her ideally suited for her work in Dresden's small KGB bureau, where she officially worked as a translator for the Soviet Union's Western Forces based in East Germany.

More >