It was the year that Vladimir Putin got lucky. "He could choose, quote-unquote, whomever he wanted to be the next president of Russia," says Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky. "The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 … provided a pretext for the Second Chechen War and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal …
I was born on 16 December 1959 in Moscow, in the maternity hospital on Proletarskaya Street. My colleagues – and about 15 from our course went into intelligence – were getting paid four times my salary, and in the evenings on the bus driving us back from First Directorate headquarters in Yasenevo, they would pat me condescendingly on the shoulder …
