Did Vladimir Putin torture people when he was in the KGB?

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7 Responses to Did Vladimir Putin torture people when he was in the KGB?

  1. Dub_Station says:

    The first thing they get taught.

  2. Lord drydreamer of that ilk says:

    Putin was an intelligence analyst on middle east affairs

  3. Merovingian says:

    The russian people prefer strong ruthless leader as it keeps the ussr by being lilly livered liberal the fragile peace in order over there you dont become head of the fragile peace in different methods of torture.

  4. skyblu says:

    he may well have learnt it. I dunno. But from what i read in some article, he wasnt very high up in the kgb, and worked a lot in the office side of things. He was only made head of it for a brief time to help fast track his political career. So presumably if he tortured at all, not that much.

  5. Captn. JC says:

    He was definitely trained on how to 'extract' intelligence, but as to if he ever did it himself, that is impossible to confirm or deny since his government most definitely hid the records (if there were any)

  6. Agility Man says:

    People have very naive understandings of how agencies work. It's highly unlikely that Putin tortured people and highly unlikely he received training is this.

    1. He was assigned to the 1st and 5th directorates in the KGB. Basically that means he worked for the branch responsible for foreign intelligence gathering (no torture involved there--instead you're trying to recruit assets or spies for your side or trying to get info by various means such as listening devices). You're more likely to engage in blackmail or bribery than any physical threat (since you often are overseas so trying to torture or use physical force on an American in America or a Britain in the UK is a good way to get PNG'ed). And the fifth directorate dealt with monitoring artists and censoring the media.

    2. The KGB defectors our side (meaning Mossad, CIA, FBI, and the British counterparts: SIS, MI-5 and other allies) have indicated that most KGB officers didn't receive training or deal with aggressive interrogation techniques. I'm not trying to argue that the KGB were mostly good guys--they obviously weren't. It's just that people have been watching way too much "24" and assuming all IC folks are the same--gun toting, torture wielding, covert ops folks. The vast majority of people in the intelligence community are analysts. Did you know that the largest employer of mathematicians in the USA is the US Intelligence Community?

  7. b'stardoh says:

    "Water boarding is not torture"
    Don Rumsfeld

    Thus the answer is no, Vlad did not toture people when he was in the KGB.

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