“Putin’s Revenge”, Frontline, PBS

October  25 and November 1, 2017.

Transcript, Part One

NEWSCASTER:We’re now only a few days away from electing the next president of the United States─

NEWSCASTER:─turning its attention back to the election─

NEWSCASTER:With the election just days away, the president─

NARRATOR:Election day, 2016. As Americans headed to the polls, U.S. intelligence agencies were on high alert.

NEWSCASTER:─making the urgent push to get out the vote.

JOHN BRENNAN, CIA Director, 2013-17:Well, in the days before the elections, there was constant interaction between the experts at CIA, FBI and NSA. We were monitoring and using our collection capabilities to understand what the Russians might have up their sleeve at the 11th hour.

NEWSCASTER:Breaking news here. Wikileaks is about to release, quote, “significant material” tied to Hillary Clinton─

NEWSCASTER:The campaign is doing damage control tonight after Wikileaks released─

NARRATOR:The intelligence agencies had been tracking a multi-pronged effort to influence voters─ leaks of hacked emails, ads on Facebook and Google, on social media, trolls and bots spreading fake news, all they believed connected to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

JAMES CLAPPER, Dir. of Natl. Intelligence, 2010-17:This was the most aggressive and most direct and most assertive campaign that the Russians ever mounted in the history of our elections. And what characterized this were the variety and intensity of the techniques that they employed.

NARRATOR:Now they detected what they call OPE, operational preparation of the environment.

JOHN BRENNAN:The Russians will map the architecture and the environment of their targets.

NARRATOR:The target, state electoral systems, registration data bases, voter information.

JEH JOHNSON, Sec. of Homeland Security, 2013-17:I’ll never forget one day, John Brennan said to me, “I’m going to come brief you.” Now, it was not often that the CIA director by himself came to DHS to meet with me by myself to share intelligence.

NARRATOR:Brennan had told Johnson the cyber intrusions traced to Russia could be the first step in a plan to directly interfere with voting.

JEH JOHNSON:The thing that immediately has to come to you is, Hey, somebody might be trying to eliminate from the rolls voters in key states, in key precincts. Through a very targeted, careful effort, you could really do a lot of damage.

NEWSCASTER:─going to the polls, casting their ballots─

NEWSCASTER:And history will be made today─

NARRATOR:Inside the administration, the question, just how far would Putin go?

JOHN BRENNAN:I didn’t know if the Russians were going to do anything at all. And I thought if they did, it clearly would be a sign that Putin had authorized an aggressive assault against this country that to me would have been tantamount to─ to war.

NARRATOR:It would be Vladimir Putin’s revenge for a lifetime of grievances.

Pres. RONALD REAGAN:Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

NARRATOR:Reviving the old cold war with new weapons.

Pres. BILL CLINTON:We have the responsibility to advance freedom and democracy─

NARRATOR:An epic struggle─

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear─

NARRATOR:─between the leader of Russia and American democracy.

Pres. BARACK OBAMA:The United States will continue to stand up for democracy and the universal rights that all human beings deserve─

NARRATOR:The story begins on New Year’s Eve 1999. In Moscow, the future of Russia was about to change. With his country in turmoil, President Boris Yeltsin had an announcement to make.

MASHA LIPMAN, Russian Journalist:President Yeltsin rose on immense popularity, his sense of love and admiration, was progressively losing that.

NARRATOR:Across Russia, they tuned in.

BORIS YELTSIN:[through translator] I have made a decision. I’ve been thinking about it painfully for a long time. Today, at the last day of the departing century, I am resigning.

YEKATERINA SCHULMANN, Russian Political Scientist:I watched it on December 31st. I remember I was crying my eyes out. He just said, “Forgive me for what I haven’t managed to achieve.”

BORIS YELTSIN:[through translator] I want to ask your forgiveness, for many of our dreams have not come true and for the things that seemed easy, but turned out to be excruciatingly difficult.

MASHA GESSEN, Author, The Man Without a Face:He gave this absolutely heartbreaking speech. He said that he wished that he had done a better job by the Russian people. And he said, “I’m tired, and I’m leaving.” It was─ it was impossible not to cry.

NARRATOR:Yeltsin’s final act as president─ the father of Russian democracy turned over the country to his little known prime minister, a former KGB officer.

BORIS YELTSIN:[through translator] I have signed a decree giving the responsibilities of the president of Russia to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

NARRATOR:The new president escorted Yeltsin out of the Kremlin.

VLADIMIR RYZHKOV, Opposition Politician:[through translator] Next to him, a young Putin was standing. And Yeltsin shook his hand. And this famous footage, actually, the whole world saw. And Yeltsin said, “Take care of Russia.” Just those words,“Take care of Russia.”

NEWSCASTER:Yeltsin’s resignation came as a complete surprise to almost everyone.

NEWSCASTER:Even Yeltsin’s top ministers didn’t know about─

NARRATOR:From his first days as president, Vladimir Putin was obsessed with creating the appearance of a 21st century leader.

NEWSCASTER:─decision to step down could not have come at a better time for Prime Minister Putin, Yeltsin’s choice to succeed him as president.

NARRATOR:He commissioned film and photo shoots.

JULIA IOFFE, The Atlantic:He is a man who is obsessed with TV. He watches tapes of the evening news over and over and over again to see how he’s portrayed, to see how he looks.

YEVGENIA ALBATS, Russian Journalist:He wears very good suits, like any other Western leader. He speaks fluent German and he understands English.

NARRATOR:Putin cultivated the image of a reformer and a democrat.

MASHA GESSEN:Russian narrative was the victory of democracy, the triumph of popular will, that sort of thing. So a young guy who speaks a foreign language fits into that narrative─ as long as you ignore everything else about him.

NARRATOR:Putin quickly learned how to sell himself with the help of his public relations guru.

GLEB PAVLOVSKY, Fmr. Adviser to Vladimir Putin:[through translator] He began to think that everything can be manipulated. Any kind of press, any TV program is all about manipulation. It was decided what TV channels would show what news.

NARRATOR:They made sure a dynamic, vital and charismatic Putin was on display for all Russians to see.

MICHAEL CROWLEY, Politico:He’s healthy. He’s young. He’s virile. He casts himself as a savior. Temperamentally and in style, he is the anti-Yeltsin. He’s bringing back a kind of dignity and strength to the Russian presidency that had been missing under Boris Yeltsin.

NEWSCASTER:President Clinton arrived in Moscow carrying a message of cooperation─

NARRATOR:Putin’s first test with the United States, a visit from the American president. Bill Clinton had come to the Kremlin to evaluate Putin for himself.

STROBE TALBOTT, Dep. Secretary of State, 1994-2001:President Clinton wanted to get a little bit of a feel. He wanted to meet him in the─ in the Kremlin as president.

NEWSCASTER:Two presidents, one near the end his term, the other beginning a new era─

NARRATOR:Putin seemed indifferent to the American president who had championed Yeltsin and liberalization and expanded NATO.

JAKE SULLIVAN, Dep. Chief of Staff, State Dept., 2009-13:Putin conveys a huge amount through body language. He tries to show you that he’s the alpha male in the room through the way he spreads his legs, through the way he slouches a bit in his chair, through the way that he will look at people and kind of give them a dismissive hand wave.

PETER BAKER, Co-Author, Kremlin Rising:Putin doesn’t have much time for him. And this is not what Clinton was used to when it came to Russia. He was used to having somebody he could relate to. And Putin is a cold fish and Clinton didn’t respond well to him.

NEWSCASTER:If Mr. Clinton was hoping for a foreign policy triumph, he won’t get it here.

NARRATOR:Later that day, Clinton received a warmer reception from Boris Yeltsin and issued a warning about Putin.

STROBE TALBOTT:Bill Clinton looked hard into Yeltsin’s eyes and said, “I’m a little bit concerned about this young man that you have turned over the presidency to. He doesn’t have democracy in his heart.” And he reached over and poked him in his heart. And I will never forget the expression that came over Yeltsin.

NARRATOR:Yeltsin’s confidantes say by the end of his life, he would come to agree with Clinton.

STROBE TALBOTT:Before Boris Yeltsin died, he told intimates that it was a great mistake for him to have selected Putin as his successor.

NARRATOR:At the Kremlin in those first months, Clinton’s fears were realized. Putin began to centralize his authority.

SUSAN GLASSER, Co-Author, Kremlin Rising:He more or less laid out the path that he was going to be taking, which was to reduce democracy, to consolidate authority back into the Kremlin. And he took steps, some of which were small and symbolic, like going back to the Soviet-era anthem.

NARRATOR:It was Joseph Stalin’s national anthem with the words rewritten by one of the original authors.

JIM COLLINS, U.S. Amb. to Russia, 1997-2001:What Putin did when he came in was said, “OK, I’ve got a different project. We’re going to make”─ if you will, to coin a phrase─ “I’m going to make Russia great again.”

NARRATOR:Behind Putin’s vision for Russia, a resentment built up over a lifetime of believing his country had been humiliated by the United States.

PETER BAKER:There’s this resentment, there’s this grievance that’s eating away at him, and it’s fundamental to his tenure, this sense of grievance.

NARRATOR:Putin’s project to make Russia great again would lead to conflict with the West and interference in an American election. But the seeds had been planted long before, when Vladimir Putin was a young man. He was trained in the Soviet secret police, the KGB, to see the United States as the enemy. It was drilled into all the officers.

YEVGENIA ALBATS, Russian Journalist:The KGB was a monopoly that produced violence. It was a monopoly that was responsible for political surveillance on an everyday basis of Soviet citizens. Nothing could go without the KGB.

NARRATOR:Putin’s first assignment wasn’t undercover espionage. They thought he was better suited to counterintelligence.

SUSAN GLASSER, Co-Author, Kremlin Rising:And a counterintelligence officer, right, is somebody for whom conspiracy theories and the enemy within are the job and rooting those out and carrying that kind of paranoid, everyone might actually always be out to get us.

NARRATOR:The job was a disappointment.

MASHA GESSEN, Author, The Man Without a Face:He’s an unhappy man. He has wanted to be a secret agent all of his life, as long as he can remember. And then he gets posted to East Germany, and not even to Berlin, to Dresden, which is just such a backwater.

NARRATOR:It was in East Germany that Putin first came face to face with the conflict between the USSR and the United States.

Pres. RONALD REAGAN:Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

NEWSCASTER:This protest movement may now be reaching a critical moment.

NEWSCASTER:─remembered for communism’s loss of influence in the world.

NEWSCASTER:Here the feeling is the end of the cold war is at hand.

SUSAN GLASSER:For many people, there is a defining moment in their history, when all things after that moment refer back to it in some way.

NEWSCASTER:From ABC, this is “World News Tonight”─

NARRATOR:Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin saw such a moment when the Berlin wall came down.

NEWSCASTER:They are here in the thousands, they are here in the tens of thousands.

NARRATOR:Marking the waning power of the Soviet Union.

NEWSCASTER:─in Eastern Europe continue to─

DAVID HOFFMAN, _The Washington Post_/FRONTLINE:Putin sees that this thing that had always seemed to be glued together well, seemed to be impervious, that had gone from generation to generation of change in the top party officials, seemed to be a rock─

NEWSCASTER:─one battle in a non-violent war─

DAVID HOFFMAN:It was starting to crumble before his eyes.

NEWSCASTER:1989 will be a year remembered for communism’s loss of influence in the world.

JOHN BRENNAN:Mr. Putin joined Russian Intelligence during their waning days, in the latter years of the Cold War, when they really felt aggrieved and the much lesser power than the United States. So I think they just reinforced some of his feelings of insecurity.

NEWSCASTER:─say they’ll never return to communism and promise free democratic elections─

NARRATOR:The protests spread to Dresden. The angry crowds marched on the German secret police, the Stasi headquarters, then Putin’s KGB building. It would be the first time Putin confronted a group of protesters.

JULIA IOFFE, The Atlantic:He calls Moscow, trying to understand what he is to do, trying to get orders. And Moscow doesn’t respond.

NARRATOR:A Soviet military officer told him, “Moscow is silent.”

JULIA IOFFE:And this is a massive, massive trauma for him, that this massive historical event is happening, Soviet influence is collapsing before his eyes, and he calls home. He radios home, and home isn’t there.

NEWSCASTER:Freedom and democracy are coming to parts of Eastern Europe and a rusty iron curtain is beginning to come down.

NARRATOR:By the time Putin returned to Russia, the USSR was falling apart. Even in front of the KGB headquarters, the statues were coming down.

DAVID HOFFMAN’For many people, this was a time of great excitement and enablement and experimentation with democracy, and Vladimir Putin missed this.

NARRATOR:The American president, George H.W. Bush, declared it a triumph.

Pres. GEORGE H.W. BUSH:This is a victory for democracy and freedom. It’s a victory for the moral force of our values.

NARRATOR:But to Putin, the end of the Soviet Union was a humiliation.

PETER BAKER:The quote that he said once that really was so revealing, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. That’s how he saw it.

NARRATOR:In the new Russia, Putin had to reinvent himself. The former KGB officer became a political operative and a bureaucratic fixer.

JULIA IOFFE:He’s a master bureaucrat. Russia has always been a bureaucratic autocracy. This is how, for example, Stalin became the general secretary. He was an amazing bureaucrat. He out-bureaucrated all the other bureaucrats. And Putin does, too. He is very good at the bureaucracy of all of it.

NARRATOR:By the late ‘90s, he even earned the confidence of Boris Yeltsin. They were an odd couple, the former spy and a progressive politician who was trying to bring democracy to Russia.

DAVID HOFFMAN:Boris Yeltsin decided to break totalitarianism, to crush what was left of communism with a simple idea, which is maximum freedom first.

NARRATOR:Before long, Yeltsin promoted him to lead the KGB’s successor, the FSB.

SUSAN GLASSER:He undertakes this remarkable rise, basically, having nothing to do with the center of power in Moscow, to running its most important security agency, working in the Kremlin.

NARRATOR:Putin had convinced Yeltsin that he shared the president’s democratic goals.

YEVGENIA ALBATS:He’s a professional liar. To lie is what he was taught in the intelligence school. He was pretending that he was going to pursue the same development of Russia as Yeltsin did. But that’s all is just one big lie.

NEWSCASTER:Another major shakeup in the Kremlin. Yeltsin fires his entire cabinet again. Who’s in charge?

NARRATOR:Putin rose to become Yeltsin’s prime minister, the second most powerful man in Russia.

NEWSCASTER:─a new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, a man of little political experience but─

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA, Opposition Politician:The biggest and the initial reaction when people heard his name being announced as acting prime minister on the 9th of August, 1999, by President Yeltsin─ the first reaction was, “Who’s that?” Most people had never heard of this guy.

NARRATOR:But the perception of Putin would begin to change less than a month later.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:Just a few weeks, really, after he became prime minister, we had a very suspicious slate of apartment bombings across Russia.

NEWSCASTER:A bomb destroyed an apartment building in Moscow, and it does appear to be─

NARRATOR:There were suspicions about who set off the bombs. The government claimed it was the work of separatists from the Russian republic of Chechnya.

MASHA GESSEN:Everybody’s home asleep in their beds. And these large apartment blocks just folded in on themselves, burying these people alive or dead, but burying everybody in the building.

NARRATOR:For Putin, it was a moment to show the Russian people just who he was.

MASHA GESSEN:This prime minister that most people don’t even remember his name, and suddenly, he comes on television. He says, “We’re going to hunt down the terrorists. And we’re going to wipe them out in the outhouse.”

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russian Prime Minister:[through translator] We’ll be chasing the terrorists everywhere, at the airports or in the toilet. We’ll waste them in an outhouse. End of story.

JULIA IOFFE:When the apartment bombings happen, it gives him the excuse he needs to finally go after what has become a morass in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan.

NARRATOR:Putin struck Chechnya with incredible force.

GLEB PAVLOVSKY, Fmr. Adviser to Vladimir Putin:This was his decision. He was angry, and he wanted to punish the separatists.

JULIA IOFFE:He is seen on TV as a doer, a man of action. He goes down there. He’s talking to the troops. He is in command.

NARRATOR:As Putin suited up for the cameras, his political fortunes were on the rise. And just a few months later, he was inaugurated as Russia’s new president.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] The powers of the head of state have been turned over to me today.

NARRATOR:Putin’s first promise to the Russian people─ strength.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] I assure you that there will be no vacuum of power, not for a minute.

NARRATOR:He moved quickly to consolidate power. One of his first targets, television.

DAVID HOFFMAN:One of the first things he did was to take control of television because more than 90 percent of Russians got all their news from television.

NARRATOR:During the Yeltsin years, independent television channels like NTV flourished even as they ridiculed political figures.

JULIA IOFFE:NTV has a comic show called “Kukly,” puppets, and when Putin comes to rise in public life, it features a Putin puppet, as well. And he’s never portrayed very flatteringly. Putin apparently was driven to madness by the show and by the way he was portrayed on it, the way he was mocked on it.

NARRATOR:NTV and its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, were among the first to fall in the crosshairs of Putin’s government.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:He sent armed operatives from the prosecutor general’s service and the tax police to raid the offices of Media Most, the parent company of NTV, which was at that time the largest independent media holding in Russia.

JULIA IOFFE:Gusinsky is imprisoned. And while he’s in jail, one of Putin’s lieutenants comes to visit him in jail and says, “You know, you could get out this mess if you sign over NTV.” Gusinsky eventually does that, hands over NTV to a Kremlin- friendly oligarch.

JOHN BEYRLE, U.S. Amb. to Russia, 2008-12:In doing that, Putin made clear the broadcast media, which is how most Russians get their news, was no longer going to be outsourced. This was going to be a state-run operation. And it’s remained that way throughout Putin’s term.

NARRATOR:He had seized control of the media. Now Putin turned his attention to making Russia powerful again.

WILLIAM BURNS, U.S. Amb. to Russia, 2005-08:When Putin became president, I think he did begin with the notion that he could help engineer the restoration of Russia as a major power, as a kind of partner of the United States.

NARRATOR:Putin had had a difficult relationship with President Clinton, but now he plotted a fresh strategy to win over a new American president, a Republican.

SUSAN GLASSER:There was an attitude about Republicans rather than Democrats were better for Russia because they’re not going to lecture us about our internal affairs. And they’re not going to meddle as much as those pesky Democrats who are always talking about democracy and human rights and things like that. And so they’re going to be realists, and that’s good.

NEWSCASTER:President George Bush has called for a new approach to a new─

NARRATOR:His first chance came in Slovenia as President George W. Bush arrived for a summit.

PETER BAKER:Well, what does Putin do? He studies George W. Bush. He spends time thinking about who this guy is, what motivates him, what works him. This is the old KGB officer whose job it is to basically turn people towards his interests, and he plays it that way.

NARRATOR:Putin decided to focus on the president’s strong Christian beliefs.

JOHN BEYRLE:President Putin told President Bush about the time his dacha burned down and a religious medallion which had belonged to his mother which had gotten lost, and he thought this was irretrievably gone, and then a fireman brought him this kind of almost like a holy relic. It was a very affecting, emotional story and had some effect on President Bush.

PETER BAKER:And he tells the story with some relish and connects with Bush, who’s a very religious Christian. Now, whether Putin himself is a Christian or religious is, I think, up to debate. But he recognized as a political actor that it was a way to make a connection to a guy for whom this would be very important.

NARRATOR:After their private meeting, Bush and Putin faced the press.

NEWSCASTER:Question to President Bush. Is this a man that Americans can trust?

NARRATOR:Putin’s story about his mother’s cross seemed to have had its desired effect.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.

DANIEL FRIED, Natl. Security Council, 2001-05:And Bush gives that line, right, that “I looked into his eyes and got a sense of his soul.” And we go, “Uh-oh.” And Condi does her version of not comfortable. She just reacts, just for a second.

Pres .GEORGE W. BUSH:I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him.

SUSAN GLASSER:I asked Rice about it recently. She claims it was not so much a gasp as an inward-looking, “Ugh.” These are smart people, and they understood this was a comment that would be wrapped around Bush’s neck as it was for as long as he was president.

NARRATOR:It looked like Putin had won over the American president and gained his respect.

But then─

NEWSCASTER:That looks like a second plane.

NEWSCASTER:That just exploded.

NEWSCASTER:We just saw another plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

NEWSCASTER:This is a live picture. We are seeing the second─

NARRATOR:Bush’s presidency was transformed on September 11th, 2001.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

NARRATOR:To Putin, at first it seemed like an opportunity.

JULIA IOFFE:He is the very first foreign leader to reach George W. Bush on September 11th and to empathize with him, not commiserate, but empathize with him that, “You are finally feeling the scourge of terrorism that we’ve been feeling forever. Let’s work together on this.”

NARRATOR:But Bush would go his own way, countering the terrorist threat with an effort to spread democracy.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:It is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.

NARRATOR:The test case, Iraq.

EVAN OSNOS, The New Yorker:Vladimir Putin watched as an American president with whom he had some sort of fragile rapport embarked on a foreign policy adventure that the United States had not done in decades. And we turned it against a single man, Saddam Hussein.

NEWSCASTER:Tomahawk missiles targeting senior Iraqi leaders and possibly Saddam Hussein himself─

NEWSCASTER:Shock and awe is the phrase of the moment.

NEWSCASTER:A reference to the Pentagon’s much debated─

NEWSCASTER:─shock and awe to describe the sweeping assault on Iraq.

MICHAEL CROWLEY, Politico:Putin resents the kind of promiscuous use of American military force abroad. As a Russian leader, and particularly a cold warrior and former KGB man, you just inherently don’t like seeing the U.S. military in action.

NARRATOR:Regime change at the hands of the Americans. As statues fell, echoes of the final days of the Soviet Union.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices. And everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

JULIA IOFFE:And Putin knows what this means for him. It means that at some point, it’s going to be his turn, that regime change is going to come for him, too. And this becomes the driving fear of the Putin regime.

EVAN OSNOS:Vladimir Putin concluded that the United States, when possible, would use its power and leverage to depose leaders that it did not agree with. And from Vladimir Putin’s perspective, that was an existential threat.

NARRATOR:Back in Russia, Vladimir Putin tried to use the perceived threat from America to his political advantage.

JON WOLFSTHAL, Natl. Security Council, 2014-17:For Putin, the sense of America as an enemy or an adversary was not only, I think, the way he views the world, but he uses it as a very potent tool at home, where he can say, “I’m the only person willing to stand up to the United States.” And that’s a very powerful message for Russians.

NARRATOR:It was a message Putin used during a tragedy that began in the small town of Beslan.

NEWSCASTER:Men and women wearing explosive belts attacked a school─

NEWSCASTER:This is definitely the worse hostage crisis that Russia has ever seen.

NARRATOR:It was the first day of school.

MASHA GESSEN:If you could imagine an even more shocking terrorist attack than the several large apartment bombings that killed people in their sleep, that was Beslan.

NARRATOR:As the students entered their school, the terrorists took them hostage, rigging the school with explosives.

SUSAN GLASSER:The school that’s normally meant to only hold a few hundred people is holding hundreds and hundreds of people. It’s children, and it’s little children, too, and their moms and dads and their older brothers.

NARRATOR:Putin was in a trap. The rebels demanded he withdraw his troops from Chechnya or the children would die.

GLEB PAVLOVSKY, Fmr. Adviser to Vladimir Putin:[through translator] And the plan was that Putin would either capitulate or he would lose his image, his reputation. This was a serious crisis. This was a really serious crisis.

NARRATOR:Putin acted and ordered his army in. Tanks and troops encircled the school. And then on the third day, an explosion and chaos.

MASHA GESSEN:The army shelled the school at point-blank range. They fired at it from tanks.

NARRATOR:Putin’s troops were armed with rockets, grenade launchers and flame throwers.

MASHA GESSEN:A lot of the children who burned alive burned alive because of a fire that raged.

SUSAN GLASSER:It turns into this debacle, and the end result is corpses of little children stacked like firewood.

NEWSCASTER:More than 320 people were killed, half of them children, in the tragedy in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia.

NARRATOR:Outrage at Putin over the tragedy was growing inside of Russia. But when he finally spoke about it, he blamed the United States who he had long accused of supporting the Chechen rebellion.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] We demonstrated weakness, and weak people are beaten.

VLADIMIR RYZHKOV, Opposition Politician:[through translator] He said there are forces in the world which want to destroy Russia. He believes that the West played its role in two Chechen wars and that the West played its role in supporting terrorism.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] Some want to tear off a juicy piece of our country. Others help them to do it.

THOMAS GRAHAM, Natl. Security Council, 2002-07:Well, the only country that he could have had in mind, although he didn’t say it directly, was the United States.

NEWSCASTER:More than a week after the (INAUDIBLE) Beslan school siege─

NARRATOR:Putin used that threat to justify forcefully expanding his own power and control.

NEWSCASTER:He’s demanded a radical shake-up of security and greater powers for the Kremlin.

NARRATOR:He canceled elections throughout the country.

NEWSCASTER:─a stark message. Governors and leaders of Russia’s dozens of republics and provinces─

NARRATOR:And new rules forced out the most outspoken members of the parliament.

MASHA GESSEN:And it was a cynical move, but at the same time, it also expresses the way to respond to extreme violence and to extreme disorder is to create more dictatorial powers.

NEWSCASTER:He’s demanded a radical shake-up of security and greater powers.

NARRATOR:Now it was clear Putin had taken Russia on a very different course.

GLEB PAVLOVSKY, Fmr. Adviser to Vladimir Putin:[through translator] After Beslan, the Kremlin had full power. The government did not matter much any longer. This Kremlin, the power these days is always in singular. It doesn’t matter where it is. It belongs to the president. It comes from the president, flows out of the president.

NARRATOR:And in his own back yard, Putin was seeing a growing threat, popular revolutions in three former Soviet republics challenging Moscow’s influence.

MASHA GESSEN:People in the streets is a really frightening sight to Putin. People in the streets can make all sorts of things happen.

NARRATOR:They were called the color revolutions, and again Putin feared America was trying to export democracy.

STEPHEN HADLEY, Natl. Security Adviser, 2005-09:Putin concluded that these were efforts by the United States and intelligence services to, in fact, install in these neighboring countries regimes that would be anti-Russian.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:Because you acted, Georgia is today both sovereign and free and a beacon of liberty for this region and the world.

MASHA GESSEN:Putin is convinced that people don’t just come out into the streets. They have to be driven by somebody. There has to be a puppet master. Somebody’s funding them, and it’s probably the United States.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH:Americans respect your courageous choice for liberty. The American people will stand with you.

NARRATOR:Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan─ Putin feared Russia was next.

MICHAEL CROWLEY:I think this makes him sit up and pay attention. Could that happen to me, and if it does, not only do I lose a job that I like, what else do I lose? Do I lose my freedom? Do I lose my life?

JULIA IOFFE:He freaks out. He’s terrified. It’s one thing to go after the leader of Iraq, which is in the Middle East. But it’s another to go into the former Soviet Republics.

DANIEL FRIED:Putin thought we were the puppet masters. Like, man, we are not that good. I even told Russian television once, when they were accusing me personally of being the “Grey Cardinal.” Are you kidding me? But they really thought we were doing it.

NARRATOR:The fall of the Soviet Union. Iraq, the color revolutions, NATO expansion. what the Bush administration was calling “the freedom agenda.” Vladimir Putin had seen enough.

NEWSCASTER:Russian president Vladimir Putin is speaking at an international─

NARRATOR:In February 2007, Putin decided it was time to make a stand. He traveled to Munich, Germany, to speak directly to Western leaders.

MASHA GESSEN:And so he comes to the Security Conference in Munich and says, basically, “I don’t have to mince words, do I? I can say what’s on my mind.” And then he─ he just lashes out, and he lists all these resentments.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] First and foremost, the United States has overstepped its national borders in the economic, political and humanitarian spheres it imposes on other nations. Well, who would like this? Who would like this?

STROBE TALBOTT, Dep. Secretary of State, 1994-2001:My head snapped. It was so searing and blunt and I─ I felt this was the real guy.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[through translator] This is, of course, extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this. No one feels safe.

DANIEL FRIED:Americans were pissed, frantic, angry.

VICTORIA NULAND, U.S. Amb. to NATO, 2005-08:I was four rows back, and you could almost feel the humidity from the spittle that was spewing. Yeah, it was─ it was pretty shocking because it was pretty aggressive.

NEWSCASTER:Putin echoed cold war rhetoric by accusing the U.S. of making the world unsafe─

NEWSCASTER:Premier Vladimir Putin left no doubt who he sees is responsible for the current global crisis.

NARRATOR:The speech was a turning point.

DANIEL FRIED:Putin clearly in this speech was drawing a line and saying, “We’re not going to try anymore. We’re just giving up on you. And we’re going to make our own world in which we are the master.”

NEWSCASTER:It’s one of Putin’s harshest attacks on Americans─

NARRATOR:By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, the relationship with Putin seemed broken.

THOMAS GRAHAM, Natl. Security Council, 2002-07:I remember the president saying, “You know, I don’t know how, but we’ve lost him.” Putin was going in a different direction. And there was little that the administration, in President Bush’s mind, could do to put Putin back on that course.

NEWSCASTER:President Putin’s comments today were quite provocative─

NARRATOR:Soon Putin would have a new American president to deal with.

NEWSCASTER:Mr. Obama’s first full day as president was a busy one─

NARRATOR:In 2009, Barack Obama arrived in Washington.

NEWSCASTER:President Obama meets with his National Security staff─

NARRATOR:He came with the hope he could change relations with Russia.

NEWSCASTER:Barack Obama won’t have much time to savor victory─

RYAN LIZZA:Obama came in and thought, “Well, this is another relationship that was probably a victim of─ of, you know, the neoconservative foreign policy. So let’s take a look at it, and let’s repair it.”

THOMAS GRAHAM:Each American administration has come to office thinking that it had to, and it could, build a constructive relationship with the Russians.

NEWSCASTER:This is, as Obama famously said, “Pressing the reset button”─

THOMAS GRAHAM:And the Obama administration comes in and does that.

NEWSCASTER:Now Mr. Obama wants to make Clinton the face of his foreign policy.

NARRATOR:Obama entrusted the job of building the reset to his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

NEWSCASTER:─between Hillary Clinton and the Russian foreign minister, Lavrov─

JAKE SULLIVAN:Secretary Clinton met with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia in Geneva, and the goal of that meeting was actually to establish this thing called “the reset.”

HILLARY CLINTON, Secretary of State:I wanted to present you with a little gift which represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying, and that is we want to reset our relationship, and─

SERGEY LAVROV:Let’s do it─ let’s do it together.

HILLARY CLINTON:So we will do it together.

JAKE SULLIVAN:One of her staff members had the idea to actually memorialize the reset with physical handing over of a reset button.

DANIEL FRIED:Yeah, it’s this─ it’s this plastic button that says, “Reset,” and it was just─ it was kind of a gag gift, but it was also symbolic of what Hillary Clinton was trying to do.

HILLARY CLINTON:We worked hard to get the right Russian word─

JAKE SULLIVAN:Foreign Minister Lavrov looked at it and said, “That doesn’t say reset, that says overcharge.”

HILLARY CLINTON:You think we got it?

SERGEY LAVROV:You got it wrong.

HILLARY CLINTON:I got it wrong.

DANIEL FRIED:So, misspelled. That might have been prophetic. My Russian is a little rusty, and I trusted somebody else─ I won’t say who.

SERGEY LAVROV:It should be “Perezagruzka,” and this says, “Peregruzka” which means overcharged.

HILLARY CLINTON:[laughs] Well, we won’t let you do that to us, I promise.

SERGEY LAVROV:OK. Thank you very much.

HILLARY CLINTON:Thank you so much.

SERGEY LAVROV:Very kind of you. I’ll put it on my desk.

HILLARY CLINTON:Well, we mean it and─

NEWSCASTER:Headed to Russia, President Obama has a big meeting ahead─

NEWSCASTER:Shadows of the cold war will loom over his summit meeting in Moscow─

NARRATOR:Just a few months later, Barack Obama himself traveled to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin.

WILLIAM BURNS:I remember their first meeting in July of 2009 at Putin’s dacha, you know, just outside Moscow. They’re much different personalities. President Obama’s initial question, about 10 seconds, led to a 45-minute, you know, monologue by Putin.

JON FINER, Obama Adviser, 2009-13:You end up having to endure a bit of a history lecture. Deal with the- what we used to call “the airing of grievances” at the beginning of every meeting.

PETER BAKER:That tells Obama everything he needs to know about Putin, that this is somebody who is, in his mind, locked in the past, who is─ who is nursing resentment and who is going to never be a full partner of the United States.

NARRATOR:In the years that followed, Vladimir Putin would come to believe that Barack Obama was a threat just like the other American presidents.

NEWSCASTER:─tracking this very serious development in the Arab World for the United States─

NEWSCASTER:Huge demonstrations broke out in the cities of─

NARRATOR:Putin saw proof in the Middle East, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, the Arab spring.

PETER BAKER:Vladimir Putin looks at what’s happening in the Arab world, and he sees it as Dresden all over again. He sees it as the American meddling in other countries’ affairs to the detriment of Mother Russia.

NEWSCASTER:The sound of freedom─

NEWSCASTER:President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down.

NARRATOR:One of the first to fall, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

DAVID HOFFMAN:I think that particularly for Putin, what happened in Egypt was something that really went right to his heart.

NARRATOR:Especially after the president of the United States weighed in.

Pres. BARACK OBAMA:The United States will continue to stand up for democracy in Egypt and around the world.

ANDREI KLIMOV, Russian Senate:They’d like to spread American-style democracy, supported with the help of money from abroad, with the help of intelligence service, with the help of diplomatic service, and even in some cases, with the help of Pentagon.

JAKE SULLIVAN:Putin was personalizing the Arab Spring. He was seeing it through the prism of what could possibly happen to him in Russia. This had a distorting effect on Putin’s perception about what the United States was up to.

NEWSCASTER:The political mutiny that began in Tunisia, spread to Egypt and beyond and has reached Libya─

NARRATOR:The Arab spring conflict came to a head in Libya. It was there that Secretary of State Clinton took the lead. She built an international coalition to take on Putin’s ally, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

HILLARY CLINTON:Qaddafi must go, and the Libyan people deserve to determine their own future.

NARRATOR:Rebel forces captured Qaddafi and dragged him from his hiding place. As Qaddafi was being captured, Clinton happened to be in front of the cameras.

HILLARY CLINTON:Wow! Huh. Unconfirmed. Yeah, unconfirmed. Unconfirmed reports about Qaddafi being captured.

JONATHAN ALLEN, Co-Author, HRC:She found out about this as she was doing a television interview.

NARRATOR:The moments around Qaddafi’s death were also caught on camera.

JONATHAN ALLEN:Her response was─

HILLARY CLINTON:We came, we saw, he died. [Laughs]

INTERVIEWER:Did it have anything to do with your visit?

HILLARY CLINTON:No. Oh, I’m sure─

JONATHAN ALLEN:It was a moment of success and gratification for her. It tells you just how invested she was in the Libya mission and what she believed was going to be a great success for herself and for the United States.

EVAN OSNOS:Vladimir Putin talked about the fall of Libya over and over again. He would talk about the scene of Muammar Qaddafi, the “Great Lion” of Libya, reduced to a man hiding in a drainage pipe, cowering with his own gun in his hand, where he was dragged out by his people and was killed.

JULIA IOFFE:Putin watches that tape over and over and over again. It’s all he can talk about for quite some time.

NARRATOR:Vladimir Putin was determined Qaddafi’s fate would not be his own.

NEWSCASTER:Tens of thousands came out on the streets to tell Prime Minister Vladimir Putin they’d had enough─

NARRATOR:By late 2011, protests were breaking out in Moscow just outside the Kremlin.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:More than 100,000 people came out to say, “No, enough. We are fed up with this.” This was the largest demonstration held in Russia in Moscow since the democratic revolution of August 1991.

NARRATOR:The protests had been sparked by claims that Putin’s party had rigged the parliamentary election, allegations of fraud captured for the first time on cell phone videos.

VLADIMIR RYZHKOV:They took their smartphones, and they recorded everything. And they immediately uploaded that on the Internet, and the whole country could see it. So the social networks have played a huge role in those protests.

NARRATOR:They saw ballot boxes being stuffed even before the polls opened.

JULIA IOFFE:Ballot stuffing. Suddenly, people saw this evidence with their own eyes, and there was no explaining it away.

NARRATOR:Ballots hidden in the bathroom, campaign officials filling out ballots, the pens at one polling place filled with erasable ink.

JOHN BEYRLE:The Russian people reacted to that by going out into the streets with signs that said literally, “President Putin must go.”

NARRATOR:Once again, Putin saw something else.

JULIA IOFFE:What Putin sees is here’s American regime change coming for him finally. He knew that the Americans would eventually come for him, that they would try to oust him.

ANTONY BLINKEN, Obama Adviser, 2009-15:He was thrown by the protests. He was taken aback by the passion of the opposition, and had to look for a place to point the finger. He pointed it at us.

NARRATOR:In particular, Putin singled out Hillary Clinton.

HILLARY CLINTON:And we do have serious concerns about the conduct of the election─

NARRATOR:Clinton’s statements on the election were spreading on the Internet

HILLARY CLINTON:You know, the Russian people deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.

MICHAEL CROWLEY:He finds it incredibly provocative that Hillary Clinton feels the need to chime in at this moment of weakness, that it’s a kind of kick in the gut when he’s weak, for which he may never have forgiven her.

NARRATOR:And in the Kremlin, they believed it was a message directed to the protesters.

ANDREI KLIMOV:It was the first signal from the State Department that they’re really very serious in their attempts to interfere in our internal political life.

NARRATOR:Putin claimed that behind the scenes, Clinton was going even further.

YEVGENIA ALBATS, Russian Journalist:He said it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who provided funds and means to the Russian opposition and made them to get out of the─ on the streets.

NARRATOR:The State Department said they were simply promoting democracy, not trying to steer the outcome. But to Putin, Clinton had crossed the line, threatening his hold on power.

PETER BAKER:No question he’s looking at revenge at Hillary Clinton. There’s no question that he sees Hillary Clinton as an adversary. And he wanted to─ like, you know, he wanted to get her back.

NARRATOR:But first, Putin decided to settle some scores inside Russia. He ordered a crackdown on protesters and dissidents.

GENNADY GUDKOV, Opposition Politician:[through translator] They started enacting searches, arrests, detentions, actions against opposition leaders, persecution in the mass media. And they launched individual persecution that applied to tens of hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the country.

JULIA IOFFE:This was a clear message that it’s over. You’ve had your fun. It’s done. It’s over. The election is over. I am the president. You are not toppling me. I am the law.

NEWSCASTER:Bad things often happen to opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

NEWSCASTER:He was forced into exile in England after─

NARRATOR:Many of Putin’s opponents inside Russia fled the country. Others had died mysterious deaths.

NEWSCASTER:Vladimir Putin’s top opponent saying, quote “I’m scared that Putin will kill me”─

NEWSCASTER:─death of a former Vladimir Putin aide─

NARRATOR:One who nearly died twice from poisoning was Vladimir Kara-Murza.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA:There’s been a very high mortality rate in the last several years among the people who have crossed the path of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin─ independent journalists, anti-corruption campaigners, opposition activists, opposition leaders. Many people have died, some in strange and unexplained deaths, others in just straight-out assassinations.

NARRATOR:He had secured his power at home and now would deal with the threat from America.

THOMAS GRAHAM:For the Russians and for Putin now, they’re engaged in an existential struggle with the United States. This is, to the Russians’ mind, to Putin’s mind, about defending the survival not simply of Putin, but of the Russian state and the Russian people.

NARRATOR:Soon Putin’s Russia would have the capacity to strike at the heart of American democracy.

Pres. VLADIMIR PUTIN:[subtitles] We are a victorious nation. We’ll remember all our greatness. The battle for Russia continues. The victory will be ours. Thank you. [cheers]

DIRECTED BY
Michael Kirk

WRITTEN BY
Michael Kirk & Mike Wiser

PRODUCED BY
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Jim Gilmore
Philip Bennett

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FIXER, RUSSIA
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