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Mikhail Fradkov appointed Foreign Intelligence (SVR) director

On October 6, 2007 President Vladimir Putin has named Mikhail Fradkov as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Fradkov replaced Sergei Lebedev, who was named executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

“As far as the director of foreign intelligence is concerned, this person is well known to you. This is Mikhail Fradkov,” Putin told reporters Saturday in Dushanbe, where he was attending a CIS summit. Fradkov, widely seen as an “outsider” and obedient technocrat when appointed prime minister by Putin in 2004, stepped down in September 2007 in a cabinet shake-up.

His resignation had been seen as the death of his political career, and his appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Service, known by its Russian acronym SVR, indicates a KGB background and his allegiance to Putin’s siloviki backers, analysts said.

It is possible that Fradkov is not so far from the intelligence issues as it might seem looking at his official biography.

In 1973, a year after he graduated from the institute, Fradkov went to India for two years to work in the staff of the adviser on economic issues at the Soviet embassy in India. Incidentally, two other future Heads of FIS served in India in the 70s. They were Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Leonid Shebarshin.

It’s interesting that Fradkov graduated from the Moscow Machine-Tool Institute, and scientific and technical intelligence was the main direction of our intelligence service in India. Former intelligence officers say that it’s there and in South Africa where main secrets of western defense technology were obtained. That’s why several networks of resident agents were created by KGB in India, one of them being in charge of obtaining technical information. One former intelligence agent, who lives in abroad now, affirms that Fradkov worked under cover in “T” department of KGB and afterwards he got the rank of colonel of the operational reserve.

Moreover, one of the major subjects in the Russian-Indian cooperation of that time was military supplies, and tanks first of all. Judging from his education, Fradkov could be an expert in that field.

It's also remarkable that when Putin presented Mikhail Fradkov as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to the personnel of the SVR, the then Russian president said that that service must “more actively stand up for the defense of the economic interests of our companies abroad.”, thus almost directly requiring a state agency to act in the interests of Russian business.