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'Germany deports

Putin for spying'

LEIPZIG (Germany): Russia's Acting President Vladimir Putin was deported from the former West Germany in the late 1970s on suspicion of spying for the KGB in Bonn, a German newspaper reported.

The Saechsische Zeitung, in its Saturday edition, quoted sources close to the German intelligence services as saying that Putin arrived in Bonn in 1975, officially to work for the Tass news agency.

It quoted his alleged KGB boss in Germany, Oleg Kalugin, as saying that has espionage work was not particularly successful.

After he was thrown out of the German Federal Republic he worked in Dresden and Leipzig, then situated in the former communist East Germany, the report said.

The former communist mayor of Dresden, Wolfgang Berghofer, told the paper that Putin was "not particularly important."

A spokesman for Germany's domestic intelligence service in Dresden confirmed to AFP that Putin had worked in the city for the KGB.

A spokeswoman for Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, told AFP that Putin had spent the majority of the years between 1994 and 1990 in Dresden where he had "an important job in the KGB's foreign service.

"It's very difficult to say what he did exactly," she said.

Eventually, in 1998, Putin became head of the FSB, the chief successor to the KGB, and his meteoric rise was almost completed when Boris Yeltsin passed him the presidential reins on January 31, last year. He is thought to be certain to win March's presidential election.ÑAFP