You all remember when Bush met Putin and came away saying that he got a "sense of his soul." This led Bush's famed "gut" guide to believe that he could work with the Russian President. It was the meeting that set the tone for the US-Russian relationship during the Bush administration.
Well, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, said people at the State Department aware of the conversation felt that Putin played Bush using an old KGB tale about a cross. Also, according to Ron Suskind, the CIA warned Bush that Putin "was a trained KGB agent ... [who] wants you to think he's your friend."
Via BTC News who got it from me :)
The question starts around 59:00 during this Book TV event for Kessler’s latest, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.
Quoting Kessler:
"At his very first meeting with Putin, Putin told (Bush) a story about a cross that he had blessed in Israel that used to belong to his grandmother. People that are aware of this conversation at the State Department feel that the President got played by Putin. There is no cross. There was just some KGB story that he made up. But it had a real impact on President Bush. That's when he walked out and said, 'I looked into his soul and decided this is a guy I can work with.' And for the longest time in the first term, if you talked to then National Security Adviser Rice, she always painted the relationship with Russia in very rosy terms. ..."
Funny how Bush will step all over the Constitution to spy on US citizens but he won't spy on his soulmate, Putin, when all it took was a battery.
From Ron Suskind's new book, "The Way of the World" via Politico we also find that the CIA warned Bush that Putin "was a trained KGB agent ... [who] wants you to think he's your friend.
In the first days of his presidency, Bush rejected advice from the CIA to wiretap Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2001 in Vienna, where he was staying in a hotel where the CIA had a listening device planted in the wall of the presidential suite, in need only of a battery change. The CIA said that if the surveillance were discovered, Putin's respect for Bush would be heightened.
But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, advised that it was "too risky, it might be discovered," Suskind writes. Bush decided against if as "a gut decision" based on what he thought was a friendship based on several conversations, including during the presidential campaign. The CIA had warned him that Putin "was a trained KGB agent ... [who] wants you to think he's your friend."