India, Dec. 7 -- I often wondered what was going on behind those eyes staring at me from across the table all those years ago. It was spring 1994 and I was in St Petersburg with a group of colleagues from our Moscow embassy meeting the mayor's team to arrange the royal visit of our future King. Sitting across the table was the newly appointed deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin, whom we knew to be a KGB agent who had returned to his home-base from Dresden following the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Putin revealed nothing about himself throughout all those meetings, a trait he continued as he rose to the top in Russia over the course of the next six years. Western commentators often portray Putin as irrational or bloodthirsty, a dictator o...