Vladimir Putin is merely posing as a lieutenant colonel.
The Russian president also oversaw war crimes in Chechnya and helped frame a prosecutor-general to derail a probe into massive Kremlin corruption.
These are some of the claims made by Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB officer and fierce critic of Putin in an interview with RFE/RL.
According to Kalugin, Putin was "just a major" in the KGB, which he resigned from in 1991. "He could have become a lieutenant colonel a year later but he didn't," he tells RFE/RL.
Kalugin, who lives in the United States and has been sentenced by Russia to 15 years in prison for treason, says Putin's 1998 appointment as director of the KGB's main successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), actually violated guidelines stipulating that only a general can hold this post.
He also confirms speculation that the FSB was behind a sex-tape scandal that ended the career of Yury Skuratov, Russia's combative prosecutor-general in the late 1990s.
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