Inside Putin’s underpants op
I don’t recall reading anything like Paul Roderick Gregory’s Hill column “The Kremlin, FSB, and the ‘Berlin patient’s’ underpants” and related news stories. The Coen Brothers could turn it to good use in a film like
Burn After Reading. Gregory tells how Vladimir Putin’s would-be assassination victim Aleksei Navalny extracted an account of the operation from the failed FSB assassin Konstantin Kudryavtsev himself. In a four-hour December 17 press conference, Putin referred to Navalny only as the “Berlin patient.” Gregory’s account draws on this reference to Kudryavtsev:
[T]he “Berlin patient” waked purported assassination-team member Konstantin Kudryavtsev (“Konstantin”) with a 7 a.m. telephone call using a fake FSB caller-ID. Navalny, playing a harried assistant, informed Konstantin ominously that the director of the National Security Council that manages the FSB, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, was demanding a report