The young Soviet diplomat called himself Alexander Rybin. He spoke excellent German, kept a close eye on underground youth culture, and knew the exact number of punk rockers in East Germany in the early 1980s.
Officially, he was a vice-consul of the Soviet consulate in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1984. But he bore a striking resemblance to early photos of a KGB agent named Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Putin, who will be sworn into office next month as Russia's president, has acknowledged he was a KGB agent for 16 years. Yet his biography still shows a mysterious blank spot in the early 1980s, at the peak of the Cold War.
He has confirmed that he worked for the KGB in Dresden, East Germany, from 1985 to 1990, before returning to the Soviet Union. There are intriguing hints, however, that he may have entered East or West Germany as early as 1982 or 1983 -- for tasks that he apparently doesn't want to reveal.
German sources, one of them a former senior officer in the East German secret police, believe Mr. Putin visited West Germany on several occasions from 1982 to 1984 under a false identity.
If confirmed, this could complicate relations between Germany and the new Russian leader, casting an ominous new light on Mr. Putin's history as a spy.
Some analysts believe Moscow and Berlin have a strong interest in keeping quiet about Mr. Putin's espionage, to avoid any awkward diplomatic problems between two countries with a growing financial relationship. "The Germans want to keep this a closed book," one Western diplomat said.
Natalya Gevorkyan, a Russian journalist who interviewed Mr. Putin extensively last month for a pre-election biography, says the acting president never explained exactly what he did in the early 1980s. But she believes he may have been involved in a special KGB group that was being trained for illegal espionage in the West.
In 1987, Mr. Putin was awarded a bronze medal by the Stasi, the East German secret police. It is normally awarded after five years of service, according to a senior German security official.
"It would have been very unusual to get a medal in just two years," said the official, who has access to the archives of the East German secret police and spoke on condition of anonymity.
"There are some indications that he could have been in Germany in 1983. It looks like it was 1983, although it's not clear. Various sources speak of 1983."
In the archives of the German Foreign Ministry, there is a photograph of a Soviet diplomat identified as Alexander Rybin, who was accredited in East Germany from 1982 to 1986.
The Globe and Mail has requested permission to see the photo, but the German government so far has not let anyone outside the government see it.
Birgit Kmezik, an official in a German Foreign Ministry division that holds former East German diplomatic documents, has seen the photo and says there is "considerable similarity" between it and the photos of Mr. Putin she has seen in newspapers and on television. Both seem to have the same facial features, the same type of hair, and even the same style of combing the hair, she said.
Only a single small index card is attached to the passport-style photograph of the Soviet diplomat. It shows an accreditation stamp for every year from 1982 to 1986. It also shows a birth date in 1947, five years before Mr. Putin's real birth date, although this detail could have been falsified.
Uwe Mueller, a foreign-policy researcher in Leipzig who worked as an East German bureaucrat in the 1980s, is convinced that Alexander Rybin and Vladimir Putin are the same person. He met the Soviet diplomat several times in the first half of 1984 and still has a faded business card with the diplomat's name, identifying him as vice-consul of the Soviet consulate in Leipzig.
Like the Russian president-elect, Mr. Rybin was a short man who spoke almost flawless German, never smoked and seldom drank, Mr. Mueller said in an interview.
The diplomat seemed to have an unusual degree of freedom in the consulate and never seemed to deal with visas or other routine work, Mr. Mueller said. Instead he was knowledgeable about dissident youth and religious groups, and he wanted to know Mr. Mueller's opinion of the mood of East German youth. That diplomat also said he had previously worked in the West German cities of Bonn and Hamburg, presumably in 1983.
He disappeared from the Leipzig consulate in the second half of 1984. Asked what happened to him, his successor told Mr. Mueller that he was still somewhere in East Germany. But he hinted that the diplomat in question was now in a military or intelligence job.
In Russian media interviews, Mr. Putin has said he graduated from Leningrad State University in 1975 and spent seven years in various KGB jobs and intelligence training posts, mostly in Leningrad.
Then he went to a special espionage training institute in Moscow, apparently around 1982. But he has never disclosed what he did after leaving the institute, until his posting to Dresden in 1985.
When his biographers asked him whether he had travelled to West Germany during his KGB years, Mr. Putin gave an evasive answer: "Not during my work in East Germany."
In early 1984, in the first meeting between Mr. Mueller and the man who called himself Mr. Rybin, the diplomat told him that Moscow was concerned about the mood of young East Germans. He seemed remarkably knowledgeable, Mr. Mueller said. "He knew the exact number of punk rockers in East Germany."
Joachim Bachmann, who worked in counterintelligence for the Stasi in Leipzig from 1973 to 1990, says his Stasi contacts have told him that Mr. Putin was gathering political intelligence as a spy in East and West Germany from 1982 to 1984, probably travelling from Moscow on occasional assignments under the cover of being a journalist.
Geoffrey York