Could Putin be toppled? An interview with Richard Dearlove

‘One of the things about being in Moscow as the guest of the Russian government,’ says Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, ‘is this real attempt to make you feel like an outsider.’ It comes, he says, ‘from a fundamental Russian suspicion of foreigners’: ‘The Kremlin is designed to intimidate you. It’s designed to make you feel as if you are at the centre of a great empire.’

Dearlove joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1966, and though spies are always a little cagey about their past, it seems he served as an intelligence officer behind the Iron Curtain. After a stint as head of station in Washington, in 1999 he was appointed chief of MI6 by Robin Cook. It was then that he first met the man who is now Russian president. ‘I went to Moscow with Blair,’ recalls Dearlove when we speak via Zoom. ‘This was in that brief honeymoon period that we had with Russia after 9/11, and I was present at those meetings between Putin and Blair.