It is common sense that by 1999, the CIA could not have been unaware that the Director of the FSB was onto them.
In September of 1999, deadly blasts rocked apartment blocks in Moscow, killing 300 people and wounding over 1000. In the aftermath, Western media was quick to point the finger at Putin, while echoes of this claim remain to this day. After the explosions, the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) identified the masterminds of the attacks as two Arab mercenaries linked to Osama bin Laden, Al-Khattab and Abu Umar [note, this is before 9/11, when the worldwide public generally did not know of Osama bin Laden.] Like other mercenaries of the Chechen Wars, they were trained in Chechnya but taught by Saudi clerics, and funded by Western dollars. The two terrorists were subsequently killed in Chechnya by Russian forces.
Western media claimed that it was Putin who masterminded the attacks, who was largely unknown at the time. Among their many claims, they posited that Putin needed to “solve” a serious problem to gain widespread popularity from the Russian public, in order to win the presidential election.
They failed to mention that the Chechen wars had been raging from the early 1990s, with horrific acts of terrorism being committed much earlier than that, such as the 1995 Budyonnovsk hostage crisis.
It is important to know that Vladimir Putin was the Director of the FSB (former KGB) up until the point of becoming Prime Minister in 1999. This is, perhaps, the only position of sufficient power that could have fully understood the rotting system from the inside out, as well as negotiated with the then-President Boris Yeltsin, to give up his tenure. Retrospectively speaking, Boris Yeltsin was a puppet instrument of the West within Russia, whether or not he knew it himself.
After Putin came to power, a number of the “downtrodden” agents of the West within Russia’s Parliament, as well as the oligarchs, would escape to the West. There, they would speak loudly on CNN and BBC of the “oppression” they experienced due to “Putin’s regime”, such as suddenly having to pay taxes off of overtly public goods, like natural resources. Others would begin their own political “opposition” parties, funded by the US State Department – see former Prime Minister Kasyanov, and current political party, PARNAS.
Given what we know now – the 16 year “removal of Putin at any cost” programme is quite evident; the murder of minimal 'opposition' figures such as Nemtsov (conveniently, outside the Kremlin – it did make for great photographs), the many heinous acts of “Islamic” terrorism that smeared the Russian state, and even disasters outside of Russia. The MH17 catastrophe, that overtly and without any real evidence (nor, any real purpose for the President) blamed Putin.
The fingerprints over this historical collection of unexplained events, shrouded in anti-Putin hysteria, seem quite identical to one another. It leads us in only one direction when it comes to the masterminds of the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings.
[By popular demand – this is the latter part of the “Unknown Putin” documentary, released in 2000. To see the first part, go back one video, “Putin knew what to do! His first interview, 2000”. This film follows “a day in the life of” documentary style, therefore there are many scenes of just walking or just driving. I have edited out the video to contain just the key points, unless the long silences added to nuance. I have also added captions, where the location or the context of the event got lost through editing.]