A Conversation With Putin.(Vladimir Putin, interview)(Brief Article)

Vladimir Putin will never call me by my nickname. He'll never invite me over to the Kremlin for sports. Neither will he ever identify a continent as a "nation," misname an allied leader or flub his lines in a Q&A on foreign policy. And he will pass all these tests without cram- coaching from his advisers.

I say this confidently after spending a bit--a very modest bit--of quality time with the Russian president. His press office invited me and eight other Western correspondents to hear his spin on the Slovenian summit with George W. Bush. But we talked about a lot more than that, going beyond missile defense to oil, to China, Chechnya, press freedom and his own lessons from life in the KGB. After nearly three hours of give and take, I left the room impressed with a man unnervingly in control of his job--even if I wasn't always convinced by his arguments.

Unlike President Bush, who declared Putin to be "trustworthy" after looking deep into his eyes, I can't claim to know anything about the Russian president's soul. I'm reasonably sure that whatever we managed to see of him was only what he wanted us to see. That included plenty of eye contact. He spoke hunched over the table in his trademark dark suit and tie, his dark blue eyes seeking us out and boring in whenever he connected. You could not help but feel the full force of his personality, and it wasn't always reassuring. This was a projection of pure intensity of self-conviction.

Putin's career as a spy helped make him the politician he has become. "To be able to work effectively with people, you have to know how to set up dialogue and make contact," Putin told us. "You have to activate all that is best in your partner." He said this partly in reply to a question I had asked about his time as a foreign intelligence agent with the KGB. How did his training there, I wanted to know, help him govern Russia today? A bit defensive at first, he soon warmed to the subject. It taught him how to work with people from a variety of backgrounds, he said. The KGB instilled "patriotism and love of the motherland," even as postings abroad fanned his disillusion, by showing that life in the West was better than in the USSR. And then there was the quality that emerged most clearly during our meeting--"the skill of ...