Vladimir Putin's chief of staff muses on their time as young spies Sergei Ivanov, a former defence minister, also recalled how he and Mr Putin had struggled to keep straight faces when instructed that "idiotic" Communist Party methods could help them in the recruiting process. Mr Ivanov, 60, the head of Mr Putin's presidential administration, said the two men were taught at Leningrad's KGB headquarters by senior former "Illegals" - the term which is still used for deep cover espionage officers working abroad, such as Anna Chapman, the glamorous businesswoman who was exposed as a Russian intelligence operative in the United States in 2010. He said in an interview with a Russian newspaper that he and the future president met after university in the city - now St Petersburg - on becoming officers "in one very small unit of one very big organisation called the KGB." Mr Putin, also 60, was a KGB officer from 1975 to 1991, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel, but he has never spoken in detail about his work in the spy agency. His official biography says he began his career in the secretariat and counterintelligence division in Leningrad, before a stint at the Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow and finally operational work in Dresden, East Germany. "We had very good teachers," Mr Ivanov told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Very experienced intelligence operatives. Many of them had worked many years abroad. They included - and I can say this for the first time because those people are no longer with us, although we remember them perfectly - our 'Illegals', who had returned, some of them after 20 years work as an Illegal abroad, and were handing on their experience to us, the younger generation. Mr Ivanov, who was a senior officer in Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service until the late 1990s, described how the two men had undergone a "funny" training session on "the role of the party organisation in improving the effectiveness of recruiting among foreigners." "Vladimir Vladimirovich and I only exchanged glances," he recalled of Mr Putin. It sounded like idiocy. But we didn't say that in front of everyone, God forbid! Now you can say such things. But then a very experienced former Illegal was talking, with an intelligent look, a respected person, a colonel. Mr Ivanov said the memory still amused him because recruiting agents was "exceptionally individual work" and had nothing to do with Communist doctrine.