The mysterious case of Vladimir Putin and Ronald Reagan | Russia

The mysterious case of Vladimir Putin and Ronald Reagan

He is the slightly geeky looking young man at the side of the picture. Next to him is none other than Ronald Reagan, about to shake hands with a small boy. And in the background are Soviet officials dressed in sober grey suits, amid the spires of the Kremlin.

But the historic photo taken during the US president's 1988 visit to Moscow's Red Square was today at the centre of a John Le Carré-style mystery. Is the camera-wearing blond youth insouciantly dressed as a tourist actually a tourist? Or is he in fact an undercover KGB spy, now better known as Vladimir Putin?

Pete Souza, President Barack Obama's official photographer, took the shot 21 years ago. He insists the tourist in the cream-coloured slacks and short-sleeved shirt is indeed a young Putin. The KGB recruit may even have been part of a plot to grill Reagan over his human rights record, it has been suggested.

Putin's press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, however, gave short shrift to the suggestion that the photo had accidentally captured Russia's future president and current prime minister. "It's not him," Peskov said, when he was shown the photo during a meeting with journalists on Wednesday at Putin's Moscow dacha.

This morning's Russian press also cast doubt on the claim. But they reprinted the photo just in case. Under the headline "How Reagan bumped into tourist Putin", the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper waded into the mystery, comparing the photo with another of a young Putin, taken in east Berlin with his wife, Ludmilla.

Souza insists the photo is genuine. At the time he was working as Reagan's official photographer. In an interview with National Public Radio, he said the encounter occurred when Reagan went for a walk-about with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary, in the summer of 1988.

Putin, meanwhile, was serving as a junior spy in the east German city of Dresden, Komsomolskaya Pravda noted — a long way from Moscow. The paper wanted to know what had happened to Putin's trademark watch. Unlike Putin, the mysterious tourist didn't have a watch on his right wrist, it told its readers.

This isn't the first time that Putin's presence — or absence — has been the subject of bizarre debate. Earlier this month, the Kremlin denied claims Putin had been a secret guest of honour at a private concert given in January by the Abba tribute group Bjorn Again, who had been flown into Russia to entertain a VIP Kremlin guest.

Band members insist Putin did attend the concert. They said he was sitting next to a woman wearing a cream dress. In a letter to the Times, however, Peskov said Putin had been meeting his cabinet at the time — and not, as the band had suggested, waving his arms in the air to Super Trouper.

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