KGB Eyes

Several years ago, my wife and I were at a private dinner with General Colin Powell, and a half dozen friends. I sat next to General Powell and posed to him several probing questions about his time as Secretary of State under President George Bush Jr. Long before today’s Ukrainian crisis, I asked him what he thought of Vladimir Putin. He recalled that moment when George Bush says he looked into Putin’s eyes and “saw his soul.” General Powell smiled wryly and said to me, “I was there too and looked into Putin’s eyes, and I saw the KGB.” (For those too young to remember the former Soviet Union, the initials KGB stood for the ruthless Russian spy agency using illegal espionage.) Putin headed the KGB in the days following the disintegration of the Soviet empire under its new name the Federal Security Service.

America and Europe are now locked into a deadly game of geopolitical chess with those eyes and the way they see the world. President Obama who mocked Mitt Romney for claiming that the Russians are America’s “number 1 geopolitical foe” looks more than a little foolish now. As Putin admittedly laments the collapse of Soviet Communism as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th Century, we have to wonder what’s in those eyes that Bush didn’t see. What I see is a man who has made sure that successful evangelical Christians will have a hard time in today’s Russian. Several ministerial friends of mine who pastor churches and evangelize in Russia have been shut out of the country, including one who can’t even return to his own wife and kids. Their crime? Being too spiritually successful and thus implicitly threatening Putin’s aims of a world where God is not too fervently worshiped. Pray for Putin that his eyes will someday see the eyes of Jesus looking back at him and offering him forgiveness and salvation.