© Sputnik/ Alexei Druzhinin
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.
Comment: Obama's reach out is late and perfunctory. Erdogan is playing all sides against each other. He is the problem child nobody wants but no one else can have.