Low Pro

An excerpt from First Person, the "astonishingly frank self-portrait by Russia's President, Valdmir Putin", the produce of a series of interviews with the Philadelphia Inquirer:

There are reports that you took part in an operation called Lightbeam:
I don't know, exactly. I wasn't involved in it. I don't even know if it was executed or not...

Well, they wanted to portray you as a s super-spy. And you're denying everything. But then why did you get promoted?
For concrete results in my work-that's what it was called. Success was measured by the quantity of realized units of information. If you procuired information from the sources you had at your disposal, put it together, and sent it to the releveant offices, you would obtain the appropriate evaluations.