Unlike Primakov's circle, Lebedev had spent his entire intelligence career in the West, working (like Putin himself) for the KGB in East Germany and for the SVR in the United States.

Even if Libya were temporarily partitioned, the West could keep up the no-fly zone with minimal effort.

And that has put the 53-year-old executive in the position of offering some guidance to neighbors in the much-troubled Eurozone as well as to stagnating Western powers farther abroad.