Yevgeny Prigozhin was the leader of a private militia that's been fighting alongside the Russian military in Ukraine.

The problem, however, on June 24 was that he was going the wrong way.

That morning, his troops stormed Russian military headquarters in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

Armored vehicles and military helicopters in Russia's Rostov region.

By that afternoon, he was leading his troops toward the Russian capital, Moscow.

Wagner vehicles that are heading towards Moscow.

And along the way, he explained why.

Prigozhin was suddenly the most serious threat

Russian President Vladimir Putin had ever faced.

The real surprise, though, was where he came from.

This was a threat coming from inside the house.

This was someone close to him who he had trusted, was really seen as a political ally.

For more than 20 years, Putin has constructed a seemingly impenetrable wall of secret police, intelligence agencies and military groups around himself and used it to eliminate anyone who challenged his power.

That is, until one of them threatened to bring it all down.

So who are the ones that keep Putin in power?

And why did one of them rebel?

I'm sorry!

I'm sorry!

Its products are riots, terror and mass murder.

Its tools are lies, deceit, blackmail, sabotage, war and revolution.

Its single goal is conquest.

It is the KGB.

The Committee for State Security was the Soviet Union's notorious intelligence service.

And it's where this whole story begins.

The KGB consisted of hundreds of thousands of agents, whose mission was to spy both in foreign countries and inside the Soviet Union.

It monitored Soviet dissidents, media organizations and even members of the ruling Communist Party, all in service of one main goal, keeping the top leaders of the Soviet Union in power.

The KGB even spied on the military, the other major force keeping these leaders in power.

By pitting the KGB against the military, the Soviet leaders had maintained a firm grip on power for decades.

Until one day, they collapsed.

The Soviet Union is dying.

Through the trappings of totalitarianism in Russia are falling away.

It was the Communist Party itself, the backbone of the Soviet state.

When the Soviet Union fell, so did the KGB.

And the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, broke it up into several smaller agencies with distinct responsibilities.

The Federal Counterintelligence Service was to prevent threats within Russia.

The Foreign Intelligence Service was in charge of spying in other countries.

The Federal Protective Service was to protect the president.

And others were responsible for things like border control, electronic eavesdropping and even Russia's many secret underground bunkers.

These are Russia's security services.

In the 1990s, they were dysfunctional and weak, while around them new factions were on the rise.

Rival politicians and a new class of ultra-wealthy businessmen called oligarchs were battling for power under a weakening Yeltsin.

In the midst of all of this, a young Vladimir Putin had risen to the right place at the right time.

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In the 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany.

Then in the 90s, he went from a mid-level bureaucrat to the head of the FSK, since renamed the FSB.

Then to be head of Russia's Security Council, where he coordinated with all of Russia's security services.

Next, he became Yeltsin's prime minister.

Then when Yeltsin suddenly resigned, he chose the 47-year-old Putin to succeed him.

Putin immediately set out to consolidate power.

And he started by calling on the only people he knew and believed he could trust.

The FSB was the security service that most resembled the old KGB.

It even worked out of its old building.

Quickly after becoming president, Putin pulled the FSB directly under his command, then expanded many of its responsibilities, and had it absorb other security services.

He then directed it to arrest oligarchs that didn't pledge loyalty to him and investigate rival politicians.

The FSB also trumped up fake charges against countless human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents.

This is how Putin captured so much power in the early 2000s.

He then elevated the other security services to create a new layer in the Russian state, alongside the military and the sprawling interior ministry, the MVD.

Putin was pulling Russia's thousands of spies, police officers, and soldiers onto his side.

And like bricks in a wall, they blocked anyone from rising up against him.

You have a leader in Putin who really grew up with that KGB background and has a sense of how to use these security services to his own ends.

This is Katrina Doxey, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

They purposefully operate in the shadows.

Members and former members of these services were known as the Solovki, and Putin elevated several of them into his inner circle, along with some trusted politicians and military leaders.

This was a collection of close confidants who Putin gave power and wealth to in exchange for their total subordination and loyalty.

Those influential members of the inner circle were the Solovki who worked with Putin before he was president, like the head of the Security Council, Nikolai Petrushev, who worked with Putin in the KGB back in the 70s, the same as the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, and the head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, worked with Putin in the 1990s.

Since they owed their positions to Putin, they helped keep this wall of security services and military firmly on Putin's side, as he continued to eliminate challengers well into the 2010s.

The Russian leader doesn't even try to be subtle anymore.

Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is murdered steps from Red Square.

Alexei Navalny survived poisoning from a nerve agent that CNN helped trace back to Russian intelligence and the FSB.

Navalny is now in solitary confinement in one of Russia's most brutal penal colonies.

With all his challengers defeated, the only factions left that could hypothetically threaten his power were in this wall.

So Putin has developed some tactics to coup-proof it.

Putin and various Russian leaders before him have always harbored this fear of the threat from within.

First, Putin gives the security services overlapping responsibilities.

For example, the SVR, FSB, and military all have formed units in charge of spying in other countries.

And Putin has created a new service in charge of protecting himself, a responsibility long held by the FSO and MVD.

He's forcing the services to compete against each other for his favor.

Putin also has them spy on each other.

Just like under the Soviet Union, the FSB has many agents inside the military.

And FSB agents are often arrested by other FSB agents.

Finally, Putin frequently purges personnel in these services.

If someone seems too ambitious, they're replaced with someone less threatening and more loyal.

Not even the members of his inner circle are safe from these purges.

Putin's tactics have purposely turned the services and those in the inner circle into bitter rivals, so that if one of them rises up against him, the others will keep it in check.

So it was no surprise when Putin allowed a new group to form.

Wagner is a militia that emerged around 2014.

Although it was technically illegal under Russian law, it quickly became one of Putin's most useful tools for achieving goals abroad.

Wagner helped the Russian military invade Ukraine in 2014 and helped it fight in Syria beginning in 2015.

Wagner also operated in several more countries that Russia had an interest in.

The person in charge of Wagner was named Yevgeny Progozhin.

He was an entrepreneur who built several companies, including one that catered meals for the Kremlin, where he caught Putin's eye.

Progozhin, in his young adulthood, was a criminal, and he did eventually build up this business empire using this sort of gang, mafia-style politics.

That sort of background and appetite to take on violence, to do whatever it takes to succeed, that really made him stand out to Putin.

So Putin and Progozhin's Wagner work alongside the Russian military, and for years, they seemed to work well together.

But that would change when Putin made the biggest mistake of his reign.

Vladimir Putin ordering an all-out air and ground assault on its neighbor.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine hasn't gone well.

The Russian military first failed to capture the capital, Kiev, and within a few months, only controlled parts of the east and south of Ukraine.

For Putin, these failures pose a huge risk to his power by possibly lowering his inner circle's confidence and increasing the risk that one of them might try and overthrow him.

So Putin has doubled down on his playbook.

He had FSB leaders arrested for providing bad intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion.

He fired more than 100 members of the National Guard, including its second-in-command, and fired several military generals.

For Progozhin, though, this was good news.

He saw this opportunity for Wagner to be presented as the competent ones.

Progozhin swelled Wagner's ranks by recruiting men from Russia's prisons, then pushed them to the front of key battles in Ukraine, most notably in the town of Bakhmut.

There, Wagner is reported to have used brutal tactics and suffered tens of thousands of killed and wounded, but on May 20, 2023, they captured it.

Wagner's success led it to overlap more with the Russian military, while also elevating Progozhin into Putin's inner circle, where he began to build up his influence and publicly criticize the military leaders.

Progozhin has come out publicly saying things that no one else could get away with saying in Russia.

But Putin didn't step in to stop Progozhin

He could play the two sides off of one another, thus using each of them to limit the other, and, in a way, can disperse some of that pressure from landing on him.

So Putin allowed the feud to escalate.

Finally, in June 2023, Putin's military leaders struck back by announcing they were going to stop the war by announcing they would absorb Wagner's troops, essentially cutting off Progozhin from the thing that gave him wealth and access to Putin.

So on June 23, 2023, in order to survive,

Progozhin rebelled.

As his forces raced towards Moscow,

Progozhin claimed he was planning to remove just Russia's military leaders.

But Putin was forced to go on national television and call Progozhin a traitor.

For the first time, the world could see that Putin didn't have total control.

And it was because the feuds he stoked between his subordinates were backfiring on him.

This was someone close to him who he had trusted, that he had given a surprisingly long leash to.

That shock factor was really part of what gave this such a large impact.

Just before reaching Moscow,

Progozhin agreed to surrender, but his rebellion revealed a much bigger problem for Putin.

His wall of security services did not appear to try and stop Wagner's mutiny, and many of Putin's top military and security service leaders were nowhere to be seen.

We did have evidence that some of the intelligence services were aware that Progozhin was planning something, but what's unclear is why actions weren't taken to really stop the advance before it could begin.

This wall has for years successfully defended him from outside challengers, but it didn't appear totally willing to stop one from coming from the inside.

It's a sign that Putin's grip on power could be weaker than ever before.

Equally suspicious is that Putin hasn't purged the security services for their inaction, and he's reportedly met with Progozhin and Wagner repeatedly since their mutiny.

That means for the time being, the war in Ukraine will continue to put pressure on Putin's leadership, but his wall of protection remains unchanged, cracks them all.

Hey, everybody, that's episode two.

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