Abstract
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - (Главное Разведывательное Управление/Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie) - or ‘GRU’ is one of the most inconspicuous organisations imaginable. Even among the generally taciturn cohort of Russian intelligence agencies, the GRU has been remarkable in its pursuit of secrecy. Whereas an endless stream of horror stories emanated from the Lubyanka, from the Aquarium - the GRU’s headquarters built atop a mass grave - there was only ever silence. This article will explore this most secretive and dangerous of organisations, offering a detailed assessment by comparing its Cold War past and its modern identity.
By Joseph Dillon
Introduction
Throughout the Cold War, the GRU was content not to share the limelight with its more conspicuous neighbours in the Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti - KGB), having no role in policing and allowing some of its disclosed international exploits to be attributed to ‘state security in order to remain a nebulous entity’ [1]. Of the few that did pay attention to the GRU, many considered it to be a much more dangerous threat to the West than the KGB, given its specific focus on foreign and especially military espionage [2]. Unlike the KGB, and perhaps because of its closely guarded inconspicuousness both at home and abroad, the GRU is the only security or intelligence agency of the Soviet Union to have survived the Union’s collapse [3]. In recent years however, the GRU has begun to enter mainstream debate. A poisoning in England, a cyber attack in Ukraine, election interference in the United States; increasingly the agency whose existence was once little more than a rumour is now garnering significant attention. Ostensibly, the GRU still values secrecy - it has no website, never comments on activity, and its organisational structure and budget remain state secrets [4] - but something has changed in its approach since its Cold War days. Why is it that such an organisation has been making international headlines over the past few years? What has changed that this most surreptitious agency is now willing to risk our attention?
Cold War
The GRU finds its antecedents in the Napoleonic wars, where Russian generals realised the necessity of modernising military intelligence efforts. Most European powers began to see the value of military intelligence around this time, but Russia was ‘among the first countries to create a unit for intelligence evaluation’ [5]. The GRU’s direct predecessor (The Registration Agency) was established by secret order on November 5, 1918 - a day that remains celebrated in Russia and is a holiday for military intelligence staff [6]. But it was Stalin who established the GRU as we know it today, giving the agency a mandate in 1942 as the main military intelligence directorate.
There are many cases where the GRU is thought to have been effective and successful: the Profumo affair, which led to the collapse of Conservative grip on power in Britain [7], the infiltration of the British Nuclear weapons programme and other illicit acquisitions of Western technological secrets, assassinations, guerilla warfare, an “illegals programme” [8], the activities of the Spetsnaz special forces division - the list of probable GRU successes goes on. The problem with properly assessing its record is that it is so patchy, so likely to have been manipulated by the GRU itself, that it can be difficult to parse the truth from various lies, exaggerations, and opportunistic rumours. For example, Stanislav Lunev, thought to be the highest ranking GRU defector, gave weight to the claim that his agency peppered major population and industrial centres in the United States with small nuclear devices, ready to be set off at the onset of hostilities between the superpowers [9]. Most doubt this claim but the lingering sense that the GRU was peculiarly ruthless, especially inured to the value of human life is one that remains difficult to expel. Perhaps the GRU was clandestine and deranged enough to have attempted such a scheme as Lunev described (and removed all trace of its existence), perhaps not. Analysts must be careful not to play into the Kremlin’s hands and overstate the reputation of the GRU.
Unlike the KGB, where an authoritative two-volume work has been produced (The Mitrokhin Archive), where dozens of former officers and agents have published memoirs and where the scholarship is in a much healthier state, the Cold War history of GRU remains beset by uncertainty. There are believed to be only two living GRU defectors; one has published what is certainly the authoritative account of GRU operations and the other was found clinging to life on a park bench in Salisbury in 2018 [10]. The former, Viktor Suvorov (his pen name) published Aquarium in 1985 and, despite certain issues around credibility, this account remains the yardstick against which all other claims are measured. The latter, Sergei Skripal, was the target of a now infamous assassination attempt. His case offers a powerful insight into some of the consistencies and some of the changes in the post Cold War GRU.
Modern Russia
The most drastic change for the GRU came not after the collapse of the Soviet Union but following the Russian war against Georgia in 2008. The Spetsnaz forces were considered to have performed well but military intelligence was generally very poor, with one particularly glaring oversight in failing to detect more advanced Georgian anti-aircraft systems [11]. Its punishment was severe: Spetsnaz command stripped, budgets cut, emblems changed, staff reassigned, etc. The GRU was defanged relative to other intelligence agencies. Its hyperactivity over the last decade, particularly under the stewardship of Igor Sergun, could be understood as an attempt to recover the prestige it once enjoyed [12]. Thus a modern paradox of the agency can be better understood; on one hand the GRU remains an extremely dangerous and effective entity but on the other, it has demonstrated an arguably uncharacteristic incompetence.
The GRU is home to some of the most dangerous hacking groups on the planet - Unit 74455 (Sandworm) and Unit 26165 (Fancy Bear). The GRU are singularly responsible for the most costly cyber attack in history [13] and regularly accomplish feats that only the likes of the United States’ NSA could reasonably hope to achieve. Its recent Solarwinds hack has compromised vast swathes of US government and business networks [14], and the infamous ‘DNC hack’ will continue to stir unease for years to come [15]. Of course they are not limited to the cyber domain. Explosions at munitions depots throughout central Europe [16] [17], an attack on French TV broadcasting [18], the annexation of Crimea, poisonings and murders around the world; the GRU has had no small share of recent success. The most notable exception is that of Sergei Skripal. This attempted murder via Novichok - a highly potent nerve agent - fit neatly into the GRU’s modus operandi but for one thing: complete failure. It was not simply a failure to achieve the overall objective of gruesomely murdering a former operative; but that each mistake was compounded by another. Dawn Sturgess, an unrelated passerby, was killed by callous negligence. The agents involved demonstrated abysmally poor tradecraft when almost every step was reconstructed by British Security Services. The embarrassing performance of those agents on Russian television then shredded whatever alibi they had originally offered [19]. Indeed, the list of recent headline grabbing successes of the GRU are matched, if not exceeded, by their failures: an abortive coup in Montenegro [20], the arrests of two GRU agents in The Hague attempting to interfere with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) [21], getting outfoxed by the Finnish authorities in attempting to carry out elaborate staging and infrastructure plans [22], the foiling of an important GRU spy by the Estonian authorities [23], etc. Add to this the indictment of seven GRU officers by the United States Justice Department in 2018 [24] and the impression given by the agency falls short of impressive. Perhaps the blackest mark on the GRU’s record is its links to the murder of almost 300 civilians aboard flight MH17 and its multiple distasteful disinformation campaigns on the same subject [25].
Conclusion
The GRU is not what it once was. A dangerous organisation, frightening in its disregard for human life, it remains. But, the catalogue of failures in its recent record suggests the agency has significantly altered since the Cold War. The Soviet GRU certainly took risks and was never short of aggression or cruelty, but, at least as far as we can tell, it did its job better. It is hard to imagine the ultra-secret organisation of old bungling a relatively simple operation and employing troll farms to dispel their embarrassment. In the jostling for prestige and the rough and tumble of the Siloviki wars in President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, the GRU has abandoned its former meticulousness in favour of seizing ‘the low-hanging fruit’ [12]. The result is an agency of contradicting characteristics; sometimes incompetent and embarrassing, sometimes capable of tradecraft excellence without peers. Given Putin’s predilection for playing security and intelligence agencies against one another, it is not likely that the modern character of the GRU will settle any time soon.
Sources:
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