GRU (G.U.)
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, abbreviated G.U., formerly the Main Intelligence Directorate and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU, is the foreign military-intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Unlike Russia's other security and intelligence agencies, such as the SVR, the FSB, and the FSO, whose heads report directly to the president of Russia, the director of the GRU is subordinate to the Russian military command, directly to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff. Until 2010, and again from 2013 onwards, the GRU controlled the military intelligence service and the GRU special forces.
The Directorate is reputedly Russia's largest foreign-intelligence agency. According to unverified statements by Stanislav Lunev, a defector from the GRU, in 1997 the agency deployed six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR, the successor of the KGB's foreign operations directorate. It also commanded some 25,000 Spetsnaz troops as of 1997.
History
The first Russian body for military intelligence dated from 1810: the War Minister Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly suggested to the Emperor Alexander I of Russia the establishment of a permanent body for strategic military intelligence. In January 1810, the Expedition for Secret Affairs under the War Ministry was formed. Two years later, it was renamed the Special Bureau.In 1815 the Bureau became the First Department under the General Chief of Staff. In 1836 the intelligence functions were transferred to the Second Department under the General Chief of Staff. After many name-changes through the years, in April 1906, the Military intelligence was carried out by the Fifth Department under the General Chief of Staff of the War Ministry.
The GRU's first predecessor in Soviet Russia was established by the secret order signed on 5 November 1918 by Jukums Vācietis, the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army, and by Ephraim Sklyansky, deputy to Leon Trotsky. Since 2006, the Russian Federation has officially observed the date of 5 November as the professional holiday of military intelligence in Russia.
The military human intelligence service thus established was originally known as the Registration Agency of the Field Headquarters of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. Simon Aralov was its first head. In his history of the early years of the GRU, Raymond W. Leonard writes:
As originally established, the Registration Department was not directly subordinate to the General Staff. Administratively, it was the Third Department of the Field Staff's Operations Directorate. In July 1920, the RU was made the second of four main departments in the Operations Directorate. Until 1921, it was usually called the Registrupr. That year, following the Soviet–Polish War, it was elevated in status to become the Second Directorate of the Red Army Staff, and was thereafter known as the Razvedupr. This probably resulted from its new primary peacetime responsibilities as the main source of foreign intelligence for the Soviet leadership. As part of a major re-organisation of the Red Army, sometime in 1925 or 1926 the RU became the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army Staff, and was thereafter also known simply as the "Fourth Department". Throughout most of the interwar period, the men and women who worked for Red Army Intelligence called it either the Fourth Department, the Intelligence Service, the Razvedupr, or the RU. As a result of the re-organisation , carried out in part to break up Trotsky's hold on the army, the Fourth Department seems to have been placed directly under the control of the State Defense Council, the successor of the RVSR. Thereafter its analysis and reports went directly to the GKO and the Politburo, apparently even bypassing the Red Army Staff.
The first head of the 4th Directorate was Yan Karlovich Berzin, who remained in the post from March 1924 until April 1935.
The military intelligence was known in the Soviet government for its fierce independence from the rival "internal intelligence organizations", such as the NKVD, later the KGB. The military intelligence headquarters were located at, west of the Kremlin, whereas the NKVD was in the very centre of Moscow, next to the building that housed People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs at the bottom of Kuznetsky Most. Due to this fact, the Soviet military intelligence came to be known in Soviet diplomats' cant as distant neighbours as opposed to near neighbours, i.e. the NKVD/KGB intelligence officers. According to public statements of Soviet military intelligence veterans, the GRU had always been operationally subordinate to the KGB.
The GRU per se was established by Joseph Stalin's order of 16 February 1942. From April 1943 the GRU handled human intelligence exclusively outside the USSR.
The GRU operated rezidenturas, both "legal" and "illegal", all over the world, along with the SIGINT station in Lourdes, Cuba, and throughout the former Soviet-bloc countries.
The existence of the GRU was not publicized during the Soviet era, but documents concerning it became available in the West in the late 1920s, and it was mentioned in the 1931 memoirs of the first OGPU defector, Georges Agabekov, and described in detail in the 1939 autobiography by Walter Krivitsky, the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect. It became widely known in Russia, and in the West outside the narrow confines of the intelligence community, during perestroika, in part thanks to the writings of "Viktor Suvorov", a GRU officer who defected to Great Britain in 1978 and wrote about his experiences in the Soviet military and intelligence services. According to Suvorov, even the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to enter GRU headquarters, needed to go through a security screening.
Following the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, the GRU continued as an important part of Russia's intelligence services, especially since it was never split up. The KGB was dissolved after aiding a failed coup in 1991 against the then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It has since been divided into the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service.
In 2006 the GRU moved to a new Headquarters complex at, which cost 9.5 billion rubles to build and incorporates 70,000 square meters.
In April 2009 President Dmitry Medvedev fired then-GRU head Valentin Korabelnikov, who had headed the GRU since 1997, reportedly over Korabelnikov's objections to proposed reforms.
In 2010 the official name of the unit was changed from "GRU" to the "Main Directorate of the Russian General Chief of Staff", or "G.U.", but "GRU" continued to be commonly used in media.
The GRU chief Igor Sergun's death in early January 2016 caused speculations of foul play. At the helm of the GRU since late 2011, Igor Sergun was reported to have taken charge of the agency in the wake of the drastic cuts to the service implemented in the course of radical reorganization of the military at the hands of Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, and was credited with the GRU having recovered some of its former influence, most notably by playing a prominent role in the capture of Crimea in 2014 and in the Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine after an FSB-orchestrated pro-Russian unrest largely fizzled out.
The tenure of Sergun's successor, Igor Korobov, was marked by what news media construed as multiple high-profile failures such as the thwarted 2016 coup d'état attempt in Montenegro and the failed 2018 Salisbury poisoning, as well as an unprecedented number of disclosed GRU agents. Korobov died on 21 November 2018, "after a serious and prolonged illness", according to the official Defence Ministry statement. His death provoked speculations and unverified reports of him having fallen ill in October that year following a harsh dressing-down from President Vladimir Putin. However, former CIA station-chief Daniel Hoffman cautioned in 2017 that some of the Russian intelligence's recent operations that appeared to be botched might have been "discoverable influence operations", i.e. operations that were meant to be discovered. Similarly, in 2019, Eerik-Niiles Kross, a former Intelligence Coordinator of the Government of Estonia opined on the GRU's apparent sloppiness: "That kind of intelligence operation has become part of the psychological warfare. It's not that they have become that much more aggressive. They want to be felt. It's part of the game."
On 2 November 2018, while marking the GU's 100th anniversary, President Putin proposed restoring the agency's former name: Главное разведывательное управление.
Organizational structure
The GRU is organized into numerous directorates. According to the data available in open sources, the structure of the Main Directorate consists of 12 directorates and several auxiliary departments.The First Directorate is responsible for intelligence in Europe.
The Second Directorate is geographically responsible for the Western Hemisphere.
The Third Directorate is geographically responsibility for Asia.
The Fourth Directorate is geographically responsible for Africa and the Middle East.
The Fifth Directorate is responsible for military operations intelligence, including naval and air force intelligence.
The Sixth Directorate is responsible for signals intelligence and space intelligence. It uses over 20 different types of aircraft, a fleet of 60 SIGINT collection vessels, satellites, and ground stations to collect signals intelligence. Together with FAPSI, the GRU operates SIG1NT collection facilities in over 60 diplomatically protected facilities throughout the world. These agencies also operate ground collection facilities within former Soviet states' territory.
The Seventh Directorate is responsible specifically for NATO.
The Eighth Directorate deals with special purpose administration.
The Ninth Directorate is responsible for military technology.
The Tenth Directorate is the department of war economics.
The Eleventh Directorate is the department of strategic doctrines and arms.
The Twelfth Directorate is responsible for Information warfare.
Unit 29155 is tasked with foreign assassinations and other covert activities aimed at destabilizing European countries. The Unit is thought to have operated in secret since at least 2008, though its existence only became publicly known in 2019. It is commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrei Vladimirovich Averyanov and based at the headquarters of the 161st Special Purpose Specialist Training Center in eastern Moscow. Its membership included some honoured veterans from the Russian wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Ukraine and Syria.
Unit 54777, alternately called the 72nd Special Service Center, is one of the GRU's primary psychological warfare capabilities. Unit 54777 retains several front organizations, including InfoRos and the Institute of the Russian Diaspora.
SATCOM
Since the mid-1970s the GRU has maintained a satellite communications interception post near Andreyevka, located approximately fifty miles from Spassk-Dalny, Primorsky Krai.GRU illegals
According to a Western assessment of the GRU seen by Reuters in the autumn of 2018, the GRU had a long-running program to run 'illegal' spies, i.e. those who work without diplomatic cover and who live under an assumed identity in foreign countries for years. The assessment said: "It plays an increasingly important role in Russia's development of Information Warfare. It is an aggressive and well-funded organization which has the direct support of – and access to – Putin, allowing freedom in its activities and leniency with regards to diplomatic and legislative scrutiny."Special Forces of the Main Directorate
Commonly known as the Spetsnaz GRU, it was formed in 1949. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Spetsnaz GRU remained intact as part of the Russian GRU until 2010, when it was reassigned to other agencies. In 2013, however, the decision was reversed and Spetsnaz GRU units were reassigned to GRU divisions and placed under GRU authority again.Education
GRU officers train at a Ministry of Defence military academy at 50 Narodnoe Opolchenie Street, with intelligence agents receiving additional training at the Cherepovets Higher Military School of Radio Electronics. The A.F. Mozhaysky Military-Space Academy has also been used to train GRU officers.Activities by country
According to the Federation of American Scientists: "Though sometimes compared to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, activities encompass those performed by nearly all joint US military intelligence agencies as well as other national US organizations. The GRU gathers human intelligence through military attaches and foreign agents. It also maintains significant signals intelligence and imagery reconnaissance and satellite imagery capabilities." Soviet GRU Space Intelligence Directorate had put more than 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit. GRU and KGB SIGINT network employed about 350,000 specialists.Austria
On 9 November 2018 Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that a 70-year-old retired army colonel, identified only as "Martin M." was believed to have spied for Russia for years. The officer in question, whose name was not disclosed and who might have been approached under a false flag, was reported to have been engaged in selling official secrets to his GRU handlers from 1992 until September 2018. In July 2019, Austria's Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the colonel's handler was a Moscow-born GRU officer Igor Egorovich Zaytsev, a Russian national, for whom an international arrest warrant had been issued.Bulgaria
An investigation by Bellingcat and Capital identified GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev as a suspect in the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian businessman Emilian Gebrev in Sofia, following an attack that mirrored the techniques used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. That attack has been specifically tied to Unit 29155.Canada
The GRU received intelligence from Jeffrey Delisle of the Royal Canadian Navy, leading to the expulsion of several Russian Embassy staffers, including the defence attaché to Ottawa.Estonia
A Russian citizen named Artem Zinchenko was convicted of spying on Estonia for GRU in May 2017. In 2007 Deniss Metsavas, a Lasnamäe-born member of the Estonian Land Forces, was targeted with a honey trapping operation while visiting Smolensk. He was subsequently blackmailed into providing information to GRU handlers. His father, Pjotr Volin, was also recruited by GRU agents as leverage against Deniss, and would serve as a courier for classified information. On 5 September 2018, Major Deniss Metsavas and Pjotr Volin were charged with giving classified information to the GRU The two were convicted in February 2019.Finland
In September 2018 Finnish police ran a large scale operation against numerous sites owned by Airiston Helmi Oy company that over years accumulated land plots and buildings close to nationally significant key straits, ports, oil refineries and other strategic locations as well as two Finnish Navy vessels. The security operation was run in parallel in multiple locations, involving Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, local police, Tax Administration, Border Guard, and Finnish Defence Forces. During the operation, a no-fly zone was declared over Turku Archipelago where key objects were located. While official cause given for the raid was multi-million euro money laundering and tax fraud, media speculated that the company might have been a cover for GRU preparing infrastructure for a surprise attack on Finnish locations in case of a conflict situation.France
Viktor Ilyushin, a GRU operative working as an Air Force deputy attaché, was expelled from France in 2014 for attempted espionage of the staff of François Hollande. In August 2015, a GRU unit posing as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant supporters called CyberCaliphate took TV5Monde offline for approximately 18 hours.GRU operatives belonging to Fancy Bear/APT 28 used fake Facebook accounts to pose as associates of Emmanuel Macron's campaign staff, with the goal of interfering with the 2017 French presidential election. Georgy Petrovich Roshka, a member of the GRU's Unit 26165 was involved in the theft of Macron's emails, and subsequent distribution via WikiLeaks.
In December 2019 Le Monde reported that the joint effort by British, Swiss, French and U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an apparent "rear base" of GRU in southeastern France, which was presumably used by GRU for the clandestine operations carried out throughout Europe. Investigators had identified 15 agents — all of them members of GRU's Unit 29155 — who visited Haute-Savoie in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, region of France from 2014 to 2018, including Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who are believed to be behind the poisoning of the former GRU colonel and British double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
Georgia
During the 2006 Georgian–Russian espionage controversy, four officers working for the GRU Alexander Savva, Dmitry Kazantsev, Aleksey Zavgorodny and Alexander Baranov were arrested by the Counter-Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and were accused of espionage and sabotage. This spy network was managed from Armenia by GRU Colonel Anatoly Sinitsin. A few days later the arrested officers were handed over to Russia through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.Spetsnaz GRU unit No. 48427, an airborne unit, participated in the Russo-Georgian War.
Japan
In September 2000 Japan expelled Captain Viktor Bogatenkov, a military attaché at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, on allegations of espionage. Bogatenkov was a GRU agent who received classified information from Shigehiro Hagisaki, a researcher at the National Institute for Defense Studies.Moldova
In June 2017 Moldova expelled five Russian GRU operatives with diplomatic cover from the Russian Embassy in Chisinau, as they were believed to be attempting to recruit fighters from Gagauzia to fight in the ongoing conflict with Ukraine. Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigory Karasin rejected the allegations.Montenegro
The two Russian nationals indicted by Montenegrin prosecution as the organisers of the attempted coup d'état in Montenegro in October 2016 are believed to be GRU officers. One of them, Eduard Vadimovich Shishmakov had been officially identified as GRU in October 2014, when Shishmakov, who then held the position of a deputy military attaché at the Russian embassy in Poland, was declared persona non grata by the Polish government.The Netherlands and Switzerland
In mid-September 2018 the Swiss press reported that two men allegedly working for the GRU had been arrested in The Hague, the Netherlands in the spring that year, after the Salisbury poisoning incident, for planning to hack the computer systems of the Spiez Laboratory, a Swiss institute analyzing chemical weapon attacks for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In early October 2018, the government of the Netherlands announced they had arrested four GRU operatives on 13 April: Aleksei Morenets, Evgenii Serebriakov, Oleg Sotnikov, and Aleksey Minin. The Russians allegedly attempted to launch a major "close access" cyberattack against the headquarters of the OPCW in the Hague and also intended to travel onwards to the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland, which was testing Novichok samples from Salisbury at the time. Investigation conducted by open-source intelligence outlets in the aftermath of the Dutch government's revelations that used Russian road police databases led to identification of further 305 GRU officers whose private cars were registered at GRU headquarters in Moscow. GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev has also been documented as operating in Geneva and Lausanne.Qatar
On 13 February 2004, in Doha, two Russian men assassinated Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, an exiled leader of Chechen rebels. Anatoly V. Belashkov and Vasily A. Bogachyov, thought to be GRU members, were found guilty of the murder by a Qatari criminal court, which said the men had acted under direct orders from the Russian leadership.Russia
and Vladislav Surkov, members of the Vladimir Putin administration, reportedly served in GRU. Two Chechens, Said-Magomed Kakiev and former warlord Sulim Yamadayev were commanders of Special Battalions Vostok and Zapad that were controlled by the GRU. The battalions each included close to a thousand fighters until their disbandment in 2008.Approximately 300 commandos, intelligence officers and other GRU personnel died during the fighting in Chechnya.
GRU detachments from Chechnya were transferred to Lebanon independently of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon after the 2006 Lebanon War.
Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated by two GRU officers. GRU officers have also been accused of creating criminal death squads.
Spain
According to reporting by Bellingcat, El País and the Civica Media Foundation, the Audiencia Nacional is investigating a GRU group known as Unit 29155 and its operations in Spain. GRU members Denis Sergeev, Alexey Kalinin and Mikhail Opryshko are reported to have been operating in Barcelona, around the time of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.Syria
The Sixth Directorate was responsible for maintaining the Center S covert listening post in Syria prior to its loss to the Free Syrian Army in 2014. The Sixth Directorate also operates a signals intelligence listening post at Hmeimim Air Base near Latakia.In 2015 GRU special forces soldiers have reportedly appeared in Aleppo and Homs. GRU officials have also visited Qamishli, near the border with Turkey.
Turkey
In 2018 the Turkish government published CCTV videos from assassination of a Chechen commander Abdulvahid Edelgiriev, who was killed in 2015 in Istanbul, claiming the perpetrator was the same person as Anatoliy Chepiga from Skripal assassination in UK.Ukraine
The GRU Spetsnaz were involved in the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and in the War in Donbass. During the November 2018, Kerch Strait incident, the GRU's Unit 54777 sent text messages to Ukrainian men in the border region calling on them to report for military service.United Kingdom
In September 2018 the Crown Prosecution Service formally named two Russian nationals, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as suspected perpetrators of the assassination attempt of the former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March 2018. As part of the charge announcement Scotland Yard released a detailed track of the individuals' 48 hours in the UK. This covered their arrival in the UK at Gatwick Airport, trip to Salisbury the day before the attack, trip to Salisbury on the day of the attack and return to Moscow via Heathrow Airport. The two men stayed both nights in the City Stay Hotel on Bow Road, East London and Novichok was found in their room after police sealed it off on 4 May 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May told the Commons the same day that the suspects were part of the G.U. intelligence service and the assassination attempt was not a rogue operation and was "almost certainly" approved at a senior level of the Russian state.As a side effect of the Skripal poisoning investigation, Russian and Western media reported conclusions made by open-source intelligence outlets that claimed that GRU operatives were issued Russian foreign travel passports with certain characteristics that would allow their tentative identification. Through further research, in the autumn of 2018, "Boshirov" was publicly exposed as Anatoliy Chepiga, a decorated GRU officer, and "Petrov" as Alexander Mishkin.
United States
GRU officer Stanislav Lunev, who defected to the U.S. in 1992 while he was posted in Washington under the cover of a TASS news agency correspondent, in the 1990s publicized his claims that small nuclear weapons that could be fit into a knapsack or a briefcase or suitcase had been secretly pre-positioned in the U.S. and other countries around the world to be used for sabotage by Russia′s agents in the event of war. U.S. Congressman, Curt Weldon, pursued these claims publicly while admitting that they had been found largely spurious by the FBI. Searches of the areas identified by Lunev – who admitted he had never planted any weapons in the US – have been conducted, "but law-enforcement officials have never found such weapons caches, with or without portable nuclear weapons".Electoral interference
On 29 December 2016 the White House sanctioned the nine entities and individuals, including the GRU as well as the FSB, for their alleged activities to disrupt and spread disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election. In addition, the United States State Department also declared 35 Russian diplomats and officials persona non grata and denied Russian government officials access to two Russian-owned installations in Maryland and New York. On July 13, 2018, an indictment to several GRU Staffers was issued. GRU Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 are alleged to be behind the DCLeaks website, and were indicted for obtaining access and distributing information from data about 500,000 voters from a state election board website as well as the email accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and volunteers and employees of the Unites States Presidential Campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic National Committee. According to information leaked by Reality Winner, the GRU attempted to hack the voting machine manufacturer VR Systems, as well as local election officials.In July 2018 Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein released an indictment returned by a grand jury charging twelve GRU officers with conspiring to interfere in the 2016 elections.
According to Microsoft VP Tom Burt, a GRU-run group dubbed Strontium has been engaged in spear phishing attacks against at least three campaigns in the 2018 midterm elections.
Notable defectors and double agents
- Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk who defected in Canada
- Walter Krivitsky, a GRU defector who predicted that Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler would conclude a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, found dead in 1941
- Stanislav Lunev
- Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU officer who played a role during the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Dmitri Polyakov, reputedly the highest-ranking GRU double agent, who inflicted the worst damage to Soviet intelligence during his 25 years of work for the CIA
- Ignace Reiss, a GRU defector who sent a letter of defection to Stalin in July 1937, found dead in September 1937
- Sergei Skripal
- Viktor Suvorov
Directors
and Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu in February 2016
| Head | Term | President served under | |
| 1 | Yevgeny Timokhin | November 1991 – August 1992 | Boris Yeltsin |
| 2 | Fyodor Ladygin | August 1992 – May 1997 | Boris Yeltsin |
| 3 | Valentin Korabelnikov | May 1997 – 24 April 2009 | Boris Yeltsin Vladimir Putin Dmitry Medvedev |
| 4 | Alexander Shlyakhturov | 24 April 2009 – 25 December 2011 | Dmitry Medvedev |
| 5 | Igor Sergun | 26 December 2011 – 3 January 2016 | Dmitry Medvedev Vladimir Putin |
| — | vacant position | 3 January – 1 February 2016 | Vladimir Putin |
| 6 | Igor Korobov | 2 February 2016 – 21 November 2018 | Vladimir Putin |
| 7 | Igor Kostyukov | 22 November 2018 – present | Vladimir Putin |