Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)


Main Intelligence Directorate, abbreviated GRU, was the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union until 1991 and for a brief few months the foreign military intelligence agency of the newly established Russian Federation until it was deactivated on 7 May 1992 and replaced with the G.U. on the same day.

History

The GRU's first predecessor in Russia formed on October 21, 1918 under the sponsorship of Leon Trotsky, then the civilian leader of the Red Army; it was originally known as the Registration Agency. Semyon 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-organization 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-organization , 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 GRU had the task of handling all military intelligence, particularly the collection of intelligence of military or political significance from sources outside the Soviet Union. It operated residencies all over the world, along with the SIGINT station in Lourdes, Cuba, and throughout the former Soviet-bloc countries, especially in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The first head of the 4th Directorate was Yan Karlovich Berzin, a Latvian Communist and former member of the Cheka, who served until 1935 and again in 1937. He was arrested and subsequently murdered during the so-called "Latvian Operation" of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.
The GRU was known in the Soviet government for its fierce independence from the rival "internal intelligence organizations", such as the Main Directorate of State Security, State Political Directorate, MGB, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, KGB and the First Chief Directorate. At the time of the GRU's creation, Lenin infuriated the Cheka by ordering it not to interfere with the GRU's operations.
Nonetheless, the Cheka infiltrated the GRU in 1919. That worsened a fierce rivalry between the two agencies, which were both engaged in espionage. The rivalry became even more intense than that between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency in the US.
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 of Walter Krivitsky, who was 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, when entering the GRU headquarters, needed to go through a security screening. In Aquarium, "Viktor Suvorov" alleges that during his training and service he was often reminded that exiting the GRU was only possible through "The Smoke Stack". This was a GRU reference to a training film shown to him, in which he alleges he watched a condemned agent being burned alive in a furnace.

Activities

SATCOM

During the Cold War, the Sixth Directorate was responsible for monitoring Intelsat communication satellites traffic.

North Korea

GRU Sixth Directorate officers reportedly visited North Korea following the capture of the USS Pueblo, inspecting the vessel and receiving some of the captured equipment.

Heads

Miscellaneous

Defectors