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GRU (Soviet Union)

March 18, 2023

This article is about the Soviet GRU. For the Russian G.U, see GRU (Russian Federation).

Main Intelligence Directorate (Russian: Главное разведывательное управление, tr. Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, IPA: [ˈglavnəjə rɐzˈvʲɛdɨvətʲɪlʲnəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪjə]), abbreviated GRU (Russian: ГРУ, IPA: [geeˈru]), was the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union until 1991. For a few months it was also the foreign military intelligence agency of the newly established Russian Federation until 7 May 1992 when it was dissolved and the Russian GRU took over its activities.

GRU Generalnogo Shtaba
Glavnoje Razvedyvatel'noje Upravlenije
ГРУ СССР
Главное разведывательное управление
Agency overview
Formed5 November 1918
as Registration Agency; GRU since 1942
Preceding agencies
  • Fifth Department of the Russian Imperial Chief of Staff
  • Expedition for Secret Affairs
Dissolved7 May 1992
Superseding agency
Jurisdiction
HeadquartersMoscow
EmployeesClassified
Annual budgetClassified
Parent agencyMinistry of Defense
Child agencies
The emblem of the RVS

History

 
Showpiece of exhibition dedicated to 80th anniversary of Russian foreign intelligence service

The GRU's first predecessor in Russia formed on October 21, 1918 by secret order under the sponsorship of Leon Trotsky (then the civilian leader of the Red Army), signed by Jukums Vācietis, the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army (RKKA), and by Ephraim Sklyansky, deputy to Trotsky;[1] it was originally known as the Registration Directorate (Registrupravlenie, or RU). 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 (at the time called the Red Army Field Staff – Polevoi Shtab). 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 (Registration Department). That year, following the Soviet–Polish War, it was elevated in status to become the Second (Intelligence) 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 (then Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenye) became the Fourth (Intelligence) 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 [in 1926], 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 (Gosudarstvennaia komissiia oborony, or GKO), 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.[2]

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 (May 1938) and subsequently murdered (July 1938) during the so-called "Latvian Operation" of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

The GRU in its modern form was created by Joseph Stalin in February 1942, less than a year after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. From April 1943 the GRU handled human intelligence exclusively outside the USSR.[3][4]

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 rezidenturas (residencies) all over the world, along with the SIGINT (signals intelligence) station in Lourdes, Cuba, and throughout the Soviet-bloc countries.

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 (GUGB), State Political Directorate (GPU), MGB, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, KGB and the First Chief Directorate (PGU). At the time of the GRU's creation, Lenin infuriated the Cheka (the predecessor of the KGB) 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 (I Was Stalin's Agent), who was the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect.[5] 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" (Vladimir Rezun), 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,[6] "Viktor Suvorov" alleges that during his training and service he was often reminded that exiting the GRU (retiring) 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.[7]

North Korea

GRU Sixth Directorate officers reportedly visited North Korea following the capture (January 1968) of the USS Pueblo, inspecting the vessel and receiving some of the captured equipment.[8]

Heads

No. Head Term Leader(s) served under
1 Semyon Aralov November 1918 – July 1919 Vladimir Lenin
2 Sergei Gusev July 1919 – January 1920
3 Georgy Pyatakov January 1920 – February 1920
4 Voldemar Aussem February 1920 – August 1920
5 Yan Lentsman August 1920 – April 1921
6 Arvid Zeybot April 1921 – March 1924
Joseph Stalin
7 Yan Karlovich Berzin 1924 – April 1935
8 Semyon Uritsky April 1935 – July 1937
(7) Yan Karlovich Berzin July 1937 – August 1937
9 Alexander Nikonov August 1937 – August 1937
10 Semyon Gendin September 1937 – October 1938
11 Alexander Orlov October 1938 – April 1939
12 Ivan Proskurov April 1939 – July 1940
13 Filipp Golikov July 1940 – October 1941
14 Alexei Panfilov October 1941 – November 1942
15 Ivan Ilyichev November 1942 – June 1945
16 Fyodor Kuznetsov June 1945 – November 1947
17 Nikolai Trusov September 1947 – January 1949
18 Matvei Zakharov January 1949 – June 1952
19 Mikhail Shalin June 1952 – August 1956
Nikita Khrushchev
20 Sergei Shtemenko August 1956 – October 1957
(19) Mikhail Shalin October 1957 – December 1958
21 Ivan Serov December 1958 – February 1963
March 1963 – July 1987
22 Pyotr Ivashutin Leonid Brezhnev
Yuri Andropov
Konstantin Chernenko
Mikhail Gorbachev
23 Vladlen Mikhailov [ru] July 1987 – October 1991

Miscellaneous

Defectors

Main article: List of Soviet and Eastern Bloc defectors
  • Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist and ex-GRU agent who broke with Communism in 1938[9]
  • Ismail Akhmedov, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the GRU, who defected to Turkey in 1942.[10] At the end of World War II, the Turks revealed Akhmedov to the Allies, and in 1948 he was interviewed by the first secretary at the British Consulate in Istanbul, in reality the local station chief of the SIS and a Soviet mole, Kim Philby.[11]
  • Iavor Entchev, a communist member of GRU; defected to United States during the Cold War.
  • Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk who defected to Canada in 1945.
  • 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, a GRU intelligence officer who defected to U.S. authorities in 1992.
  • Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU officer who played an important role during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • Dmitri Polyakov, a high-ranking GRU officer who volunteered to spy for the FBI in 1962.
  • Juliet Poyntz, an American communist and founding member of the Communist Party of the United States, allegedly kidnapped and killed in New York in 1937 by NKVD agents for an attempt to defect.
  • Ignace Reiss, a GRU defector who sent a letter of defection to Stalin in July 1937, found dead in September 1937.
  • Viktor Suvorov (pseudonym of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun), a GRU officer who defected to the SIS with his wife (also a GRU officer) in Geneva in 1978.
  • Kaarlo Tupmi, an illegal GRU officer turned double agent by the FBI in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1959.

Agents

"Illegals"

Naval agents

See also

References

  1. ^ Earl F. Ziemke, Russian Review 60(2001): 130.
  2. ^ Leonard, Secret Soldiers of the Revolution, p. 7.
  3. ^ Военная разведка: 1941–1945 (tr, "Military intelligence: 1941–1945") hrono.ru
  4. ^ Главное разведывательное управление Генштаба ВС России. Справка. (tr. "Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. Reference") RIA Novosti, 19 March 2009.
  5. ^ Leonard, Secret Soldiers of the Revolution, p.xiv.
  6. ^ Aquarium (Аквариум), 1985, Hamish Hamilton Ltd, ISBN 0-241-11545-0
  7. ^ (PDF). Central Intelligence Agency. June 18, 1982. p. 23. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 30, 2016.
  8. ^ Newton, Robert E. (1992). (PDF). National Security Archive. p. 177. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 30, 2016. Other collateral sources reported that a group of Soviet military intelligence officers from the Sixth Directorate (responsible for Soviet SIGINT matters) of the Chief Intelligence Directorate (GRU) visited North Korea shortly after the seizure of the ship and inspected the vessel. Later, the North Koreans were reported to have turned over some of the captured equipment to the GRU. Apparently, some of this equipment was taken to Soviet radio plants in Kharkov, Voronezh, and Gorkij for examination by technicians.
  9. ^ Chambers, Whittaker (1952), Witness, New York: Random House, p. 799, ISBN 9780895269157, LCCN 52005149
  10. ^ Richard J. Aldrich, Michael F. Hopkins, Intelligence, Defence and Diplomacy: British Policy in the Post-War World, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 211
  11. ^ Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence, Scarecrow Press, 2008, p. 6
  12. ^ Hunt, Graeme. "Spies and Revolutionaries – A History of New Zealand subversion" (Auckland: Reed, 2009), p.171

Further reading

March 18, 2023
soviet, union, this, article, about, soviet, russian, russian, federation, main, intelligence, directorate, russian, Главное, разведывательное, управление, glavnoye, razvedyvatel, noye, upravleniye, ˈglavnəjə, rɐzˈvʲɛdɨvətʲɪlʲnəjə, ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪjə, abbreviated,. This article is about the Soviet GRU For the Russian G U see GRU Russian Federation Main Intelligence Directorate Russian Glavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenie tr Glavnoye razvedyvatel noye upravleniye IPA ˈglavneje rɐzˈvʲɛdɨvetʲɪlʲneje ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje abbreviated GRU Russian GRU IPA geeˈru was the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union until 1991 For a few months it was also the foreign military intelligence agency of the newly established Russian Federation until 7 May 1992 when it was dissolved and the Russian GRU took over its activities GRU Generalnogo ShtabaGlavnoje Razvedyvatel noje UpravlenijeGRU SSSRGlavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenieAgency overviewFormed5 November 1918as Registration Agency GRU since 1942Preceding agenciesFifth Department of the Russian Imperial Chief of StaffExpedition for Secret AffairsDissolved7 May 1992Superseding agencyMain Intelligence Directorate G U JurisdictionRed Army 1918 1946 Soviet Army 1946 1991 HeadquartersMoscowEmployeesClassifiedAnnual budgetClassifiedParent agencyMinistry of DefenseChild agenciesOsnazSpetsnaz GRUThe emblem of the RVS Contents 1 History 1 1 Activities 1 1 1 SATCOM 1 1 2 North Korea 2 Heads 3 Miscellaneous 3 1 Defectors 3 2 Agents 3 3 Illegals 3 4 Naval agents 4 See also 5 References 6 Further readingHistory Edit Showpiece of exhibition dedicated to 80th anniversary of Russian foreign intelligence service The GRU s first predecessor in Russia formed on October 21 1918 by secret order under the sponsorship of Leon Trotsky then the civilian leader of the Red Army signed by Jukums Vacietis the first commander in chief of the Red Army RKKA and by Ephraim Sklyansky deputy to Trotsky 1 it was originally known as the Registration Directorate Registrupravlenie or RU 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 at the time called the Red Army Field Staff Polevoi Shtab 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 Registration Department That year following the Soviet Polish War it was elevated in status to become the Second Intelligence 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 then Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenye became the Fourth Intelligence 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 in 1926 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 Gosudarstvennaia komissiia oborony or GKO 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 2 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 May 1938 and subsequently murdered July 1938 during the so called Latvian Operation of Joseph Stalin s Great Purge The GRU in its modern form was created by Joseph Stalin in February 1942 less than a year after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany From April 1943 the GRU handled human intelligence exclusively outside the USSR 3 4 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 rezidenturas residencies all over the world along with the SIGINT signals intelligence station in Lourdes Cuba and throughout the Soviet bloc countries 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 GUGB State Political Directorate GPU MGB OGPU NKVD NKGB KGB and the First Chief Directorate PGU At the time of the GRU s creation Lenin infuriated the Cheka the predecessor of the KGB 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 I Was Stalin s Agent who was the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect 5 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 Vladimir Rezun 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 6 Viktor Suvorov alleges that during his training and service he was often reminded that exiting the GRU retiring 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 Edit SATCOM Edit During the Cold War the Sixth Directorate was responsible for monitoring Intelsat communication satellites traffic 7 North Korea Edit GRU Sixth Directorate officers reportedly visited North Korea following the capture January 1968 of the USS Pueblo inspecting the vessel and receiving some of the captured equipment 8 Heads EditNo Head Term Leader s served under1 Semyon Aralov November 1918 July 1919 Vladimir Lenin2 Sergei Gusev July 1919 January 19203 Georgy Pyatakov January 1920 February 19204 Voldemar Aussem February 1920 August 19205 Yan Lentsman August 1920 April 19216 Arvid Zeybot April 1921 March 1924Joseph Stalin7 Yan Karlovich Berzin 1924 April 19358 Semyon Uritsky April 1935 July 1937 7 Yan Karlovich Berzin July 1937 August 19379 Alexander Nikonov August 1937 August 193710 Semyon Gendin September 1937 October 193811 Alexander Orlov October 1938 April 193912 Ivan Proskurov April 1939 July 194013 Filipp Golikov July 1940 October 194114 Alexei Panfilov October 1941 November 194215 Ivan Ilyichev November 1942 June 194516 Fyodor Kuznetsov June 1945 November 194717 Nikolai Trusov September 1947 January 194918 Matvei Zakharov January 1949 June 195219 Mikhail Shalin June 1952 August 1956Nikita Khrushchev20 Sergei Shtemenko August 1956 October 1957 19 Mikhail Shalin October 1957 December 195821 Ivan Serov December 1958 February 1963March 1963 July 198722 Pyotr Ivashutin Leonid BrezhnevYuri AndropovKonstantin ChernenkoMikhail Gorbachev23 Vladlen Mikhailov ru July 1987 October 1991Miscellaneous EditDefectors Edit Main article List of Soviet and Eastern Bloc defectors Whittaker Chambers an American journalist and ex GRU agent who broke with Communism in 1938 9 Ismail Akhmedov a Lieutenant Colonel of the GRU who defected to Turkey in 1942 10 At the end of World War II the Turks revealed Akhmedov to the Allies and in 1948 he was interviewed by the first secretary at the British Consulate in Istanbul in reality the local station chief of the SIS and a Soviet mole Kim Philby 11 Iavor Entchev a communist member of GRU defected to United States during the Cold War Igor Gouzenko a GRU cipher clerk who defected to Canada in 1945 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 a GRU intelligence officer who defected to U S authorities in 1992 Oleg Penkovsky a GRU officer who played an important role during the Cuban Missile Crisis Dmitri Polyakov a high ranking GRU officer who volunteered to spy for the FBI in 1962 Juliet Poyntz an American communist and founding member of the Communist Party of the United States allegedly kidnapped and killed in New York in 1937 by NKVD agents for an attempt to defect Ignace Reiss a GRU defector who sent a letter of defection to Stalin in July 1937 found dead in September 1937 Viktor Suvorov pseudonym of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun a GRU officer who defected to the SIS with his wife also a GRU officer in Geneva in 1978 Kaarlo Tupmi an illegal GRU officer turned double agent by the FBI in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1959 Agents Edit Stig Bergling Joseph Milton Bernstein Eugene Franklin Coleman Desmond Patrick Costello alleged 12 Sviatoslav Konstantinovich Mel nikov Klaus Fuchs Harold Glasser Tanner Greimann Rudolf Herrnstadt Arvid Jacobson Gerhard Kegel Mary Jane Keeney and Philip Keeney Tadeusz Kobylanski George Koval a scientist who stole atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project Ursula Kuczynski Stefan Litauer Sean MacBride Robert Osman Ward Pigman Adam Priess Alexander Rado Vincent Reno Elie Renous William Spiegel Lydia Stahl Irving Charles Velson Brooklyn Navy Yard American Labor Party candidate for New York State Senate Stig Wennerstrom Illegals Edit Boris Bukov RU RKKA officer Yakov Grigorev Vladimir Kvachkov Hede Massing Richard Sorge Moishe Stern Joshua Tamer Alfred Tilton Alexander Ulanovsky Ignacy WitczakNaval agents Edit Jack Fahy Naval GRU Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs Board of Economic Warfare United States Department of the Interior Edna Patterson Naval GRU served in US August 1943 to 1956 Dieter Gerhardt a commodore who served in South African Navy from 1962 to 1983 and spied for the Soviets for 20 yearsSee also EditSMERSHReferences Edit Earl F Ziemke Russian Review 60 2001 130 Leonard Secret Soldiers of the Revolution p 7 Voennaya razvedka 1941 1945 tr Military intelligence 1941 1945 hrono ru Glavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenie Genshtaba VS Rossii Spravka tr Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Reference RIA Novosti 19 March 2009 Leonard Secret Soldiers of the Revolution p xiv Aquarium Akvarium 1985 Hamish Hamilton Ltd ISBN 0 241 11545 0 The Technology Acquisition Effort of the Soviet Intelligence Services PDF Central Intelligence Agency June 18 1982 p 23 Archived from the original PDF on December 30 2016 Newton Robert E 1992 The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on SIGINT Operations PDF National Security Archive p 177 Archived from the original PDF on December 30 2016 Other collateral sources reported that a group of Soviet military intelligence officers from the Sixth Directorate responsible for Soviet SIGINT matters of the Chief Intelligence Directorate GRU visited North Korea shortly after the seizure of the ship and inspected the vessel Later the North Koreans were reported to have turned over some of the captured equipment to the GRU Apparently some of this equipment was taken to Soviet radio plants in Kharkov Voronezh and Gorkij for examination by technicians Chambers Whittaker 1952 Witness New York Random House p 799 ISBN 9780895269157 LCCN 52005149 Richard J Aldrich Michael F Hopkins Intelligence Defence and Diplomacy British Policy in the Post War World Oxon and New York Routledge 2013 p 211 Nigel West Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence Scarecrow Press 2008 p 6 Hunt Graeme Spies and Revolutionaries A History of New Zealand subversion Auckland Reed 2009 p 171Further reading EditPavel Gusterin Sovetskaya razvedka na Blizhnem i Srednem Vostoke v 1920 30 h godah Saarbryukken 2014 ISBN 978 3 659 51691 7 David M Glantz Soviet military intelligence in war Cass series on Soviet military theory and practice 3 London Cass 1990 ISBN 0 7146 3374 7 ISBN 0 7146 4076 X Raymond W Leonard Secret soldiers of the revolution Soviet military intelligence 1918 1933 Westport Conn London Greenwood Press 1999 ISBN 0 313 30990 6 Stanislav Lunev Through the Eyes of the Enemy The Autobiography of Stanislav Lunev Regnery Publishing Inc 1998 ISBN 0 89526 390 4 Viktor Suvorov Aquarium Akvarium 1985 Hamish Hamilton Ltd ISBN 0 241 11545 0 Viktor Suvorov Inside Soviet Military Intelligence 1984 ISBN 0 02 615510 9 Viktor Suvorov Spetsnaz 1987 Hamish Hamilton Ltd ISBN 0 241 11961 8 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title GRU Soviet Union amp oldid 1128178619, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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