GRU (Soviet military intelligence)

For most of the Soviet period the GRU lived in the shadow of the security police it never stopped competing with. The KGB and its predecessors had the larger budget, the domestic power and the public fame. The GRU had the Red Army behind it, a network of military attachés in every Soviet embassy, and for long stretches some of the best-placed spies of the century. Its name was not published in the Soviet Union, but it was known in the West from the late 1920s, and defectors made it notorious.⁵

From Registration Directorate to Fourth Department

The service began in autumn 1918, during the Civil War, as the Registration Directorate of the Red Army's field staff, created on Leon Trotsky's authority; its first head was Semyon Aralov.⁵ In the 1920s it became the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army Staff and, from about 1926, the Fourth Directorate, often called simply the Fourth Department. Its reports went directly to the State Defense Council and the Politburo, apparently bypassing the army staff.⁵

Its longest-serving interwar chief, the Latvian Yan Berzin, ran it until 1935 and briefly again in 1937. He was arrested in May 1938 and killed that July in Stalin's purge.⁵ Walter Krivitsky, the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect, described the service's workings in a 1939 memoir.⁵

The service relied heavily on illegals, officers living abroad under false identities, and on foreign communists. Richard Sorge, who ran the Tokyo ring, was one of its illegals, and Ursula Kuczynski, better known as Ruth Werner, one of its agents.⁵ (See Illegals and legends.)

The war and the American networks

Stalin gave the service its modern form as the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) in February 1942; from April 1943 it handled human intelligence outside the USSR.⁵ The joint NSA–CIA history of the Venona decrypts describes GRU officers in Soviet consulates in the United States working with the Comintern and with Communist Party agents in government and industry. Before the war the GRU had overshadowed the NKVD in America: in 1940 the GRU residency in New York sent three cables for every one sent by its NKVD counterpart, a ratio that reversed in 1941.¹ The former GRU courier Whittaker Chambers told the FBI about his network in 1942, and his later testimony became central to the Hiss case.¹ (See The Venona project and Whittaker Chambers.)

On 5 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected with documents identifying Soviet agents, including inside the Manhattan Project.¹ His evidence, together with Elizabeth Bentley's a few weeks later, galvanized American counterintelligence.¹ (See The Gouzenko affair.)

Penetrated from within

The GRU's own officers became the West's most valuable sources. In the 1950s the CIA ran Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov, a GRU officer in East Germany, whose information helped the FBI track a pair of GRU illegals in New York in 1957; the illegals' escape and report contributed to Popov's arrest.¹ Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, recruited by the CIA and MI6 in April 1961, photographed missile manuals and the classified edition of the General Staff journal Military Thought before his arrest in October 1962.² (See IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case.) General Dmitri Polyakov volunteered to the FBI in the early 1960s, was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988.⁵ (See Dmitri Polyakov and TOPHAT: the Polyakov case.)

The 1980s war scare

In May 1981 the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, announced that the KGB and GRU would join forces in RYAN, a collection effort to give early warning of an American nuclear attack. A February 1983 KGB instruction noted that "our military neighbors," the GRU, were doing similar work against Western armed forces.³ During NATO's Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, GRU residencies received messages to search for US military activity, alongside the KGB's circular telegram.⁴

Dissolution

The Soviet GRU outlived the Soviet Union by a few months. On 7 May 1992 it was dissolved and the new Russian Federation's military intelligence service took over its functions under the same name.⁵

Operations in these files

September 1933 – 18 October 1941 The Sorge spy ring From 1933 to 1941 a Soviet military intelligence network in Tokyo, run by the German journalist Richard Sorge, reported from inside the German embassy and Prince Konoe's circle until Japanese police broke it. 1938 – 3 May 1945 The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) Rote Kapelle was the German counterintelligence name for Soviet radio networks in Belgium, France and the Netherlands and for a Berlin resistance circle that passed secrets to Moscow. Most were rounded up in 1942. September 1941 – June 1950 Soviet atomic espionage (Enormoz) How Soviet intelligence penetrated the Manhattan Project under the codename ENORMOZ, who its sources were, how Venona and confessions exposed them, and what the stolen secrets were worth. August 1942 – 19 May 1944 The Lucy spy ring From Lucerne, the German émigré publisher Rudolf Roessler fed German high command secrets to Soviet intelligence in 1942–1943. Who his sources were, and how the material reached him, is still argued over. 5 September 1945 – 27 June 1946 The Gouzenko affair In September 1945 a GRU cipher clerk walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with over a hundred documents, exposing a Soviet spy network in Canada and a British atomic scientist. May – November 1962 Operation Anadyr The Soviet General Staff's 1962 plan to move nuclear missiles and some 42,000 troops to Cuba in secret, and the deception that hid it from US intelligence until a U-2 flight on 14 October. November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history. May 1981 – April 1989 Operation RYAN The KGB–GRU intelligence alert launched in May 1981 to detect a feared American nuclear first strike, its indicator lists, and the long argument over whether Moscow's fear was real. 2–11 November 1983 Able Archer 83 and the war scare A routine NATO nuclear-release exercise in November 1983 met an unusual Soviet military alert. What the declassified record shows about the reaction, and why historians still disagree on the danger.

Operations against the GRU

1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean. 5 September 1945 – 27 June 1946 The Gouzenko affair In September 1945 a GRU cipher clerk walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with over a hundred documents, exposing a Soviet spy network in Canada and a British atomic scientist. December 1953 – 22 April 1956 Operation Gold (the Berlin Tunnel) From 1955 to 1956 the CIA and British SIS tapped Soviet military phone and teleprinter cables in East Berlin from a 1,476-foot tunnel, unaware that a KGB mole had betrayed the plan before digging began. 20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. OPERATION · 1961 November 1961 – 15 March 1988 TOPHAT: the Polyakov case From 1961 to 1980 GRU officer Dmitri Polyakov, later a major general, spied for the FBI and CIA. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988.