![]() ![]() 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’. The GRU finds its antecedents in the Napoleonic wars, where Russian generals realised the necessity of modernising military intelligence efforts. ![]() 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? Ostensibly, the GRU still values secrecy - it has no website, never comments on activity, and its organisational structure and budget remain state secrets - but something has changed in its approach since its Cold War days. 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. In recent years however, the GRU has begun to enter mainstream debate. 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. 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. 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’. ![]()
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