Is Russia's GRU Putin's Secret Weapon?

Vladimir Putin and Sergei Ivanov at the headquarters of Russia’s main intelligence department, the GRU, in 2006. Photograph: Dmitri Astakhov/AFP

Michael Weiss, Daily Beast: The GRU: Putin’s No-Longer-So-Secret Weapon

Long regarded as the understudy of the infamous KGB and its successor services, Russian military intelligence is now front and center in the Moscow-Washington showdown.

It says something about the ingrained rivalry between the various fiefdoms of Russian espionage that the founder of Soviet military intelligence, Leon Trotsky, had an ice-ax driven into his head in Mexico by an agent of Stalin’s foreign intelligence service.

Ever since, in the long dark history of Soviet and Russian spookery the military’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, has been overshadowed by a succession of more powerful, famous and infamous organizations known by a succession of acronyms, most famously as the KGB and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FSB and SVR.

But on Thursday the GRU suddenly emerged from the shadows when the waning Obama administration imposed sanctions on the four top-ranking GRU officers for their roles hacking the private email correspondence of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. The entire spy agency, along with the FSB, was also sanctioned institutionally.

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Update: US expulsions put spotlight on Russia's GRU intelligence agency (The Guardian)

WNU Editor: Recently released videos of Russian special forces in Syria has some of them sporting GRU patches on their shoulders (see my commentary at this post) .... Russian Special Forces Wear Hezbollah Patch In Syria (December 31, 2016).