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Glavonoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravlenye
The GU (Russian: ГУ) is the current Russian foreign Military Intelligence
Service of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
It was established in 1992, after the fall of the
Soviet Union,
and is the successor to the GRU (Russian: ГРУ).
Nevertheless it is still commonly known by its old name GRU.
Until 2010, the Russian Special Forces were
also part of the GU/GRU.
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Unlike the other security and intelligence services,
such as the FSB,
the SVR
and the FSO,
the GRU does not report directly to the
president. Instead, its Director is subordinate to the Russian Military Command,
which means he reports to the minister of defence and the Chief of the
General Staff of the Armed Forces.
The GRU is arguably Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency.
According to unverified statements from GRU defector
Stanislav Lunev, the GRU had six times as many agents (in 1997) as
the SVR,
the successor of the KGB's
foreign operations directorate PGU KGB
(Russian: ПГУ КГБ). In that year, the GRU/GU also commanded approx.
25,000 Spetsnaz Special Forces troops.
In 2010, the GRU was renamed GU (Russian: ГУ) and the special
forces (Spetsnaz) were branched out of the organisation.
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Since then, successive governments have tried to re-organise the GRU,
but apparently to no avail.
It is widely believed that the GRU was behind the capture
of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent Russian intervention is eastern
Ukraine. There is also conclusive evidence that GRU was
involved in shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MA17) on 17 July
2014, a civil airplane with 283 passengers and 15 crew. In the event,
all 298 aboard lost their lives [3]. Despite very strong evidence
gathered by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) and by Belingcat investigators,
and a ruling of the
International Criminal Court in The Hague (Netherlands),
Russia denied all allegations.
In September 2018, two GRU officers were charged by the UK for attempting
to assassinate former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in
Salisbury (UK). Furthermore, in October 2018, both the Netherlands and the
UK announced that in April of that year
the Dutch Military Intelligence Service (MIVD)
had caught four GRU officers red-handed whilst trying to mount
a cyber attack against the OPCW headquarters in The Hague. As they
were travelling on diplomatic passports, they could not be arrested, but
were expelled from the country the next day [1].
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GRU gadgets on this website
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One of the methods used by
Russian intelligence services
to send messages to agents and intelligence officers
in foreign countries, is the so-called
One-Way Voice Link (OWVL),
also known as
Numbers Stations —
mysterious radio stations on the
short wave radio band, that broadcast long strings of spoken numbers.
Such stations were frequently spotted during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
The number strings represent coded messages that are generally encrypted
by means of a
One-Time Pad (OTP) cipher.
Most Numbers Stations
have disappered after the end of the
Cold War,
but some are still active today. Although most of them are
operated by the
SVR
and the GRU,
they are often (falsely)
attributed to the FSB (and previously to its predecessor,
the KGB). The following Russian Numbers Stations
were still active from Russia in 2019:
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Sunday 07 October 2018. Last changed: Friday, 20 September 2024 - 15:27 CET.
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