GRU
From Acw
GRU is the acronym for the USSR's Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie (Main Intelligence Directorate). It handles all military intelligence, including HUMINT and SIGINT, and monitors all external and internal theats considered to be of a military nature. Naturally, this wide-ranging and poorly defined mandate brings it into conflict with it's sister-organisation, the KGB, with whom it maintains a violent rivalry.
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History
It claims to predate the KGB by nearly 40 years, being supposedly founded by Lenin in 1918, although the documents in which Lenin supposedly warned the Cheka (the KGB's predecessor) not to interfere with them has been lost. The GRU claims that the KGB, with unfettered access to the central archives has purposely destroyed these files, while the KGB claims they never existed, and offers a more likely foundation date of 2020, following the reorganisation of the Red Army. Its existence became common knowledge throughout the Soviet Union and the other powers in the 2040's, after it was depicted as the chief antagonist in the "CJ Danger" spy thriller movies produced by Warner/Disney.
The Lost Starling
Although there is a strong school of thought that the GRU was not founded until the 21st century, most versions of the possibly mythical story of the "Lost Starling" feature either the GRU itself, an an antecedent military intelligence organisation. It is worth noting that despite the claims made by the Commissariat of the Exterior, the GRU has neither confirmed or denied any of the allegations - nor has the KGB, the other great player in the drama.
At its most basic level, the myth goes that at the height of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had an informer or agent at the highest levels of the Nazi war machine. This informer, according to various tales, warned of Operation Barbarossa, the mass production of Messerchmit 232's, the Nazi nuclear program, and supposedly every other German advance, innovation, or scheme that tellers of the tale care to bring up. The agent's codename was 'Starling', and he had been a member of the Nazi party since its earliest days, before becoming disillusioned with the injustices inherent in the Nazi system - becoming a fervent Communist. He was, perhaps, the single greatest asset that the [[USSR|Soviet Union}} possessed in the Great Patriotic War.
Needless to say, 'Starling' was hot property amongst the numerous intelligence departments and agencies operating during the war. In 'Starling', everyone and their boss saw a ticket to the very top of the command structure, and the ear of Stalin himself, who had been chastened by his dismissal of the warnings of Barbarossa. As the purges swung fully into gear near the end of the war, they became a powerful weapon in the battle for control of 'Starling', with whole branches apparently wiped out indiscriminately by factions of the KGB and GRU (or their predecessors). However, in 1946, it became clear that the flow of information had dried up. Stalin himself appointed Lazar Kaganovich, a senior buerecrat with intelligence experience, but who, as Director of Heavy Industry, had been separate from the fighting, to investigate why. It soon became clear to Kaganovich, and a furious Stalin, that 'Starling' had simply been lost - in the fighting, every man who knew the identity of Starling, and all avenues by which he could be contacted had simply been exterminated. An unpopular factional warlord, by the name of Lavrenty Beria, took the fall for the debacle, but virtually every member of the intelligence community had a hand in it.
The story of the greatest bungle in Soviet intelligence history was in wide circulation within the Communist Party by the late 1960s, but was not officially recognised by the USSR until 2014, when the Commissariat of the Exterior confirmed them as part of a propaganda offensive to overshadow the 50th anniversary of Hitler's death. Shaming the KGB, at the time a chief rival of the Commmissariat regarding foreign policy, was probably also an unspoken objective.
According to declassified documents tabled in 2014, investigations later proved that 'Starling' was almost certainly celebrated Nazi high official Martin Bormann, who headed the Nazi Party Chancellory until his retirement in 1971.
