GRU
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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.
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 262'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 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 - including all branches of military intelligence. 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 NKGB and GRU (or their predecessors). However, in early 1946, it became clear that the flow of information had dried up. Stalin himself appointed Lazar Kaganovich, a senior bureaucrat 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 numerous military intelligence units were hit hard in the ensuing purges, as a result of Stalin's continuing distrust of the Red Army. In this period, they seem to have organised their own intelligence sharing and support networks, away from civilian oversight - a few highly speculative commentators point to this debacle as the birth of the organisation that would eventually become the GRU.
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 Reichs Chancellory until his retirement in 1971.
The Bay of Pigs
The story of the valiant Cuban defense of their homeland against German and American aggression is amongst the proudest legends of early Communist history. Less often emphasised is the (probable) role of the GRU (or an antecedent Soviet military intelligence organisation) in the war. Once again, it should be emphasised that there is no publicly available evidence that the GRU itself had even been founded by this stage. In fact, virtually the only evidence pointing to Russian Military Intelligence is the involvement of one man, Enrique Lister Forjan.
Enrique Lister
Enrique Lister Forjan was a hero of many revolutions long before The Bay of Pigs made him a household name. A stonemason by trade, he had spent his early life working in Spain and Cuba, moving constantly to escape the repression his involvement with the PCE (Communist Party of Spain) brought upon him. With the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, he returned to Spain, to be nominated by the Comintern as a candidate for training in the famous Soviet Frunze Military Academy. In 1935, he returned to Spain, just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War, and served as one of the Spanish republic's most effective and decorated Generals. As the Republic finally collapsed, he organised rearguard actions around the Ebro, until, finally, he was forced into exile, never to return to his homeland. Fleeing to Russia, he served as a General in the Red Army until the end of World War II, and was chiefly responsible for the devastating Partisan actions of 1946 that saw the near collapse of the German slave-agriculture projects in their Eastern territories. Given his expertise in guerilla warfare and civil war, it could reasonably be inferred that he was active in the Soviet military intelligence community by this point, though his authorised biography, released in 2036, 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, claims that he wasn't recruited by undisclosed Intelligence agencies until 1949, as the Cold War set in.
Over the next decade, there is almost no evidence of Lister's whereabouts, although his biography describes a set of dramatic and highly unlikely adventures throughout South America. In 1959, though, there is good evidence that he was seconded to Cuba, under the command of the either the KGB or Red Army, to assist in the defence of the new Socialist Republic. At the time, following a number of murders amongst pro-Chinese Cuban trade union leaders, and the widening Sino-Soviet split, the KGB was widely distrusted by the Cuban authorities, right up to Castro himself, and the political officers and KGB operatives sent to assist were quickly sidelined by the administration. Lister and many of the trained military personnel, though, were eagerly welcomed into the command structures at all levels, with Lister being supposedly made a Colonel in the Cuban DGI (General Intelligence Directorate).
It was in this role that Lister either personally uncovered, or more likely organised the detection of the earliest blueprints of Operation Northwoods. Northwoods, in mid 1960, was a scheme being hatched by the CIA to train Cuban exiles, many supporters of the former regime, into an guerilla army capable of toppling the new pro-Soviet (but not officially Communist) Castro regime. Preparations for the defence began immediately, despite personality clashes with the prominent, charismatic and pro-Chinese military powerbroker, Che Guevara.
The CIA, though, was having trouble getting support for the program at home. President Kennedy, aligning himself with the State Department, was more concerned with protecting America's image than fighting Communism, in their opinon, and had repeatedly intervened in the project to ensure that any US participation was thoroughly cloaked in secrecy - placing conditions that the CIA felt endangered the whole project. Elements of the agency committed to the Northwoods project sought to perform an end-run around the administration, setting up meetings between Nazi intelligence and the exile leaders. Batista, exiled in Franco's Spain, was not a party to the talks, but gave them his blessing. The belligerent Nazis were more than willing to provide all the support the exiles needed, up to and including air, naval and potential ground support, in exchange for a guarantee of non-intervention by the US, which the CIA readily agreed to, believing that a Nazi satellite would prove less dangerous than a Communist one. The revised plan, by January 1961, was that the invasion would take place at the Bay of Pigs, the area designated by Kennedy's changes, but that the invasion, from that point onwards, would declare for Fascism and receive air and naval support from a Nazi fleet stationed within American territorial waters. The day after the beachhead had been created, Grossdeutschland para-Engineers would be moved from a secret CIA airbase in Florida to drop in and fortify the area against counter-attack.
However, deceiving the President was not to everyone in the Agency's taste, and Lister's agents had, by January, received a number of leaks roughly outlining the updated plans. By the time the invasion was launched, on April 15th, the Bay of Pigs was surrounded by a network of defences and bunkers full of revolutionary soldiers. More importantly, at 10pm that evening, the CIA hideout in Florida, containing a full battalion of German Engineers, was raided by the FBI. Their commanding officer, thankfully, had been ordered to surrender in such a situation, and bloodshed was avoided, apart from one CIA agent who was shot while resisting arrest. At 11.05pm, the Nazi 13th Atlantic Battlegroup, stationed off Florida, recieved a warning by radio from the UISA's 8th Atlantic Battlegroup, demanding that they leave American territorial waters immediately, or face destruction. An unconcerned Admiral Doenitz replied that he was acting with the permission of the US Government, which Captain Nordlund, acting Commander of the 8th, informed him was not the case. He repeated his warning at 11.10pm, and hearing no response, gave the order to fire a warning shot over the bow of the lead destroyer. At this point, the suffered an explosion near its midsection, before buckling and sinking. Doenitz ordered his group to retreat, firing at will, while Nordlund ordered a peaceful retreat.
The Palace Coup
The Andropov Affair
The Neuostland Bight
Current Activities
Known Resources
- SPETZNAZ - the armed Counter-insurgency force of the GRU. Well-trained, experienced, and very, very deadly.
