They have been accused of assassinating Russia’s enemies on foreign soil and helping shoot down passenger jets filled with families.
Now the GRU, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-secret military intelligence agency, has been roundly blamed for the nerve agent attack on former comrade Sergey Skripal in Salisbury, England.
Russian agents Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were seen smiling on CCTV hours before the alleged hit on Skripal, himself an ex-GRU operative, and his daughter Yulia in March.
It is rumored the GRU, which recruits only the most patriotic young soldiers from poor backgrounds, have burned “traitors” alive in furnaces, have nuclear suitcase bombs stashed around the US and helped bring down flight MH17.
Not only are they trained to gather top secret information on its rivals, its agents have been accused of creating “death squads” to assassinate its enemies on foreign soil.
Here, we delve deeper into its murkiest operations, psychotic recruitment process and assassination attempts of the GRU.
What does the GRU do?
The GRU, officially known as the Main Intelligence Directorate, is the arm of the Russian Defense Ministry tasked with gathering what some experts refer to as “battlefield intelligence.”
It has long existed and worked alongside the KGB, which operated as the Soviet Union’s main security agency until its breakup in 1991.
But by 1997, the GRU commanded 25,000 troops and deployed six times more agents than the KGB’s successors, the SVR.
The GRU once had stations known as “residencies” in Russian embassies around the world and still has a terrifying network of agents abroad, according to the Daily Beast.
GRU agents who spied on Ukrainian forces intercepted communications and seized important military outposts were credited for the “bloodless seizure of Crimea” in 2014, Foreign Policy reported.
While visiting the agency’s sprawling new James Bond-style Moscow HQ in 2006, Vladimir Putin bragged: “No other country can boast of such a state-of-the-art complex.”
What makes the GRU so fearsome?
Legends of unimaginable cruelty and violence in the GRU’s ranks have added to its terrifying reputation – even though some were never proven.
In 1992, former GRU officer-turned-defector Stanislav Lunev claimed Russia had placed backpack-sized nuclear weapons around the globe to be used if all-out war broke out.
Searches of areas he identified were carried out but officials “never found such weapons caches, with or without portable nuclear weapons,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2006.
Investigators probing the downing of MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014 claimed the BUK rocket launcher allegedly used was procured by high-ranking GRU officer Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov — code name Orion.
One day after the plane crashed with 298 on board, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) published details of an intercepted phone conversation between Orion and a senior defense official.
In it, Orion boasted that it had acquired a BUK and would soon start “shooting down Ukrainian military planes with it.”
One officer who later defected to Britain also claimed that recruits were shown a graphic video of the agent Pyotor Popov being burned to death in a furnace after he turned against his colleagues.
The CIA claimed that that account is likely to be false – but the story has entered GRU folklore and only adds to its fearsome reputation.
Who (and where) are the Salisbury assassins?
Detectives said the alleged assassins, believed to be in their 40s, traveled under aliases, and Petrov and Boshirov are probably not their real names.
Prosecutors said it was futile to try and extradite the men from Russia, suggesting they are back home, but issued a European Arrest Warrant and are seeking help from Interpol.
Russian news agencies have reported they used the passports, issued in 2016, to travel to Amsterdam, Geneva, Milan and Paris before they landed in Salisbury.
The same site claimed Boshirov was born in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe and was issued two parking tickets in 2015, though this could very well be a different man.
Scotland Yard confirmed that both suspects had been to the UK before on the same passports and “travelled extensively on them in the past.”
Why does the GRU operate so brazenly?
English Prime Minister Theresa May said the Salisbury attack was carried out by two GRU agents and sanctioned at a “senior level” within the Russian state.
Security Minister Ben Wallace went even further on Thursday, saying Putin had a strong grip over his state, which “controls, funds and directs the GRU.”
The agency has not only intensified its operations over the last 18 months, it appears to be growing more “arrogant and complacent,” government sources told the Times today.
One source said the GRU was only required to offer a “fig leaf of deniability,” adding: “Daylight is the best disinfectant for this sort of thing and they shouldn’t rely on being able to get away with it.”
British officials are reported to believe the organization does not care about being caught and, backed by Putin, brazenly denies involvement even in the face of indisputable evidence.
It has already been accused of hacking the South Korean Olympic Games, cyber-attacks against Germany, sharing emails stolen from the US Democratic Party and meddling in the 2016 election.
How are GRU officers recruited?
While the KGB’s eye was drawn to the sons of high-ranking officers, the GRU looked for its agents among the working class, GRU defector Victor Suvorov wrote in his book, “Inside Soviet Military Intelligence.”
They also avoid “intellectually developed” officers who are fluent in foreign languages, according to intelligence expert Constantine Preobrazhensky.
“Such people have been thought to be unreliable,” he claimed. “They might be fond of Western freedoms and could defect.”
Preobrazhensky claimed they look for patriotic candidates who do not want to serve abroad and descend from poor peasant families.
Who are the GRU’s special forces?
The GRU has its own special-forces battalion known as the Spetsnaz, which was formed in 1949.
These soldiers, armed with a distinctive Vintorez rifle, have extensive battlefield experience in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans and reportedly in Syria.
But the force was originally designed to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage operations against its enemies in the Cold War.
Unlike Western special forces likes the Navy SEALs or the British SAS, the Spetsnaz were not trained to rescue hostages, according to Systema Spetsnaz, which claims they were tasked with destroying enemy command posts and taking out its leadership.
Did the GRU meddle in the US election?
Nothing has been proven but US prosecutors certainly seem to think so: In a 29-page indictment, a grand jury listed 12 Russian co-conspirators who it claimed interfered in the US election.
It said they hacked into the computers of officials involved in the election, stole documents and released them in an attempt to swing the vote.
The document listed monikers and code names used by the suspects, including Agent X, who are accused of using malware to move the stolen documents.
It went on to say the “conspirators” hacked the accounts of volunteers and employees working for Hillary Clinton and used fictitious online personas to cover their tracks.
British officials also believe the attack on the Skripals was “most probably carried out by current or former agents of the service known as the GRU,” the New York Times reported.
The same agency was accused of assassinating Chechen writer and politician Zelimkhan Abdulmuslimovich in May 2017.