Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

bassador to Italy and Yugoslavia. Joseph Stalinplanned to use

Grigulevich to murder Yugoslav leader Josef Broz Tito, but the plan

apparently ended with Stalin’s death. In 1953 Grigulevich was re-

called to Moscow and disappeared from the Costa Rican diplomatic

service. He resurfaced in Moscow in the 1960s as an academician.

GRU (GLAVNOE RAZVEDIVATELNOE UPRAVLENIYE). The

GRU, the Chief Intelligence Directorate, oversees military intelli-

gence. Russian military intelligence was always formidable in pro-

viding human source intelligence on the tsar’s adversaries. Russian

military intelligence can trace its heritage to 1810, when Tsar Alek-

sandr I mandated an intelligence bureau within the general staff. In

the wars against France (1812–1814), military intelligence provided

information on the French adversary and on the country where the

Russian army was operating. Many of the intelligence officers had

extensive engineering experience, which allowed them to translate

information from sources on roads, cities, and fortresses into material

for a general staff moving hundreds of thousands of military person-

nel across central Europe.

Before World War I, Russian military attachés were the key play-

ers in military intelligence. They also worked with military intelli-

gence officers in Warsaw, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. A major suc-

cess for military intelligence was the recruitment of Colonel Alfred

Redl, an Austrian officer who was a promiscuous homosexual. Redl

was blackmailed into providing detailed information on Austrian mil-

itary planning for war against Russia and its ally Serbia, as well as

counterintelligenceinformation about Austrian agents.

Soviet military intelligence was founded on 5 November 1918 by

Commissar of War Leon Trotsky, who appointed Semyon Aralov its

first chief. While the name changed repeatedly, it is known in Soviet

history usually as either the Fourth Department of the General Staff

or the Chief Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff. The

GRU and its predecessors were not political services like the Cheka

or the KGB. Chiefs of military intelligence almost never served on

the Communist PartyCentral Committee, and its officers did not

have the role of protectors of the party—a role assumed by the Cheka.

In its first two decades of Soviet history, military intelligence’s

most striking success came from the use of illegal officers and

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