Viktor Suvorov - Inside soviet military intelligence

The personnel directorate has exceptional influence both in the GRU and outside. It directs the movements of all officers, not only inside the GRU, but in a number of satellites, in fleet intelligence, intelligence directorates of military districts and groups of forces too, and also in the intelligence services of Eastern bloc countries.

The Operational/Technical Directorate is concerned with the development and production of all espionage equipment and apparatus. Within its dominion fall several scientific research institutes and specialised undertakings. On the orders of the procurement organs the directorate prepares equipment for secret writing and micro-photography, several kinds of dead letter-box, radio appliances, eavesdropping material, armaments and poisons, to name but a few. Its head is a lieutenant-general, although he is not classed officially as a deputy.

The Administrative/Technical Directorate is in charge of foreign currencies and other items of value, gold and diamonds, for example. This directorate is the currency middle-man between the military industrial commission and the operational users. It controls all the currency resources of the GRU and also carries out secret speculative operations on the international market. Possessed of colossal currency resources, it frequently uses them in order to exert secret pressure on individual businessmen, statesmen and sometimes even on whole governments. No less important, it is responsible for the growth of capital belonging to the GRU and for the acquisition of 'clean' currency.

The Communications Directorate deals with the organisation of radio and other communication between the GRU and its overseas units. Needless to say, it controls several powerful reception and transmission centres of its own, but should the need arise to secure special channels of communication, in case of a worsening of operational conditions, for example, then it can make use of the services of the cosmic intelligence directorate, communicating with illegals and agents by means of GRU satellites.

The Financial Department: unlike the administrative/technical directorate, the financial department deals only with Soviet money, not with foreign currency. The financial department carries out legal financial operations in the Soviet Union.

The First GRU Department (Passport) studies passport regulations worldwide. In the pursuit of this esoteric duty it has the greatest collection in the world of passports, identity cards, driving licences, military documents, passes, police documents, railway, air and sea tickets. The department keeps maps of many thousands of frontier posts, customs and police posts, and so on. The department can at any moment say what documents are required at any given control point in the world, what sort of questions are asked, and what stamps are to be put on the passports and other documents. Within a few hours, it can forge the passport of any country to conform with the latest changes in the passport and visa regulations of that country, having at its disposal hundreds of thousands of blanks for new passports, identity cards and driving licences for every country in the world. In my experience, the preparation of the papers which will preserve one's true identity can be done in a very short time.

The Eighth GRU Department is the most secret of all the top secret units of the GRU. The eighth department possesses all the GRU's secrets. It is here that the enciphering and deciphering of all incoming and outgoing documents is carried out.

The Archives Department is possibly the most interesting of all the departments. In its cellars are millions of personal details and files on illegals, domestic officers, undercover residencies, successful recruitment of foreigners (and unsuccessful ones), material on everyone from statesmen and army heads to prostitutes and homosexuals and designers of rockets and submarines. In every file lies the fate of an individual, in every file there is an unwritten novel.

We can define an illegal as an officer of strategic intelligence performing the tasks of the Centre on the territory of a foreign state, who passes himself off as a foreigner but not as a Soviet citizen. Illegals are frequently confused with agents, but these are completely different things. The crucial difference is that the agent is an inhabitant of a foreign country who has been recruited by, and works in the interest of, Soviet intelligence, whereas an illegal is first and foremost a Soviet officer passing himself off as a foreigner. Sometimes some of the most valuable and deserving agents receive Soviet citizenship as an incentive and are awarded the rank of an officer of the GRU or the KGB, but even so, an agent remains an agent. However, in the occasional case when a foreigner has been recruited by Soviet intelligence and for some reason or other changes his appearance or name and continues his activities with false documents, then he is called an illegal agent.

Both the GRU and the KGB have their own illegal networks, but these are completely independent one from the other. Each organisation selects, trains, prepares, deploys and utilises its illegals as it sees fit. In the same way each organisation separately works out principles, methods of work and technical details of the illegal system separately. The system of running illegals is entirely different in the two services. In the KGB there is a special directorate of illegal activities. In the GRU, all illegals are trained in a training centre under the leadership of Lieutenant-General V. T. Guryenko. After their training, the illegals are put at the disposal of the heads of the four geographical directorates and are controlled personally by them. Thus each directorate head supervises a number of directions and separately a group of illegals. In order to help him, the directorate head can call on a small group of advisers consisting in the main of former illegals (though not 'blown' ones) who are ready at any moment, using false papers, to go to the target country and 'fine-tune' and help the activities of the illegal networks. Directorate heads themselves frequently travel abroad for the same reasons. A number of the more important illegals are directly controlled by the first deputy head of the GRU, and there is a cream who are under the personal supervision of the head of the GRU. Thus both one and the other have small groups consisting of the most experienced and successful illegals who have returned from abroad and who exercise supervision over the daily running of the illegals. If a young illegal begins to acquire really interesting information he is transferred from the control of the head of a directorate to that of the first deputy or, in the case of even greater success, to that of the head of the GRU himself. This is, of course, a very high honour, granted only to those who return information of a very high calibre -unprecedented or highly classified material which produces an intelligence breakthrough. Equally an illegal may be demoted for failing to produce the goods. In certain cases his grade may fall below that which is supervised by the head of a directorate and he will be supervised only by the head of a direction. This is a very critical stage for the illegal, although he may not even be able to guess that it has happened. If he is demoted to direction head level - and he is, of course, not informed about this -the next step could well be a recall to the Soviet Union, regarded by all intelligence personnel as the direst form of punishment. Recall to the Soviet Union is a particularly effective measure against any Soviet citizen serving abroad. It is all the same to them whether they are in Paris or in Pnom Penh. The only important thing is that they should not be in the Soviet Union, and transfer to the Soviet Union, even on promotion, is regarded as the tragedy of a lifetime.