General Takes Helm of Top-Secret GRU

The general who reportedly orchestrated the death of Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev has been appointed head of the Russian military's Chief Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, the Defense Ministry confirmed Wednesday.


Colonel General Valentin Korabelnikov, the former chief of the GRU's regional conflicts directorate, faces the major challenge of reorienting Russia's most secretive espionage agency from Cold War-era strategic priorities to the limitations of a post-Soviet budget and an altered military policy.


The daily newspaper Segodnya reported that Korabelnikov, who ran Russia's military intelligence in Chechnya, was personally in charge of locating and killing Dudayev. Dudayev was killed by a rocket while talking on a satellite telephone April 26, 1996. The phone's location was reportedly traced by GRU surveillance aircraft. There was no independent confirmation of Segodnya's account of Korabelnikov's involvement.


Korabelnikov is known as a "practical, decisive man with extensive operational experience," said Valery Kudryavtsev, an analyst at the Moscow-based Center for Strategic and Military Studies. Unlike his predecessor, Fyodor Ladygin, an analyst and expert on disarmament negotiations, Korabelnikov will take a more "dynamic" role in transforming the GRU, Kudryavtsev said.


Korabelnikov inherits Russia's largest and most unreformed intelligence service, according to leading British intelligence historian Rupert Allason.


"The GRU remains the most closed of all Russia's espionage structures ... and the one which has changed the least," said Allason. "We know very little about [the GRU] because the last known successful penetration was [executed GRU Colonel] Oleg Penkovsky in 1961."


The GRU, which is responsible for all aspects of military intelligence from strategic analysis to tactical battlefield coordination, has changed "not at all" over the last seven years, said Itogi magazine defense correspondent Alexander Golz. Nonetheless, despite a failure to adapt to the prevailing geopolitical climate, the GRU has felt the post-Soviet financial squeeze that has stricken Russia's armed services, Golz said.


"They are not pursuing the same level of activity," as in Soviet times, said Golz, a former analyst at Krasnaya Zvezda, the army's official newspaper paper. "Of course ... they are feeling the same financial problems as the rest of the army."


The GRU's huge intelligence apparatus dwarfs that of Russia's other foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, formerly the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, Kudryavtsev said.


Segodnya reported that GRU operatives in foreign stations outnumber the SVR by six to one. The GRU traditionally has been more effective in terms of practical intelligence gathering than the "politicals" of the SVR, Kudryavtsev added. The GRU even has a spetsnaz force of 25,000 shock troops under its direct control, unlike the KGB, which lost its military forces after 1991, said a spokesman for the Defense Ministry's information section.


In the 1980s, some notable GRU espionage successes against the West helped the Soviet Union to keep up in the technological arms race. The designs of the SS-20 ballistic missile is heavily based on Western intercontinental ballistic missiles, Segodnya reported. The Tu-160 heavy bomber, the An-72 transport plane and a whole generation of Soviet surface-to-air missiles also benefitted heavily from copied Western designs.


Despite the success of its technological espionage, the GRU appears to enjoy far less direct political influence over central government than the SVR. Whereas SVR director Vyacheslav Trubnikov meets Yeltsin every Monday, Korabelnikov has to go through the army's General Staff or through the Defense Ministry. Also, whereas the SVR enjoys the luxury of having their "own man" at the Foreign Ministry -- Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov is a former SVR director -- there is evidence that the influence of the GRU within the General Staff is limited.