Under the Tsarist empire from 1813 to 1917, briefly independent until 1921 and then part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, Georgia has a special place in the hearts and minds of Russian officials. They see it rather as Americans do Florida, a prized spot for recreation and the source of countless sentimental holiday memories. It is also a bastion of Russian influence on the Black Sea, and a bulwark against historic rivals for influence in the region such as Iran and Turkey. The idea that Georgia – an Orthodox Christian country – might want to head westwards, joining the European Union and even NATO, strikes most such Russians as preposterous effrontery, even if it is exactly what the overwhelming majority of Georgians want. Russia kept a military presence in Georgia, against the will of the republic’s authorities, until 2006, occasionally displaying military muscle in a show of force. But the real threat was not the demoralised and largely barracks-bound regular soldiers.
So far I have mainly dealt with the direct heirs to the KGB, the FSB domestic security agency and the SVR foreign-intelligence service. But in Georgia’s case, another organisation is at work: the GRU military-intelligence service.[23] Georgian officials term it the ‘most aggressive and destructive’ of Russia’s three spy services. With around 12,000 employees,7 the GRU has maintained unbroken institutional continuity since Leon Trotsky created it in 1918 (and it draws on a long tradition of Russian military espionage going back to Peter the Great). Even in Soviet times, the GRU’s motivation was more patriotism than communist ideology. Its officers tend to come from the provinces rather than Russia’s metropolises, from humbler backgrounds than the elite spies of the SVR, and nowadays from more honest ones than the cronies and thugs of the FSB. Partly as a result, the GRU tends to stay clear of the dodgy money-laundering schemes and commercial shenanigans beloved of its sister agencies: it will take part when operationally necessary, but not out of simple greed. It is hard, for example, to imagine a GRU officer being involved in the swindles that led to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. The agency is also less subject to political interference than the SVR: it is directly responsible only to the defence ministry, which shields it somewhat from the feuds and machinations at the top of Russian officialdom. But its senior officers and people close to it run into trouble if they stray into national politics.8
The GRU’s chief mission is to collect military information affecting Russian national security, especially plans, hardware and personnel moves. Those who watch it sometimes feel the agency is stuck in something of a time warp, with targets and tasking almost unchanged since Soviet times. GRU officers seem to assume that foreign countries have secret plans to attack Russia that must be uncovered. If they cannot be found, then the search must be intensified. GRU doctrine and methods have in the past been different too. It tends to go for the ‘quick hit’: overcoming a source’s reluctance, squeezing out his secrets and then dumping him, shutting him up with money, threats or worse. GRU officers are trained in the use of force and are quite capable of using it. In this sense, the GRU is quite different from counterpart organisations such as America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (part of the Pentagon) or Britain’s Defence Intelligence (which works out of the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall). These are chiefly focused on analysing information; when their staff members venture into the field, it is mainly as embassy-based attachés.
The GRU’s officers do work as military attachés too. But its role is much wider. Until the military reforms of 2009 it used to have responsibility for most of Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces – the equivalent of Britain’s SAS and SBS, or America’s Delta Force. It continues to have a special-operations capability. A small cadre of illegals are posted abroad, mainly to act as saboteurs in time of war. The agency also runs an extensive military counter-intelligence effort inside Russia; it is responsible for satellite reconnaissance (a comparable function to America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and also for military electronic information collection, such as snooping on NATO communications. The GRU’s officers are trained at the ‘Aquarium’ spy school and headquarters building in Moscow. In a sign of the agency’s prestige, in November 2006 Mr Putin formally opened the agency’s glitzy new building, on Narodnogo Opolchenia (People’s Militia Street) in the heart of Moscow. A sycophantic news report9 showed the indoor swimming pool (for training frogmen) a firing range, special windows incorporating anti-bugging technology and a hi-tech situation room.
The GRU has played a big role in Chechen counter-insurgency operations. A GRU operation killed the first president of the breakaway republic (a terrorist leader in Russian eyes), Jokar Dudayev. A missile blew him up when he unwisely emerged from hiding to make a call on his satellite telephone. Another high-profile killing was the car-bomb assassination of the exiled Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in the Qatari capital Doha in February 2004. This killed the Chechen leader and two bodyguards, as well as seriously injuring his 12-year-old son Daud. Shortly afterwards the infuriated Qatari authorities arrested three Russians (possibly because Russia’s foreign-intelligence agency, the SVR, which often has poor relations with the GRU, botched part of the follow-up). One of the arrested men, a first secretary at the Russian embassy named Aleksandr Fetisov, was released shortly afterwards either because of his diplomatic immunity, or possibly in exchange for two Qatari wrestlers arrested on trumped-up charges while in transit at Moscow airport. The other two men were identified as GRU agents, Anatoly Yablochkov and Vasily Pugachev. Both men received emphatic public support from Russian officials; their defence attorney was Nikolai Yegorov, a friend and former university classmate of Vladimir Putin. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, but were extradited to Russia in December to serve their sentence there. On arrival, they received a hero’s welcome and disappeared from public view. The Russian authorities said that the Qatari sentence was ‘not relevant’.
Many Russians see the Chechen fighters as mere bandits and welcomed these operations. For Western countries worried about global jihadist violence, the nuances of Chechen insurrectionist politics paled against the need to maintain solidarity between big countries in counter-terrorism. But the GRU’s operations in Georgia are quite different. They are directed against a country that has not attacked Russia. Its only crime is to see its history and future differently. The GRU armed and trained Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces that resisted Georgian independence in the early 1990s. The reluctance was understandable: Georgia’s ethnonationalist leadership at the time made little effort to accommodate the views of the country’s minorities. But the Abkhaz and Ossetian separatist militias also perpetrated ethnic cleansing against people in their territories, mainly Georgians, who disagreed.
After those civil wars ended in uneasy truces, many in Moscow assumed that Georgia could be maintained as a weak and pliant neighbour. History proved otherwise. Georgia stabilised under the rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister, and then accelerated its reforms under the leadership of the American-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. Seen (perhaps rather romantically) as a lone outpost of Atlanticist sentiments in the region, and (hard-headedly) as a vital part of plans to bring oil and gas from the Caspian and Central Asian regions to world markets, Georgia benefited from a huge CIA and Pentagon aid programme. Georgian intelligence and security officers received fast-track training in the United States and in other NATO allied countries. The Georgian military received subsidised or donated equipment, ranging from sophisticated battlefield radios to portable anti-aircraft missiles (provided secretly by Poland in 2007).10 The hope was to make Georgia a bastion of Western influence on Russia’s southern flank. But in the rivalry between the GRU and its adversaries, the Russian side has so far been the winner.