Glavnoye Razvedyvatel ' noye Upravleniye GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel ' noye Upravleniye ( Russian : Главное разведывательное управление , English : Main Intelligence Directorate ) is the foreign military intelligence main directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation ( formerly the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union ) . " GRU " is the English transliteration of the Russian acronym ГРУ , which stands for " Главное Разведывательное Управление " , meaning Main Intelligence Directorate . The official full name translation is Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation . It is also known as GRU GSh ( short for " GRU Generalnovo Shtaba " , or ГРУ Генерального штаба , i . e . " GRU of the General Staff " ) . The GRU is Russia ' s largest foreign intelligence agency . In 1997 it deployed six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR , the successor of the KGB ' s foreign operations directorate . It also commanded 25 , 000 Spetsnaz troops in 1997 . The current GRU Director is Lieutenant General Igor Sergun . History . The GRU first predecessor in post - tsarist Russia was created on October 21 , 1918 under the sponsorship of Leon Trotsky , who was then the civilian overseer of the Red Army ; it was originally known as the Registration Directorate ( " Registrupravlenie " , or RU ) . Simon Aralov was its first head . In his history of the early years of the GRU , Raymond W . Leonard writes : As originally established , the Registration Department was not directly subordinate to the General Staff ( at the time called the Red Army Field Staff — " Polevoi Shtab " ) . Administratively , it was the Third Department of the Field Staff ' s Operations Directorate . In July 1920 , the RU was made the second of four main departments in the Operations Directorate . Until 1921 , it was usually called the " Registrupr " ( Registration Department ) . That year , following the Soviet - Polish War , it was elevated in status to become the Second ( Intelligence ) Directorate of the Red Army Staff , and was thereafter known as the " Razvedupr " . This probably resulted from its new primary peacetime responsibilities as the main source of foreign intelligence for the Soviet leadership . As part of a major re - organization of the Red Army , sometime in 1925 or 1926 the RU ( then Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenye ) became the Fourth ( Intelligence ) Directorate of the Red Army Staff , and was thereafter also known simply as the " Fourth Department . " Throughout most of the interwar period , the men and women who worked for Red Army Intelligence called it either the Fourth Department , the Intelligence Service , the " Razvedupr " , or the RU . [ . . . ] As a result of the re - organization [ in 1926 ] , carried out in part to break up Trotsky ' s hold on the army , the Fourth Department seems to have been placed directly under the control of the State Defense Council ( Gosudarstvennaia komissiia oborony , or GKO ) , the successor of the RVSR . Thereafter its analysis and reports went directly to the GKO and Politburo , even apparently bypassing the Red Army Staff . The first head of the 4th Directorate was Janis Karlovich Berzin , a Latvian Communist and former member of the Cheka , who remained in the post until 28 November 1937 , when he was arrested and subsequently liquidated during Joseph Stalin ' s purges . The GRU was well known in the Soviet government for its fierce independence from the rival " internal intelligence organizations " , such as NKVD and KGB . At the time of the GRU ' s creation , Lenin infuriated the Cheka ( predecessor of the KGB ) by ordering it not to interfere with the GRU ' s operations . Nonetheless , the Cheka infiltrated the GRU in 1919 . This planted the seed for a fierce rivalry between the two agencies , which were both engaged in espionage , and was even more intense than the rivalry between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency in America would be in a future time . The existence of the GRU was not publicized during the Soviet era , although documents concerning it became available in the West in the late 1920s and it was mentioned in the 1931 memoirs of the first OGPU defector , Georges Agabekov , and described in detail in the 1939 autobiography ( " I Was Stalin ' s Agent " ) of Walter Krivitsky , the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect . It became widely known in Russia , and the West outside the narrow confines of the intelligence community , during perestroika , in part thanks to the writings of " Viktor Suvorov " ( Vladimir Rezun ) , a GRU agent who defected to Great Britain in 1978 , and wrote about his experiences in the Soviet military and intelligence services . According to Suvorov , even the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union couldn ' t enter GRU headquarters without going through a security screening . The GRU is still a very important part of the Russian Federation ' s intelligence services , especially since it was never split up like the KGB . The KGB was dissolved after aiding a failed coup in 1991 against the then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev . It has since been divided into the Foreign Intelligence Service ( SVR ) and the Federal Security Service ( FSB ) . Activities . According to the Federation of American Scientists : " . . . Though sometimes compared to the US Defense Intelligence Agency , [ the GRU ' s ] activities encompass those performed by nearly all joint US military intelligence agencies as well as other national US organizations . The GRU gathers human intelligence through military attaches and foreign agents . It also maintains significant signals intelligence ( SIGINT ) and imagery reconnaissance ( IMINT ) and satellite imagery capabilities . " GRU Space Intelligence Directorate has put more than 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit . GRU and KGB SIGINT network employed about 350 , 000 specialists . According to GRU defector Kalanbe , " Though most Americans do not realize it , America is penetrated by Russian military intelligence to the extent that arms caches lie in wait for use by Russian special forces " . He also described a possibility that compact tactical nuclear weapons known as " suitcase bomb s " are hidden in the US and noted that " the most sensitive activity of the GRU is gathering intelligence on American leaders , and there is only one purpose for this intelligence : targeting information for spetsnaz ( special forces ) assassination squads [ in the event of war ] " . The American leaders will be easily assassinated using the " suitcase bomb s " , according to Lunev . GRU is " one of the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide " according to Lunev Terrorist Shamil Basayev reportedly worked for this organization . US Congressman Curt Weldon supported claims by Lunev but noted that Lunev had " exaggerated things " according to the FBI . Searches of the areas identified by Lunev – who admits he never planted any weapons in the US – have been conducted , " but law - enforcement officials have never found such weapons caches , with or without portable nuclear weapons . " During the 2006 Georgian - Russian espionage controversy , four officers working for the GRU Alexander Savva , Dmitry Kazantsev , Aleksey Zavgorodny and Alexander Baranov were arrested by the Counter - Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and were accused of espionage and sabotage . This spy network was managed from Armenia by GRU Colonel Anatoly Sinitsin . A few days later the arrested officers were handed over to Russia through the OSCE . GRU detachments from Chechnya were transferred to Lebanon independently of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon after the 2006 Israel - Lebanon conflict " to improve Russia ’ s image in the Arab world " , according to Sergei Ivanov . Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated by two GRU officers . GRU officers have also been accused of creating criminal death squads . Miscellaneous . Chechnya . Dmitry Kozak and Vladislav Surkov , members of the Vladimir Putin administration , reportedly served in GRU . Two Chechen former warlord s Said - Magomed Kakiev and Sulim Yamadayev are commanders of Special Battalions Vostok and Zapad ( " East " and " West " ) that are controlled by the GRU . Each battalion included close to a thousand fighters , until their disbandment in 2008 . Baranov . In 2002 , Bill Powell , former Moscow bureau chief at " Newsweek " , wrote " Treason " , an account of the experiences of former GRU colonel Vyacheslav Baranov . Baranov had been recruited by the U . S . Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) and agreed to spy for them , but was betrayed to the Russians by a mole in either the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) or the CIA and spent five years in prison before being released . The identity of the mole remains unknown to this day , although speculation has mounted that it could have been Robert Hanssen . Chairmen . The Head of the Russian Military Intelligence is a military officer and is the highest ranking intelligence officer in Russia . He is the primary military intelligence adviser to the Russian Minister of Defense and to the Chief of Staff and also answers to the President of Russia . Fictional uses . In the international bestselling The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy , the main protagonist Lisbeth Salander ' s father , Alexander Zalachenko , was a former GRU spy who defected to Sweden and was granted political asylum and began his new life in Sweden under the protection of a secret division of the Swedish Security Service during the cold war . In Team Fortress 2 , the Gloves of Running Urgently ( often abbreviated as GRU ) are an unlockable melee weapon for the Heavy Weapons Guy .