PARIS: It seems like a spy film parody two burly Russian agents staying in a low-end London hotel and doctoring a perfume flask with deadly nerve agent, oblivious to the security cameras filming them along the way.

The operation to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Britain was either botched, or intentionally obvious. But experts say it’s hallmark GRU, the Russian military spy agency with a brutish reputation that’s increasingly taking on high-profile, high-risk operations to damage Russia’s enemies, or simply strike fear.

After British authorities identified two alleged GRU agents this week as the perpetrators, releasing copies of their passports and a slew of CCTV images to back up the accusation, Russian social networks exploded with caricature photos and memes ridiculing the claim. The implication: the GRU would never do something so dumb.

Yet the Russian public may never know what actually happened, given the murkiness and myth that have surrounded the GRU since the Soviet era. “No normal Russian citizen has any idea what they are doing, or whether they are changing their strategy,” said independent military analyst Alexander Golts.

It’s not the first time that alleged GRU agents have failed to cover their tracks, stirring suspicions that they are trying to send a message. British Prime Minister Theresa May said the Skripal poisoning in March was a possible warning to other Russians in London that they aren’t safe. Either way, the accusations against the GRU fortify Russia’s image as unafraid to protect its interests on foreign soil, at any cost.

The Kremlin calls the British evidence hogwash, along with everything else the GRU has been accused of in recent years hacking the 2016 US election campaign, trying to stage a coup in Montenegro, downing a Malaysian Airlines plane over Ukraine, running mercenaries in Syria.

Wherever the truth lies, the GRU is having its moment.

A ‘can-do’ military mindset

Created in the midst of the civil war that spawned the Soviet Union, the GRU was chastened by Stalin in the 1930s when it grew too brazen abroad, according to military historians. Since then it has operated largely in the shadows, overseeing special forces and listening operations once by radio surveillance teams, now by hackers, according to Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer.

The GRU’s boss reports to Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, but was named by President Vladimir Putin, a onetime spymaster himself. The agency has also cultivated rivalries with fellow intelligence agencies FSB and SVR.

As tensions mount with the West since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the GRU’s prominence has risen.

“It has a ‘can-do’ military mindset less concerned with avoiding risk and more with not wasting opportunities,” Mark Galeotti, Russia security analyst at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, wrote in the Moscow Times. “As a result, the GRU is perhaps more likely to be active at the sharpest end of the current intelligence war between Russia and the West.”

The agency technically now called the GU, or Main Directorate, but still widely known by its Soviet-era acronym is increasingly upstaging rival agencies in the public imagination abroad.

It was the no 1 suspect in the March nerve agent attack in the British city of Salisbury against Skripal, himself a former GRU officer who became a British double agent. He and his daughter survived the poisoning, but another local resident died months later from exposure to the same nerve agent.

The GRU is accused of a role in the annexation of Crimea and separatist reb­el­­lion in eastern Ukraine, and in leading a so-called shadow army in Syria. Alleged GRU agents have been targeted by US sanctions, and 12 were indicted in July in Robert Mueller’s investigation into election meddling, accused of hacking into the Hillary Clinton campaign and releasing masses of emails.

Each time the GRU is outed it damages the individuals involved, but not necessarily the operations as a whole, Felgenhauer said. And a well-publicised attack like that on Skripal can “demonstrate to the rank and file [of intelligence agencies] that if you become a traitor, you won’t end well”. While the GRU make for handy villains, some warn that too much Western attention to the GRU could distract from more dangerous covert activity by Russia’s other spy agencies. Some experts believe the FSB or SVR carried out a parallel hacking campaign around the US 2016 elections that hasn’t yet been exposed.

“There is a risk that placing too much attention on the GRU because it provides a more politically compelling narrative could actually become a problem for the West. ... The more urbane spies of the SVR and the political technologists and disruptors of the FSB represent every bit as much a challenge for the West,” Galeotti wrote.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2018