The GRU: Putin’s No-Longer-So-Secret Weapon - by Michael Weiss | Shooting At Meek Mill’s Concert: 2 Dead & 2 Injured At Connecticut Show
The GRU: Putin’s No-Longer-So-Secret Weapon MICHAEL WEISS 12.31.16 12:15 AM ET Long regarded as the understudy of the infamous KGB and its successor services, Russian military intelligence is now front and center in the Moscow-Washington showdown. It says something about the ingrained rivalry between the various fiefdoms of Russian espionage that the founder of Soviet military intelligence, Leon Trotsky, had an ice-ax driven into his head in Mexico by an agent of Stalin’s foreign intelligence service. Ever since, in the long dark history of Soviet and Russian spookery the military’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, has been overshadowed by a succession of more powerful, famous and infamous organizations known by a succession of acronyms, most famously as the KGB and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FSB and SVR. But on Thursday the GRU suddenly emerged from the shadows when the waning Obama administration imposed sanctions on the four top