The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

The Hunt for Red October Ramius takes the boat to sea for exercises with the submarine V.K. Konovalov, commanded by his former student Captain Tupolev (Stellan Skarsgård). Ramius murders political officer Ivan Putin (Peter Firth), the one man not under his command and the only man aboard besides himself who knows the sub's orders, then burns the orders and tells the crew they will conduct nuclear missile drills off America's east coast. The Dallas, an American submarine on patrol nearby, detects Red October but loses contact once Ramius engages the silent drive. The next morning, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) briefs U.S. government officials on the departure of Red October and the threat it poses. Officials in the briefing, learning that the Soviet Navy has been deployed to sink Red October, fear Ramius may plan a strike against the U.S. However, Ryan thinks Ramius plans to defect and leaves for the North Atlantic to prove his theory before the U.S. Navy is ordered ...

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...