Washington believes Moscow’s military spying organisation took the lead in hacking to interfere with the US election

Barack Obama’s announcement that Washington will avenge alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the US election with new sanctions and the expulsion of 35 diplomats has focused attention once again on Russia’s main intelligence directorate, the GRU.

Powerful and mysterious, the GRU is one of the country’s three intelligence agencies and was itself put under sanction on Thursday, along with four individual officers and three companies the US claims provided material support to its cyber operations.

Russia also has the FSB and SVR. The former is the sprawling structure that absorbed most parts of the KGB, while the latter is the part that focused on spying abroad, which became a new structure in modern Russia. The GRU, the intelligence wing of the Russian army, has always been separate entity.

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All three run agents and missions abroad, but US intelligence has come to believe that the GRU took the lead in hacking operations, though there has been no concrete evidence provided publicly to definitively link it to the hacks. The US sanctions also hit the FSB, but all four individuals named are high-ranking GRU officials.

Donald Trump has scorned US intelligence agencies’ assessments of Russian hacking. His spokeswoman, Kelly Ann Conway, told CNN: “The GRU doesn’t really travel here, doesn’t keep its assets here.”

Experts say this is not true. “The GRU is an active, aggressive and extensive intelligence agency, with all kinds of assets in the US,” said Mark Galeotti, a specialist on the Russian security and intelligence services.

“The GRU is a military intelligence agency, which makes it especially willing to take risks, but in the competitive world of Russian spying it doesn’t confine itself to military secrets but hunts everything from insider business information to political gossip.”



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The GRU went into decline in the 1990s and there was some talk of disbanding it, but in 2006 it moved to new headquarters. It was considered instrumental in Russian manoeuvres to annex Crimea in 2014 and subsequent interference in eastern Ukraine.

The level of secrecy surrounding the GRU is so high that there was even speculation earlier this year that it had changed its name without anybody knowing.

In-country operations in the US would normally be run by the SVR. The agency is known for for having run slow-drip “illegals” operations, in which Russians would pretend to be natives of the country they were based in, painstakingly building up their “legend” over decades.

An SVR defector, however, alerted US authorities to the programme, and allowed them to kept tabs on 11 agents for years before swooping in 2010 and deporting them to Russia.