‘Ruthless’ GRU looks like a comedy outfit
Vladimir Putin likes to pride himself on the sophistication and effectiveness of his intelligence services, which play a vital role in his vanity project to re-establish Russia as one of the world’s leading powers.
As a former senior KGB officer, Putin has personal knowledge of the advantages gained from wellrun intelligence-gathering operations against enemy targets.
To this end, the Kremlin has invested heavily in rebuilding the operational strength of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service which, during the Soviet era, was regarded as one of the elite units in the ideological conflict with the West.
The only problem for Putin is that, far from an organisation famed for its fearless and ruthless approach, the GRU is starting to look more like a comedy outfit.
The realisation that the GRU is not all it’s cracked up to be started to dawn after its failed attempt to murder one of its own: Sergei Skripal, the former GRU officer in retirement in Salisbury.
Not only did it fail to assassinate Skripal using the Novichok nerve agent, which had been smuggled into the country in a small perfume flask. (Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, survived after being exposed to the agent that had been smeared on the front door of his Salisbury home).
But the ineptitude of the two GRU hoods sent to carry out the mission meant they were easily and quickly identified by British counter-terrorism experts, to the extent that Russia faces increased isolation as a consequence.
Now the GRU has compounded its error-strewn performance in Britain by being caught red-handed trying to undertake another clandestine enterprise in the Netherlands, where they tried to mount a cyber attack on the global chemical weapons watchdog investigating . . . er, the Salisbury poisoning.
Britain appealed to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to conduct its own analysis of the poison used in Salisbury to verify the Government’s claim that it could only have come from Russia.
Desperate to discover just how much the British authorities knew about the Salisbury attack, the GRU first attempted ‘‘spearfishing’’ attacks on the Foreign Office and the Porton Down research establishment. When these failed, the GRU then dispatched a fourman team to Amsterdam to penetrate the OPCW.
The level of incompetence they displayed in this botched affair beggars belief. According to the evidence produced yesterday at a press conference hosted by Dutch and British officials, this hapless crew used publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots, meaning that their login details were easily traceable. D’oh! And they flew into Amsterdam using forged passports bearing four consecutive numbers.
They also broke the iron law of any spying enterprise: they got caught.
The four agents, who were caught when their attempt to intercept the logins of OPCW staff triggered an alarm, were unceremoniously deported back to Moscow, where they are unlikely ever again to be trusted with a mission now that their cover has been blown.
The fiasco certainly makes grim reading for Putin, who – for all his bravado – is clearly feeling the strain over the incompetence of his spies. Earlier this week, he let slip his true feelings about the Salisbury poisoning, referring to Mr Skripal as a ‘‘traitor and scumbag’’.
It would be fascinating to hear him describe the performance of Russia’s elite espionage agency.
– Telegraph Group A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
The men were expelled instead of arrested, because they were traveling on diplomatic passports.
The Dutch also accused the GRU of trying to hack investigators examining the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led team says it has strong evidence the missile that brought the plane down came from a Russia-based military unit. Russia has denied the charge.
Also yesterday, the US Justice Department charged seven GRU officers — including the four caught in The Hague — in an international hacking rampage that targeted more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company, a Swiss chemical lab and the OPCW.
The seven were identified as: Aleksei Morenets, 41; Evgenii Serebriakov, 37; Ivan Yermakov, 32; Artem Malyshev, 30; and Dmitriy Badin, 27; who were each assigned to Military Unit 26165, and Oleg Sotnikov, 46, and Alexey Minin, 46, who were also GRU officers.
Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said the accusations were fake and intended to ‘‘delegitimise’’ a resurgent Russia.
Russia countered with accusations of their own: The Defense Ministry unveiled complex allegations that the US has a clandestine biological weapons lab in the country of Georgia as part of a network of labs on the edges of Russia and China that flout international rules.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations ‘‘an invention’’ and ‘‘obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behaviour on many fronts.’’ –AP