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Beginning as a not-so-friendly rivalry between the

longstanding and entrenched Military  Гла́вное Разве́дывательное Управле́ние /  Glavnoe

 Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie Generalnovo Shtaba (ГРУ/GRU) or, roughly translated, the Main

Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff and the

fledgling State Комит́ет Госуд́арственной Безоп́асности /  Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (КГБ/KGB) or State Security

Committee, this legendarily long-running, bitter and

 bloody feud has claimed countless casualties and

even since the renaming of the KGB to the

Федера́ льная слу́жба безопа́сности /   FederalnayaSluzhba Bezopasnosti (ФСБ/FSB) or Federal

Security Service, shows no signs of abating and on

the contrary, seems to become yet more intense and

overt.

Ever since the KGB's first major overseas work in the

1950's with operations in Laos and (as then named)

Persia along with the United Kingdom, the rivalry

soon began costing the USSR potential assets and

intelligence gains. Three specific agents, Phoc Tun

Lao, Hassan Berkha Kalanjari and Anthony Blunt areknown to have acted (at least briefly) as triple agents

in the pay of not only the KGB and GRU but also of 

their own country's national intelligence agencies.

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Such was the embarrassment within the various

services over these three agents that Phoc Tun Lao

was assassinated, Kalanjari was betrayed eventually

to the notorious SAVAK of Mohammed Reza Shah where he died under torture in the late 1960's, and

Blunt was abandoned but watched by both services

along with Britain's MI5 until his eventual disgraced

death in 1983.

In the 1960's and 70's, the two agencies did their

best to embarrass each other on all frontsincluding a particularly unpleasant exposure of a

political mole for the GRU, Adrian Callaghan in

Australia in 1974 and the beautifully staged betrayal

of the GRU officer Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky in

1959 which became apparently "complete" in 1961.

Penkovsky systematically burned exclusively KGB

assets for the entire period until eventually caught

and executed by the KGB in 1963.

Beginning with the second tenure of Leonid Ilyich

Brezhnev (1977 to 1982), the KGB and GRU began

to balkanize by nationality, largely as a result of 

 patronage and nepotism within both services. While

the KGB became almost entirely ethnically Russian,the GRU recruited more and more of its senior 

officers and field agents from Georgia and the

Ukraine. Naturally, this only exacerbated the by now

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savage rivalry between the two. Under Brezhnev,

the GRU slowly gained ground and was regarded

internally as the "Senior Service".

This suffered a dramatic reverse under the former

KGB head, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov. His reign

also proved dramatically short but the GRU suffered

truly crushing funding cutbacks which were reflected

(often tragically) in living circumstances of many of 

its agents. The KGB, on the other hand, was flying

very high during this period.

The GRU enjoyed a brief renaissance during the

extremely short tenure of Konstantin Ustinovich

Chernenko, himself a Georgian.

Although everything changed with Mikhail

Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the changes were not, in theIntelligence community, as dramatic and sudden as

they appeared from the outside. Unlike his greatest

rival for ultimate power in the USSR, Grigory

Valentinovich Romanov, Mikhail Sergeyevich had

never served with the KGB and unlike his mentor,

Andropov, had no special attachment to it.

Furthermore, the sitting head of the GRU, Georg

Eduardis dze Melua, proved such a strong supporter 

of both the Glasnost and Perestroika policies (to

Romanov's reported fury) that Gorbachev did not

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scale back GRU operations with the same heavy hand 

he curtailed the KGB - although external

international pressure from the Western Powers was

directed mainly against the more widely-known KGBwhich doubtless had some effect since Gorbachev

was actively seeking Western investment during his

tenure.

With the failed coup against Gorbachev, the Old

World finally seemed to end. Boris Nikolayevich

Yeltsin led the way with the democratization of Russia and the formation of the Russian Federation 

and this, unwisely, was seen as the end of the GRU /

KGB internal feud. Sadly, this did not prove to be the

case and the GRU still struggles with the FSB (the

renamed KGB) in the day to day operation of both

the Russian Federation and surrounding states.

Recent issues between the two services have

included:

1. Each side supplied conflicting information to

MI6 and the CIA regarding the purchase of 

Nigerian Uranium by Iraq. In this case, the

FSB data was more accurate since it dismissedthe whole thing as absurd and unsubstantiated.

2. Both sides shipped nuclear technology to

Pakistan, although the GRU made a concerted

attempt to switch sides and support India as soon

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as it discovered the FSB dealing plutonium into

Islamabad.

3. The "heart attack " suffered by Turkmenbashi of 

Turkmenistan which conveniently occurred after he had dissolved all traces of co-operation 

 between his internal Intelligence network and

FSB.

4. The murder of ex-KGB agent Alexander 

Valterovich Litvinenko using Polonium-210 (an

alpha-radiation emitter) which he apparently

ingested at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly,

London. Although no-one has yet been charged

with this offence, it has been noted by many

conspiracy theorists that Litvinenko was eating

right next to the niece of a former Georgian

GRU head, a singer named Ketevan "Katie"

Melua.

The Georgian connection inside the GRU is still very

strong and the feud shows no signs of calming down

any time soon. This node will be updated as further 

evidence and examples are forthcoming.