What Has Become of the GRU?

Two striking facts from a Czech investigation into the GRU’s role in the 2014 explosions of ammunition depots in the village of Vrbetice shed light on how the GRU has developed over the years. 

First, investigators learned that GRU agents organized the two explosions — that claimed human lives on the territory of a European country. This was part of an operation to poison Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, thereby disrupting the supply of weapons to Ukraine. Second, it turned out that the same two GRU operatives who had attempted to poison Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom personally arranged the explosions.

In fact, the roots of this operation go back to September 28, 1956, when a bomb exploded in the Hamburg office of Otto Schlüter. 

Although the prominent arms dealer escaped with nothing more than wounds, his assistant was killed. Two more attempts on Schlüter’s life soon followed. 

One year later, a bomb exploded in his Mercedes-Benz, killing his mother and seriously wounding his daughter. Only at that point did Schlüter decide to give up his main business, which had been supplying weapons to Algerian rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Because other Germans were also supplying weapons to the FLN, the assassination attempts continued. Soon after, a bomb planted under the driver’s seat of a different Mercedes-Benz in Hamburg exploded, killing another arms dealer. 

That man’s Swiss business partner had been killed earlier in Geneva by a poisoned dart fired from a converted bicycle pump.

Meanwhile, the cargo ship Atlas, loaded with Norwegian dynamite for the FLN, sank in the port of Hamburg after a bomb attached to its keel exploded.

It was a high-profile story, and the series of murders and bombings were attributed to the mysterious la Main Rouge (The Red Hand) organization that was believed to be a group of French settlers in North Africa who were dissatisfied with the course of the war in Algeria. 

It later became known that professional units of the French intelligence service SDECE had carried out the operations. 

By that time, the SDECE had developed two types of operations to prevent outside parties from supplying weapons to Algeria. The first was called “Arma,” from the word armaments. These operations were intended to sabotage the FLN’s support channels and intimidate businessmen working with the Algerians. 

This involved destroying the ships carrying weapons there, such as the Atlas in the Hamburg port. The second, code-named “Homo” for “homicide,” involved the assassination of arms suppliers and FLN agents. The operations killed hundreds of people, primarily in North Africa and the Middle East, with German arms sellers among them.  

The killings in Germany had a specific purpose — to knock Germany out of the small arms supplies market for the Algerian rebels. Many years later, Germany acknowledged that terrorist activities by the “The Red Hand” was one of the reasons that forced the German authorities to tighten the rules on the arms trade. This did not, however, help the French win the war in Algeria. 

This old story — that the French and Germans dislike recalling — is very similar to how the Czechs describe the current actions of Russia’s GRU. In it, we see the same combination of “arma” and “homo”: explosions at arms depots and an attempt to poison a Bulgarian who supplied arms to Ukraine.