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Comment by BWStearns | Hacker News Reader

GRU is nominally military intelligence and SVR inherited the KGB illegals program. These programs are really hard and have a ton of overhead supporting a relatively small number of actual officers. Having duplicate capabilities for it is a waste. Especially in this case where they're used for active crimes/violence. The GRU has never been shy about just going and murdering people on a tourist visa[0], why bother with all the extra overhead?

Not all (or even most) intelligence agencies run illegals programs since they're crazy difficult, fragile, expensive, and arguably a waste of effort/resources.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/05/planes-train...

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> having duplicate capabilities for it is a waste.

This is a feature, not a bug. This is how a system of checks and balances works in authoritarian countries - the entire security apparatus is duplicated several times over lest one agency becomes too powerful or indispensable. KGB/Ministry of the Interior/Military kept each other in check for much of the later part of the Soviet Union's existence.

This. I would only add that even the FSB (which is theoretically the equivalent of the FBI, and should operate domestically) has extensive foreign operations. It was most likely the FSB that was primarily blamed for the major fuckup that was the raid on Kyiv in 2022. Sergey Beseda, the leader of the "foreign branch", was imprisoned for some time after that happened.

Russia also has had at least three armed forces up until recently, the normal one, the Rosgvardia, and the PMC complex including Wagner. All of them have had rather serious equipment, for example Wagner had tanks, artillery, they even had their own air defence like Pantsir and their own aviation.

Running an oppressive, murderous regime sometimes requires crazy solutions.

That reminds me of this exchange, where two men are bluffing their way through a (literal) circle of hell:

> “They think—what do they think? That we’re important officials?”

> “No. Of course not. They know we are only pretending that.”

> “Then what—”

> “But they cannot be sure. We might be important officials. But most of them think we are secret police.”

> “But how do you know there are secret police?”

> Benito looked very sad. “Allen, there have to be. You cannot run a bureaucratic state without them. Come.”

-- Inferno, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven

Now that you make me think about it, that doesn't even seem a feature of authoritarian countries.

I can easily think plenty of countries around the world where security and intelligence duties are often duplicated and overlap.

While it is probably a waste of resources, dictatorships are famous for having wasteful duplicated efforts: dictators need their people to constantly be competing with each other, and to split favor so that no one ever becomes strong enough to pose a threat to the Big Man himself. That is the whole reason for the GRU-KGB split in the first place!

Suvorov wrote about the Soviet practice of making GRU and KGB compete for the same goals to ensure they get the best intelligence.

How very capitalist of them.

The Soviet Union had multiple competing suppliers for most things you could think of, down to consumer goods.

capitalism is about the accumulation of capital; competition is not related, but the byproducts of capitalism which can be beneficial to the consumer.

Capital (big C) does everything it can to extinguish competition -- and would, if not for regulation, trust busting, etc. All large companies are trying to be monopolies to the fullest extent possible, and history shows plenty of examples.

CIA is predominantly human intelligence, big-picture targeting, and analysis.

But, starting with GWOT, the DIA picked up its own human intelligence. They want it their way, and don't want to play with gatekeepers. The DOD also owns SIGINT via the NSA, which is a military organization headed by an Admiral/General, and they want to be able to pair their existing strengths with HUMINT.

Several NATO countries, esp. the Baltics / Central Europe have been expanding military HUMINT in the same way, esp. in anticipation of Russian infiltration and SF work that was seen in the early days of Ukraine round 2.

In other words, everyone else is doing it, even if it's fragile, expensive, and wasteful.

GRU has always had its own illegals program, at least from the 1930s.

They were not concerned with the same tasks as KGB/SVR, targeting military technology and the militaries themselves rather than political/security espionage , so they did away with much smaller networks and humbler resources.

Agencies need all types of spies, some laying low for years in case their networks get rolled up.

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