GRU Defector Lunev

Stanislav Lunev (born 1946 in Leningrad) is a former Soviet military officer, the highest-ranking GRU officer to defect from Russia to the United States.

He was born in the family of a Soviet Army officer. He graduated from the Suvorov Military School in Vladikavkaz, and then from Joint Arms High Command Military Academy.

He then worked as a GRU intelligence officer in Singapore in 1978, in China from 1980, and in the United States from 1988. He defected to U.S. authorities in 1992. Since then he has worked as a consultant to the FBI and CIA.  He remains in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program.

Nuclear Sabotage Operations

Lunev is mostly known for his description of nuclear sabotage operations that have allegedly been prepared by the KGB and GRU against the western countries. It was known from other sources that large arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries for these planned activities.. They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices. One of such cache, which was identified by Vasili Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities tried to remove it from woods near Berne. Several others caches were removed successfully.

Lunev asserted that some of the hidden caches could contain portable tactical nuclear weapons known as RA-115 "suitcase bombs". Such bombs have been prepared to assassinate US leaders in the event of war, according to him.  Lunev states that he had personally looked for hiding places for weapons caches in the Shenandoah Valley area and that "it is surprisingly easy to smuggle nuclear weapons into the US, either across the Mexican border or using a small transport missile that can slip undetected when launched from a Russian airplane.

US Congressman Curt Weldon supported claims by Lunev but noted that Lunev had "exaggerated things", according to the FBI. Searches of the areas identified by Lunev — who admits he never planted any weapons in the US — have been conducted, "but law-enforcement officials have never found such weapons caches, with or without portable nuclear weapons."

Poisoning of Potomac River

According to Lunev, a probable scenario in the event of war would have been poisoning the Potomac River with chemical or biological weapons, "targeting the residents of Washington DC". He also noted that it is "likely" that GRU operatives placed "poison supplies near the tributaries to major US reservoirs." These allegations have been confirmed by former SVR officer Kouzminov, who was responsible for transporting pathogens from around the world for the Russian program of biological weapons in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. He described a variety of biological warfare acts that would be carried out on the order of the Russian President in the event of hostilities, including poisoning public drinking-water supplies and food processing plants.
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Lunev

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Through the Eyes of the Enemy

by Stanislav Lunez
1998Amazon.com review  5 Stars

With the knowledge of one who spent most of his professional life in Russia's most secretive intelligence agency, Colonel Lunev provides a riveting and disturbing -- and very credible -- look at the GRU and how it has resisted the reforms that have swept its country.

Lunev provides an equally troubling yet compelling analysis of how the corruption of the Soviet system hijacked economic reform in Russia and turned the country into what President Yeltsin himself once called the "superpower of crime."

There are few books about the GRU. The best-known ones, written under the pseudonym Suvorov by a former GRU officer named Rezun who defected to the United Kingdom, are excellent works but many scholars suspect that they rest heavily on material provided by British intelligence. While this does not diminish the value of the Suvorov books, it does contrast with that of Lunev who, with the help of a co-author, offers a perspective completely unique to his experience.

Suvorov's books remain valuable, because the GRU has changed little if at all, and its mission remains the same. But being written in the Soviet period, they lack the context of the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War as we knew it.

U.S. intelligence was slow to realize the depth of criminalization within Russia's government and its security and intelligence services, and American policymakers have yet to accept this fact. Policymakers are also reluctant to admit that Moscow has preserved the Soviet-built mechanisms to decapitate the civilian and military leadership of the United States in the event of crisis.

Lunev describes the situation lucidly. One cannot understand the situation in Russia today without reading this book.

J. Michael Waller, Ph.D. Author, "Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today" (Westview, 1994). Executive Editor, "Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization." Vice President, American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, D.C.