Intel world

Death of theGRU Commander

As a career U.S.Army military intelligence officer, and our senior military attaché to Russia from 2012 to 2014, I met with General Sergun and his staff several times for extended periods. I found him soft-spoken, unassuming, complex, erudite and nuanced. And I learned that even as Sergun relentlessly directed global intelligence operations against our interests, he — paradoxically — also viewed constant confrontation with theU.S. and West as not in Russia’s best long-term interest.

Before U.S.–Russia relations collapsed, Sergun facilitated increased contact between our countries’ military intelligence leaders. During 2012-13, I watched as U.S. and Russian intelligence chiefs from strategic regional and global commands discreetly met in cities across Russia: Khabarovsk in the east, Rostov in the south, and also Sochi, just before the 2014 Winter Olympics. These meetings — which were often the first face-to-face interactions between these senior U.S. and Russian MI officers — always entailed straightforward, cordially hardnosed discussions that intelligence officers understood from a world of black and gray, and rarely white, as traditional adversaries, often foes. Clearly, both sides entered cautiously, but increasingly saw substantive talks emerge on carefully cleared topics.