Illuminating Russia’s Main Directorate of Special Programs
The Main Directorate of Special Programs (Russian acronym: GUSP) is a somewhat mysterious Russian security organization that was established as one of the various successors to the former KGB.
“The directorate’s specialists have a great deal of experience in building fortified structures and tunnels and know how to handle explosives,” according to an article in Moskovskiy Komsomolets (16 September 1999).
“Moreover, the GUSP is the president’s very own special service and is accountable only to the head of state.”
In a neat bit of detective work, the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noticed that new details of GUSP’s internal structure could be gleaned from official badges sold by commercial vendors of military paraphernalia.
“Russian commercial websites specializing in the sale of military insignia provided identifying information for a number of military units belonging to the Special Facilities Service (SSO) of the Main Directorate for Special Programs of the Russian Federation President (GUSP),” the Open Source Center reported this week (pdf).
“[This] is in most instances the only available public reference for these units and their affiliation with the Special Facilities Service,” the OSC said.
In another neat bit of work, Allen Thomson retrieved images of those telltale military insignia and combined them with other published material to produce “A Sourcebook on the Russian Federation Main Directorate of Special Programs (GUSP)” (pdf).
To fight the climate crises, we must do more than connect power plants to the grid: we need new policy frameworks and expanded coalitions to facilitate the rapid transformation of the electricity system.
Without information, without factual information, you can’t act. You can’t relate to the world you live in. And so it’s super important for us to be able to monitor what’s happening around the world, analyze the material, and translate it into something that different audiences can understand.
There is a lot to like in OPM’s new memos on federal hiring and senior executives, much of which reformers have been after for years, but there’s also a troubling focus on politicizing the federal workforce.
FAS is excited to announce it has acquired MetroLab Network (MLN), bringing together two teams with a shared commitment to harnessing science, technology and innovation to drive impact in new ways in communities across the country.