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).
While advanced Chinese language proficiency and cultural familiarity remain irreplaceable skills, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for successful open-source analysis on China’s nuclear forces.
To maximize clean energy deployment, we must address the project development and political barriers that have held us back from smart policymaking and implementation that can withstand political change. Here’s how.
While rural schools are used to being scrappy and doing more with less, without state and federal support, districts will be hard-pressed to close teacher workforce gaps on their own.
At a time when universities are already facing intense pressure to re-envision their role in the S&T ecosystem, we encourage NSF to ensure that the ambitious research acceleration remains compatible with their expertise.