Spy Wars Without Rules: Why Russian Intelligence Killings Endanger Americans

Russia’s Assassins: How Moscow’s Secret SSD Unit Targets the West and the CIA

Ever feel like the rules used to matter, but somewhere along the way, they just… stopped? Especially in the world of spies and shadows, there were unspoken codes. One of them: don’t kill each other’s operatives — especially not on foreign soil. It was messy. Risky. The kind of thing that sparked political firestorms. Sure, espionage was always ugly — spying, sabotage, hacking — but murder? That used to be the line.

Russia’s not interested in that line anymore.

There’s a unit deep inside Moscow’s intel machinery called SSD — the Department of Special Tasks. That name may sound bureaucratic, but what they do is anything but. Think car bombs, assassinations, sabotage plots, even planting explosives on planes. SSD isn’t just waging a new Cold War — they’re already deep into it. And they don’t care who notices, as long as the job gets done.

Word inside Western intelligence is that SSD absorbed the GRU’s old hit squad, Unit 29155. If that rings a bell, it’s because they’ve been linked to poisonings, explosions, and just about every dirty op that ends in a closed casket. These aren’t the guys who care about headlines — unless they’re the kind that list body counts.

And this is where fiction starts to rub elbows with fact.