CovertCouncil

Declassified · 237 files

The history of espionage, from the record.

Operations, agencies, spies and their methods, from the 1920s to the end of the Cold War, written from declassified files, the Foreign Relations of the United States and court records. Where the sources disagree, we say so.

Browse the operations Open the timeline

US Army tanks face Soviet armour at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, October 1961. U.S. Army photo Photo Credit: USAMHI, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Document of the week26 June 1979

The Afghan program begins: the Special Coordination Committee, 26 June 1979

Special Coordination Committee, National Security Council (chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski; summary drafted by Donald Gregg)

It is CIA’s judgment that monetary support for food, clothing, and medical supplies is critical if opposition to the Taraki regime is to be sustained throughout the winter.

This week's document · All 74 documents

Declassified

Notable files

All 80 operations →
1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean. December 1953 – 22 April 1956 Operation Gold (the Berlin Tunnel) From 1955 to 1956 the CIA and British SIS tapped Soviet military phone and teleprinter cables in East Berlin from a 1,476-foot tunnel, unaware that a KGB mole had betrayed the plan before digging began. 4 February – 14 May 1943 Operation Mincemeat In 1943 British intelligence floated a dead man dressed as a Royal Marines officer ashore in Spain with forged letters pointing at Greece and Sardinia, to hide the coming invasion of Sicily. 1 July 1969 – 16 June 1975 Project Azorian (the Glomar Explorer) In 1974 the CIA used a purpose-built ship, passed off as Howard Hughes's deep-sea mining vessel, to lift part of the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from 16,500 feet down in the Pacific. 24 November 1954 – 16 May 1960 The U-2 program and the 1960 shoot-down From 1956 the CIA's U-2 photographed the Soviet Union from 70,000 feet. On 1 May 1960 a missile brought down Francis Gary Powers near Sverdlovsk, the cover story collapsed and the Paris summit failed. March – 19 August 1953 Operation Ajax (TPAJAX) The 1953 Anglo-American covert operation that removed Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, as reconstructed from the CIA and State Department records published in 2017. 1934 – 23 January 1963 The Cambridge Five Five Cambridge graduates recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s reached MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office and Bletchley Park, and were exposed one by one between 1951 and 1990. 17 March 1960 – 19 April 1961 The Bay of Pigs invasion In April 1961 a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs to topple Fidel Castro and was defeated within three days. The records show how a covert plan outgrew its cover. October 1971 – 1981 Operation Ivy Bells From 1971 US Navy divers working from submarines tapped a Soviet military cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk. Former NSA analyst Ronald Pelton sold the secret to the KGB, and the Soviets removed the tap in 1981. 20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. 13 April 1953 – 1964 Project MKUltra The CIA's umbrella program, approved in 1953, for secret research on drugs and behavior control. It included LSD tests on unwitting Americans; most records were destroyed in 1973, and a surviving cache surfaced in 1977. February 1981 – 23 January 1985 The Farewell Dossier In 1981–82 a disaffected KGB officer, Vladimir Vetrov, gave French counterintelligence thousands of documents on Soviet technology theft. The West expelled scores of Soviet officers and fed Moscow doctored technology.
InteractiveThe timeline Every operation, agency milestone and Cold War turning point from 1909 to 2001. Filter by agency, country and decade. InteractiveThe map of operations Where it happened: 80 operations on a world map, with the Cold War blocs.

By era

1909–1938 Before the war

1939–1945 The Second World War

1946–1962 The early Cold War

1963–1979 Crisis and détente

1980–2001 The last decade of the Cold War

The services

All 18 agencies →

Tradecraft

How it was done, historically →

People

All 51 →

How these files are written

Each page is built from primary sources first: the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States, CIA, NSA and FBI releases, congressional investigations and court records, all public domain, quoted briefly and linked. For 80 operations we compare the dates and outcome in a government source with Wikipedia and publish the result. Contested claims are labelled. Read the methodology.