CovertCouncil

Case files

Operations

80 operations, from the Soviet deception of the 1920s to the spy cases of the 1990s, in date order. Every file cites the declassified record, FRUS or a court record, and states where its sources disagree.

Before the war 1909–1938

1921 – 13 April 1927 Operation Trust For six years the Soviet secret police ran a fake monarchist underground, the 'Trust', that fed émigrés and Western services disinformation and lured Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly to their deaths.
12 May 1922 – 29 August 1924 Operation Sindikat-2 An OGPU deception of 1922–1924 that invented an underground party inside Soviet Russia to draw the old terrorist Boris Savinkov home. He crossed the border in August 1924 and walked into a trap.
December 1932 – May 1945 Ultra and the breaking of Enigma How Polish mathematicians first broke the German Enigma machine, and how Britain's codebreakers at Bletchley Park turned that start into Ultra, the most closely guarded intelligence source of the Second World War.
September 1933 – 18 October 1941 The Sorge spy ring From 1933 to 1941 a Soviet military intelligence network in Tokyo, run by the German journalist Richard Sorge, reported from inside the German embassy and Prince Konoe's circle until Japanese police broke it.
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.
1938 – 3 May 1945 The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) Rote Kapelle was the German counterintelligence name for Soviet radio networks in Belgium, France and the Netherlands and for a Berlin resistance circle that passed secrets to Moscow. Most were rounded up in 1942.

The Second World War 1939–1945

20 February 1939 – September 1945 Magic and the breaking of Purple In September 1940 a small US Army team rebuilt Japan's top diplomatic cipher machine without ever seeing one. The decrypts, called Magic, shaped American policy before Pearl Harbor and fueled a long argument afterward.
September 1939 – May 1945 The Double-Cross System How MI5 caught or recruited Germany's wartime spies in Britain and ran them as double agents, steered by the Twenty Committee, until their reports could carry the D-Day deception.
8 February 1940 – 2 January 1942 The Duquesne spy ring Thirty-three German agents convicted in 1941–42 after the FBI turned an Abwehr recruit, William Sebold, ran his radio link to Hamburg for 16 months and filmed spies in a wired Manhattan office.
July 1941 – August 1944 Operation Monastery An NKVD radio game of 1941–1944 in which the agent Alexander Demyanov, 'Heine', posed as the Abwehr's man in Moscow, fed German intelligence disinformation and drew its couriers into arrest.
September 1941 – June 1950 Soviet atomic espionage (Enormoz) How Soviet intelligence penetrated the Manhattan Project under the codename ENORMOZ, who its sources were, how Venona and confessions exposed them, and what the stolen secrets were worth.
October 1941 – 18 June 1942 Operation Anthropoid The 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague by two Czechoslovak soldiers trained and dropped by SOE, and the German reprisals that destroyed Lidice and Ležáky.
13 June – 8 August 1942 Operation Pastorius In June 1942 U-boats landed eight Abwehr saboteurs on Long Island and in Florida. One turned himself in, all were caught within two weeks, and the Supreme Court upheld their trial by military commission.
July 1942 – 6 May 1945 Operation Bernhard The SS forgery of British banknotes, made by 142 Jewish prisoners in an isolated block at Sachsenhausen from 1942 to 1945 and used to pay spies and buy goods abroad. It was the largest counterfeiting effort of the war.
August 1942 – 19 May 1944 The Lucy spy ring From Lucerne, the German émigré publisher Rudolf Roessler fed German high command secrets to Soviet intelligence in 1942–1943. Who his sources were, and how the material reached him, is still argued over.
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.
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.
16–28 February 1943 Operation Gunnerside In February 1943 nine Norwegian SOE commandos crossed a gorge in Telemark and blew up the heavy-water cells at Vemork without firing a shot, after a British glider raid had ended in disaster.
26 October 1943 – April 1944 The Cicero affair In 1943–44 the British ambassador's valet in Ankara photographed secret papers and sold them to the SD as "Cicero." An OSS source in Berlin exposed the leak; Berlin doubted the goods; much of his pay was forged.
1944 – 1 May 1946 TICOM The 1945 Anglo-American hunt for Germany's codebreakers, their machines and files, which showed how far the Germans had read Allied traffic and handed the West a working Soviet intercept system.
January – September 1944 Operation Fortitude The Allied deception that invented armies in Scotland and southeast England in 1944 to make Germany expect landings in Norway and the Pas-de-Calais, and to see Normandy as a feint.
5 June 1944 – April 1945 Operation Jedburgh From June 1944 Allied three-man teams in uniform, drawn from SOE, the OSS and the Free French, parachuted into France and the Low Countries to arm and lead resistance fighters behind German lines.
February – 2 May 1945 Operation Sunrise Allen Dulles's secret 1945 talks in Switzerland with SS General Karl Wolff, which ended in the German surrender in Italy and sparked an angry exchange between Stalin and Roosevelt.
20 July 1945 – 1962 Operation Paperclip The US program, first called Overcast, that brought more than 1,500 German scientists and engineers to America after 1945, among them Wernher von Braun's rocket team and men with Nazi pasts.
August 1945 – 15 May 1975 Operation Shamrock For thirty years, from August 1945 to May 1975, three American telegraph companies handed the government copies of international cables: the largest interception program affecting Americans, the Senate said.
5 September 1945 – 27 June 1946 The Gouzenko affair In September 1945 a GRU cipher clerk walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with over a hundred documents, exposing a Soviet spy network in Canada and a British atomic scientist.

The early Cold War 1946–1962

1949 – 1954 Operation Redsox REDSOX was the CIA's early Cold War program for parachuting and smuggling émigré agents into the Soviet Union. It produced little intelligence and cost many agents their lives.
1949 – 1955 Operation Silver (the Vienna tunnels) In occupied Vienna from about 1949, British SIS officers dug short tunnels to tap the telephone cables of the Soviet command, then shared the take with the CIA. It was the model for the Berlin Tunnel.
22 June 1949 – 1954 Operation Valuable (Albania) The joint British and American attempt, from 1949 into the early 1950s, to undermine Enver Hoxha's regime by infiltrating Albanian émigré agents. Most teams were caught, and Hoxha stayed in power.
27 January 1950 – 1959 Operation Washtub From 1951 to 1959 the US Air Force, at first with the FBI, recruited Alaskan civilians as stay-behind agents who would hide and radio intelligence if the Soviet Union invaded the territory.
1951 – 22 March 1961 The Portland spy ring A Soviet network that took naval secrets from the Admiralty's underwater research establishment at Portland, run by the KGB illegal 'Gordon Lonsdale' and broken up by MI5 in January 1961.
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.
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.
22 June 1953 – 15 November 1957 The Hollow Nickel case A Brooklyn newsboy's trick nickel held a coded message the FBI could not read for four years, until a drunken KGB defector explained it and led agents to the illegal known as Rudolf Abel.
12 August 1953 – 27 June 1954 Operation PBSuccess The CIA's 1953–54 campaign of propaganda, pressure and a small proxy invasion that forced Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz to resign on 27 June 1954.
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.
2 July 1954 – 31 January 1955 The Lavon affair In 1954 Israeli military intelligence had Egyptian Jews firebomb Egyptian and American buildings to keep British troops in Egypt. Two were hanged, and the fight over who gave the order shook Israel for years.
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.
1956 – 6 May 1974 The Guillaume affair An East German intelligence officer, planted in the West in 1956, rose to become an aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt. His arrest in April 1974 was followed two weeks later by Brandt's resignation.
August 1956 – 28 April 1971 COINTELPRO From 1956 to 1971 the FBI ran secret programs to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' American political groups, from the Communist Party and the Klan to civil rights and antiwar organizations. A burglary in 1971 exposed them.
28 November 1956 – November 1990 Operation Gladio Italy's secret stay-behind network, set up with the CIA in 1956 to fight a Soviet occupation, was revealed by Prime Minister Andreotti in 1990. Its alleged links to terrorism are still disputed.
1957 – 1972 ST CIRCUS: the CIA in Tibet From the late 1950s to the early 1970s the CIA trained Tibetan guerrillas in Colorado, supplied a resistance army in Nepal and subsidized the Dalai Lama. Rapprochement with China ended it.
September 1957 – 22 May 1960 The capture of Adolf Eichmann In May 1960 a Mossad team led by Isser Harel seized Adolf Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street, held him for nine days and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and hanged for his part in the Holocaust.
February 1958 – 31 May 1972 CORONA America's first photographic reconnaissance satellite, run by the CIA and Air Force from 1958 to 1972. Its film buckets, caught in midair, ended the missile-gap guesswork and stayed secret until 1995.
1959 – 1972 Operation Holystone Holystone was a US Navy code name for close-in submarine spying on the Soviet Navy. The New York Times exposed it in May 1975, and Ford White House papers show how officials argued over the leak.
29 August 1959 – 21 June 1968 Project Oxcart The CIA's Mach 3 titanium spy plane, the Lockheed A-12, was built to replace the U-2 over the Soviet Union. It never flew there; its only operation, BLACK SHIELD, covered Vietnam and North Korea in 1967–68.
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.
August 1960 – 1965 The plots against Fidel Castro Between 1960 and 1965 the CIA pursued at least eight plots to kill Fidel Castro, using poison pills, gangsters and a Cuban insider. None succeeded, and who authorized them was never settled.
18 August 1960 – 17 January 1961 The CIA and the Congo crisis, 1960–61 In 1960 the CIA plotted to poison Patrice Lumumba and backed Joseph Mobutu. Lumumba was killed by Katangan authorities in January 1961; the Church Committee found no evidence the US took part in his death.
17 January 1961 – February 1973 The secret war in Laos From 1961 to 1973 the CIA armed and directed an irregular army, built around Hmong fighters led by Vang Pao, against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnam in a country officially neutral.
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.
May 1961 – 2 June 1962 Project Coldfeet In 1962 two US officers parachuted onto an abandoned Soviet drifting ice station near the North Pole, searched it for three days, and were snatched back into a CIA B-17 by Robert Fulton's Skyhook.
November 1961 – 15 March 1988 TOPHAT: the Polyakov case From 1961 to 1980 GRU officer Dmitri Polyakov, later a major general, spied for the FBI and CIA. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988.
30 November 1961 – October 1962 Operation Mongoose The Kennedy administration's 1961–62 covert program to overthrow Fidel Castro, run by Edward Lansdale under Robert Kennedy's eye, which aimed at a revolt in Cuba by October 1962.
9–16 March 1962 Operation Northwoods A March 1962 Joint Chiefs of Staff paper listing staged incidents that could be blamed on Cuba to justify a US invasion. It was a proposal only, and the Kennedy administration did not adopt it.
May – November 1962 Operation Anadyr The Soviet General Staff's 1962 plan to move nuclear missiles and some 42,000 troops to Cuba in secret, and the deception that hid it from US intelligence until a U-2 flight on 14 October.
10 August – 20 November 1962 Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis How US intelligence missed, then found, Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962: a wrong estimate, a five-week gap in U-2 coverage, the 14 October flight over San Cristóbal, and what the photographs never showed.

Crisis and détente 1963–1979

1963 – 16 August 1966 Operation Diamond In August 1966 an Iraqi Air Force captain recruited by the Mossad flew his MiG-21, the Soviet Union's newest fighter, to Israel. Israel tested it and in 1968 lent it to the United States, which flew it at Area 51.
12 March – 15 June 1963 Project Mockingbird (1963) In 1963 the CIA tapped the phones of two Washington columnists to find who was leaking to them. The 'Family Jewels' call it Project Mockingbird, a name later borrowed for a larger, unproven theory.
5 May 1964 – March 1965 Operation Neptune (1964) In 1964 Czechoslovak intelligence sank chests of blank paper in a Bohemian lake, staged their discovery for television, then filled the story with Nazi files from Moscow to press West Germany over war crimes.
March 1967 Acoustic Kitty A 1960s CIA effort to turn a trained cat into a mobile listening device. The only official record is a heavily redacted 1967 memo; the famous taxi story and the price tag come from later, disputed recollections.
June 1967 – 1972 The Phoenix Program Phoenix (Phung Hoang) was the US–South Vietnamese effort of 1967–72 to identify and 'neutralize' the Viet Cong's clandestine political apparatus. It became the most contested program of the war.
15 August 1967 – 5 March 1974 Operation CHAOS Pressed by two presidents to prove that foreign communists were behind the antiwar movement, the CIA built files on 7,200 Americans from 1967 to 1974 and kept finding no such proof.
20 October 1967 – October 1973 Project Minaret From 1967 to 1973 the NSA searched international communications for the names of Americans supplied by the FBI, CIA and Secret Service, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and two sitting senators.
December 1967 – 20 May 1985 The Walker spy ring For seventeen years US Navy communications specialist John Walker sold cipher keys and secret messages to the KGB, later recruiting a friend, his brother and his son. The FBI arrested him in May 1985.
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.
15 September – 24 October 1970 Track II and Chile, 1970 In September 1970 President Nixon ordered the CIA to try to provoke a military coup that would stop Salvador Allende taking office in Chile. The effort ended with the killing of General René Schneider.
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.
1972 – 1995 The Stargate Project For two decades the CIA, the Army and the DIA funded research into 'remote viewing', the claimed psychic ability to describe distant places. A 1995 review found it never produced usable intelligence.
September 1972 – 22 January 1979 Operation Wrath of God After the 1972 Munich massacre, Israel's government authorized the killing of Palestinians it held responsible. Only one episode reached a courtroom: the 1973 murder of an innocent waiter in Lillehammer, Norway.
January 1977 – 24 September 1986 The Tolkachev case From 1979 to 1985 Soviet radar engineer Adolf Tolkachev photographed secret designs for the CIA in Moscow, handing over hundreds of rolls of film. Betrayed in 1985, he was executed in September 1986.
3 July 1979 – 1992 Operation Cyclone The CIA's covert program to arm the Afghan resistance, from a $695,000 non-lethal finding in July 1979 through Soviet-made rifles via Pakistan to Stinger missiles, and what the record says about bin Laden.
November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history.
4 November 1979 – 28 January 1980 The Canadian Caper Six American diplomats who escaped the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran hid with Canadian diplomats for nearly three months, then flew out on Canadian passports posing as a film crew invented by the CIA.

The last decade of the Cold War 1980–2001

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.
May 1981 – April 1989 Operation RYAN The KGB–GRU intelligence alert launched in May 1981 to detect a feared American nuclear first strike, its indicator lists, and the long argument over whether Moscow's fear was real.
17 July 1983 – 1989 Operation INFEKTION The 1980s KGB and Stasi campaign to persuade the world that the US military had created AIDS at Fort Detrick: how the story was planted, spread and disowned, and what its codename really was.
2–11 November 1983 Able Archer 83 and the war scare A routine NATO nuclear-release exercise in November 1983 met an unusual Soviet military alert. What the declassified record shows about the reaction, and why historians still disagree on the danger.
October 1984 – 25 November 1986 The Iran–Contra affair In 1985–86 Reagan administration officials secretly sold missiles to Iran to free American hostages and ran a private supply line to the Nicaraguan contras despite a congressional ban, then tried to cover both up.
16 April – 25 November 1985 1985, the Year of the Spy In 1985 the FBI arrested a string of Americans spying for Moscow, Beijing and Israel, a KGB officer defected and re-defected, and the CIA lost almost every agent it had inside Soviet intelligence.