Chronology
Timeline
689 dated events, from the founding of the British Secret Service Bureau to the spy cases of the 1990s: every operation in these files, the services' milestones, key documents and the Cold War's turning points.
1900s
- 26 July 1908 FBI Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders Justice Department cases referred to a new force of 34 special agents.
- 16 March 1909 FBI Attorney General George Wickersham names the force the Bureau of Investigation.
- October 1909 MI6 Commander Mansfield Cumming takes charge of the foreign section of the new Secret Service Bureau.
- October 1909 MI5 Secret Service Bureau begins work; Vernon Kell takes the home (counter-espionage) side, Mansfield Cumming the foreign side.
1910s
- August 1914 MI5 On the outbreak of war, police acting on MI5's lists arrest the German naval intelligence network in Britain.
- August 1915 Wilhelm Canaris Escapes internment in Chile after the scuttling of SMS Dresden.
- January 1916 MI5 Becomes section 5 of the new Directorate of Military Intelligence: the name MI5 is born.
- 26 July 1917 J. Edgar Hoover Enters the Department of Justice.
- 19 October 1917 Sidney Reilly Commissioned temporary second lieutenant on probation, General List.
- 20 December 1917 Cheka–NKVD Council of People's Commissars creates the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky.
- 1918 GRU Registration Directorate set up under the Red Army field staff, sponsored by Leon Trotsky.
- 7 July 1918 Felix Dzerzhinsky Steps aside after the Left SR uprising; Jēkabs Peterss acts as chairman.
- 22 August 1918 Felix Dzerzhinsky Resumes the chairmanship of the Cheka.
- September 1918 Sidney Reilly Allied plot to use Latvian Riflemen against the Bolsheviks collapses; Reilly flees Russia.
- 3 September 1918 Felix Dzerzhinsky Izvestia publishes the Cheka's appeal for mass terror, drafted by Dzerzhinsky and Peterss.
- 5 September 1918 Cheka–NKVD Decree 'On Red Terror' follows the shooting of Lenin.
- 14 October 1918 William J. Donovan Leads the 165th Infantry at Landres-et-St. Georges, France; later awarded the Medal of Honor.
- December 1918 Sidney Reilly Sentenced to death in absentia by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in Moscow.
- 12 February 1919 Sidney Reilly Award of the Military Cross gazetted.
- August 1919 J. Edgar Hoover Heads the new General Intelligence (Radical) Division during the Red Scare.
- August 1919 Richard Sorge Receives a doctorate in political science from the University of Hamburg; by then a member of the German Communist Party.
- 1 November 1919 GCHQ Government Code and Cypher School formally established under Alastair Denniston, merging the wartime Admiralty and War Office codebreakers.
1920s
- 1920 MI6 The title Secret Intelligence Service comes into use, around this year.
- 1920 Abwehr Set up as a small counterintelligence group inside the Reichswehr ministry.
- 1920 Reinhard Gehlen Joins the Reichswehr.
- 1921 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.
- 1922 GCHQ Transferred from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office; from 1923 its director is also the chief of SIS.
- 6 February 1922 Cheka–NKVD Cheka dissolved; its functions pass to the State Political Directorate (GPU).
- 12 May 1922 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.
- 15 November 1923 Cheka–NKVD GPU becomes the all-Union OGPU.
- 10 May 1924 FBI J. Edgar Hoover becomes acting director.
- August 1924 Cheka–NKVD Boris Savinkov captured through the deception Sindikat-2.
- August 1924 Felix Dzerzhinsky OGPU captures Boris Savinkov through Operation Sindikat-2.
- 1925 Whittaker Chambers Joins the Communist Party.
- 25 September 1925 Sidney Reilly Crosses from Finland into the USSR to meet the Trust; arrested by the OGPU.
- 5 November 1925 Sidney Reilly Executed near Moscow, by the usual account.
- 20 July 1926 Felix Dzerzhinsky Dies of a heart attack in Moscow after a speech to the party Central Committee.
- 13 April 1927 Cheka–NKVD The Trust deception is exposed when Eduard Opperput flees to Finland.
- May 1927 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Recruited by the OGPU as a radio operator.
- 1929 Richard Sorge Joins the Red Army's Fourth Department (military intelligence) under Yan Berzin.
1930s
- 1930 Isser Harel Emigrates to Mandatory Palestine on forged papers.
- 1930 Richard Sorge Sent to Shanghai under journalistic cover.
- July 1930 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Moves to Shanghai; soon works with Richard Sorge for Soviet military intelligence.
- 9 August 1931 Erich Mielke Takes part in the murder of police captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck on Berlin's Bülowplatz, then flees to the Soviet Union.
- 15 October 1931 MI5 Renamed the Security Service and given responsibility for most threats to national security at home.
- 1932 Whittaker Chambers Goes underground as a courier for Soviet military intelligence.
- 1932 Melita Norwood Begins work as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.
- December 1932 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 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.
- 6 September 1933 Richard Sorge Arrives in Yokohama to build a network in Japan.
- 24 September 1933 Klaus Fuchs Arrives in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
- 1934 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.
- 1934 Harry Gold Begins passing industrial chemical processes to Soviet intelligence.
- 1934 Kim Philby Recruited by Soviet intelligence officer Arnold Deutsch.
- April 1934 Markus Wolf Arrives in Moscow with his émigré communist family.
- 10 July 1934 Cheka–NKVD OGPU absorbed into the all-Union NKVD as its Main Directorate of State Security.
- 1935 Guy Burgess Recruited by Soviet intelligence.
- 1 January 1935 Abwehr Captain Wilhelm Canaris takes over as chief.
- March 1935 Elizabeth Bentley Joins the Communist Party USA in New York.
- July 1935 FBI Renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- July 1935 J. Edgar Hoover The Bureau is renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- August 1935 Donald Maclean Enters the Diplomatic Service.
- 1936 John Cairncross Enters the civil service, starting in the Foreign Office.
- 1936 Alger Hiss Joins the State Department.
- 1936 Alan Turing Completes 'On Computable Numbers', introducing what became known as the Turing machine.
- July 1936 Guy Burgess Joins the BBC Talks Department.
- August 1936 FBI President Roosevelt confidentially directs the Bureau to gather intelligence on fascist and communist groups.
- August 1936 J. Edgar Hoover Receives President Roosevelt's confidential instructions to gather domestic intelligence on fascist and communist groups.
- November 1936 Erich Mielke Serves in the Spanish Civil War under the name Leissner, until February 1939.
- 1937 Melita Norwood Becomes a full Soviet agent, according to the Mitrokhin archive.
- 30 July 1937 Cheka–NKVD NKVD Order No. 00447 launches the mass operations of the Great Terror.
- 1938 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.
- 1938 MI6 Section D formed for sabotage and covert action; Bletchley Park bought as a wartime base for SIS and the codebreakers.
- 1938 Elizabeth Bentley Begins working with the Soviet agent Jacob Golos.
- 1938 Guy Burgess Joins SIS's new Section D.
- 1938 Whittaker Chambers Breaks with the underground and goes into hiding with his family.
- 1938 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Posted to Switzerland; recruits Alexander Foote into what became the 'Red Three' network.
- 4 February 1938 Abwehr The Armed Forces High Command (OKW) is created; the Abwehr becomes its Amt Ausland/Abwehr.
- July 1938 GRU Former chief Yan Berzin killed in Stalin's purge.
- 24 September 1938 Donald Maclean Takes up post as Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Paris.
- November 1938 Morris and Lona Cohen Morris Cohen returns to the United States from the Spanish Civil War, already working for Soviet intelligence.
- February 1939 Julius Rosenberg Graduates in electrical engineering from a New York college.
- 20 February 1939 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.
- 18 June 1939 Ethel Rosenberg Marries Julius Rosenberg in New York.
- August 1939 GCHQ Moves to its war station at Bletchley Park.
- August 1939 Abwehr Abwehr divisions supply Polish uniforms for the SD's staged border incidents, Lahousen later testifies.
- September 1939 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.
- September 1939 Whittaker Chambers Names alleged Communists in government to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle.
- 1 September 1939 Germany invades Poland; the Second World War begins in Europe.
- 4 September 1939 Alan Turing Reports to Bletchley Park, wartime home of GC&CS.
- 12 September 1939 Wilhelm Canaris Protests to Keitel about planned mass killings in Poland, as Lahousen later testifies.
1940s
- 1940 MI6 Section D absorbed into the new Special Operations Executive.
- 1940 Anthony Blunt Joins the Security Service (MI5).
- 1940 Kim Philby Joins the Secret Intelligence Service.
- 1940 Duško Popov (TRICYCLE) Recruited by the Abwehr through his friend Johnny Jebsen; reports this to the British in Belgrade.
- 8 February 1940 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.
- 5 March 1940 Cheka–NKVD Politburo approves the NKVD's execution of Polish prisoners, carried out at Katyn and other sites.
- 18 March 1940 Alan Turing First British Bombe, built to his design, is installed.
- June 1940 MI5 Kell removed by Churchill after the Service is overwhelmed in the first year of war.
- 22 July 1940 SOE SOE formally created under the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, from Section D, MI(R) and Electra House.
- 14 October 1940 Friedman's report on breaking PURPLE (14 October 1940) William Friedman's account, written three weeks after the event, of how the Army's Signal Intelligence Service solved Japan's 'B' cipher machine, and his roll of the team who did it. The founding document of MAGIC.
- 31 October 1940 SOE Headquarters move to 64 Baker Street, London.
- 19 November 1940 Noor Inayat Khan Enlists in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and trains as a wireless operator.
- 1941 Klaus Fuchs Joins Rudolf Peierls on the British Tube Alloys project and offers information to Soviet military intelligence.
- 1941 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) Rebuffed by the British in Madrid, offers himself to the Abwehr and begins sending invented reports from Lisbon.
- 1941 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Arrives in Britain on a British passport after marrying Len Beurton.
- 1941 Richard Sorge's own typescript: the discarded Shanghai draft of his confession (1941) Twenty-four pages Sorge typed in German in a Tokyo prison in late 1941 on his Shanghai years, later replaced in his statement. The prosecutor kept them and gave them to US Army G-2 in 1949.
- January 1941 MI5 First meeting of the Twenty (XX) Committee, which coordinates the deception fed through double agents.
- 5 May 1941 SOE First SOE agent parachuted into occupied France.
- June 1941 FBI Arrests the Duquesne spy ring, built with the help of a double agent.
- June 1941 Abwehr The FBI arrests the Duquesne ring, built around Abwehr agents in New York.
- 22 June 1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).
- July 1941 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.
- July 1941 Morris and Lona Cohen Morris and Lona marry; Lona soon joins his intelligence work.
- 11 July 1941 OSS Roosevelt appoints William J. Donovan Coordinator of Information, the forerunner of OSS.
- August 1941 SOE Propaganda branch SO1 transferred to the new Political Warfare Executive; SOE becomes purely an operations body.
- August 1941 Duško Popov (TRICYCLE) Arrives in New York with a German questionnaire that includes a page on Pearl Harbor's defenses.
- 23 August 1941 Virginia Hall Arrives in Vichy France for SOE under cover as a New York Post correspondent.
- September 1941 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.
- 14 September 1941 Richard Sorge Reports that a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union is no longer likely that year.
- October 1941 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.
- October 1941 Alan Turing Co-signs the codebreakers' letter to Churchill asking for more staff; Churchill orders 'Action this day'.
- 18 October 1941 Richard Sorge Arrested in Tokyo.
- 7 December 1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; the United States enters the war.
- 1942 John Cairncross Begins work at the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park.
- 1942 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Becomes the courier for Klaus Fuchs, meeting him near Banbury.
- February 1942 GRU Reorganized in its modern form as the Main Intelligence Directorate.
- February 1942 GCHQ Reorganized: Denniston takes the diplomatic sections back to London, Edward Travis runs the service sections at Bletchley.
- April 1942 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) Brought to Britain and taken on as a double agent, first as BOVRIL, then GARBO.
- 1 April 1942 Reinhard Gehlen Becomes head of Foreign Armies East, the army's intelligence section on the Soviet front.
- 27 May 1942 SOE SOE-trained Czechoslovak soldiers attack Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.
- June 1942 FBI Captures the eight German saboteurs landed by U-boat.
- June 1942 Abwehr Eight Abwehr saboteurs land in New York and Florida and are caught within two weeks.
- 13 June 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.
- 13 June 1942 OSS COI is split; its intelligence and operations side becomes the Office of Strategic Services under the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
- July 1942 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.
- 15 July 1942 Virginia Hall Helps organize the escape of SOE agents from Mauzac prison.
- August 1942 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.
- 29 October 1942 Ex parte Quirin (1942): the Supreme Court and the Nazi saboteurs The Supreme Court's 1942 ruling that the eight German saboteurs landed by U-boat could be tried by Roosevelt's military commission. The judgment came on 31 July; the reasons followed in October, after six had been executed.
- November 1942 OSS Allen Dulles opens the OSS station in Bern, Switzerland; OSS officers in North Africa support the Torch landings.
- November 1942 Virginia Hall Flees France on foot over the Pyrenees as the Germans occupy the southern zone.
- 12 November 1942 Allen Dulles Arrives in Bern to run the OSS mission in Switzerland.
- 1943 OSS Counterintelligence Branch X-2 is created to share ULTRA-derived material with British services.
- 1943 James Jesus Angleton Joins the Army and the OSS counterintelligence branch, X-2, in London.
- February 1943 SOE SOE-trained Norwegians sabotage the heavy-water plant at Vemork.
- 1 February 1943 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 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 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.
- 17 May 1943 GCHQ BRUSA agreement with the US War Department on sharing signals intelligence.
- June 1943 John Cairncross Leaves Bletchley Park for SIS.
- June 1943 Igor Gouzenko Arrives in Ottawa as cipher clerk to the Soviet military attaché.
- 10 June 1943 The BRUSA agreement on 'Special Intelligence' (1943), with the War Department's covering memo The May 1943 agreement that gave the US Army a share in Ultra: Britain to read German and Italian army and air ciphers, America Japanese, with US officers at Bletchley Park and Britain's Ultra security rules.
- 16 June 1943 Noor Inayat Khan Landed by Lysander in northern France as wireless operator 'Madeleine'.
- September 1943 SOE Colin Gubbins becomes executive head of SOE.
- 29 September 1943 Richard Sorge Sentenced to death by the Tokyo District Court.
- October 1943 Noor Inayat Khan Betrayed and arrested in Paris; held at the SD headquarters on the Avenue Foch.
- 26 October 1943 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.
- November 1943 Elizabeth Bentley Golos dies; she takes over his sources.
- 27 November 1943 Noor Inayat Khan Sent to Germany and held in solitary confinement at Pforzheim.
- 1944 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.
- 1944 George Blake Joins the Secret Intelligence Service.
- 1944 Guy Burgess Joins the Foreign Office.
- 1944 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) Appointed MBE by the British, in secret.
- 1944 Theodore Hall Joins the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos at eighteen.
- 1944 Donald Maclean Posted to the British Embassy in Washington; later First Secretary.
- 1944 Duško Popov (TRICYCLE) Passes deception material supporting the Normandy cover plan.
- 1944 Team Frederick in Brittany: the OSS London war diary, 1944 Pages from the OSS London Special Operations war diary on Jedburgh team Frederick: its June 1944 drop into Brittany, its radio traffic with London, and its leader's report on arming some 4,200 resistance fighters.
- January 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.
- February 1944 Abwehr Abwehr officer Erich Vermehren defects to the British in Istanbul.
- February 1944 Wilhelm Canaris Dismissed when Hitler abolishes the Abwehr as an independent service.
- 5 February 1944 Harry Gold First meeting with Klaus Fuchs in New York, reported in a KGB cable.
- 18 February 1944 Abwehr Hitler signs the decree abolishing the Abwehr as an independent service.
- 21 March 1944 Virginia Hall Lands in Brittany as an OSS radio operator, codename Diane.
- June 1944 SOE Jedburgh teams parachute into France to support the Normandy landings.
- June 1944 OSS Jedburgh teams, run jointly with SOE, begin parachuting into France.
- 5 June 1944 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.
- 9 June 1944 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) Signals that the Normandy landing is a diversion and a larger attack on the Pas de Calais is still to come.
- July 1944 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) Awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, by the Germans.
- July 1944 Virginia Hall Begins organizing and supplying Maquis groups in the Haute-Loire.
- 23 July 1944 Abwehr Canaris is arrested after the 20 July plot.
- August 1944 William Colby Parachutes into occupied France as leader of Jedburgh team BRUCE.
- 14 August 1944 Klaus Fuchs Arrives at Los Alamos with the British mission.
- 13 September 1944 Noor Inayat Khan Killed at Dachau with three other SOE women.
- 21 September 1944 Julius Rosenberg KGB cable reports that LIBERAL has recommended his wife's sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass.
- October 1944 Theodore Hall Approaches Soviet contacts in New York and hands over a report on Los Alamos.
- November 1944 William J. Donovan Promoted to major general.
- 7 November 1944 Richard Sorge Hanged at Sugamo Prison, Tokyo.
- 12 November 1944 Theodore Hall KGB New York cable reports his recruitment by name.
- 16 November 1944 SDECE An order signed by de Gaulle's government creates the DST under Roger Wybot.
- 27 November 1944 Ethel Rosenberg KGB cable from New York describes 'LIBERAL's wife', first name Ethel.
- 27 November 1944 A Venona decrypt: New York 1657, 27 November 1944 A short KGB cable from New York to Moscow describing LIBERAL's wife, "first name ETHEL." Broken by Army codebreakers years later, it became the most argued-over Venona message in the Rosenberg case.
- 1945 James Jesus Angleton Chief of X-2 operations in Italy by the war's end.
- 1945 Anthony Blunt Leaves MI5; appointed Surveyor of the King's Pictures.
- 1945 Melita Norwood First vetted for access to government secrets despite concerns.
- January 1945 Julius Rosenberg Collects David Greenglass's first written report on Los Alamos.
- February 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.
- February 1945 Alger Hiss Attends the Yalta Conference as a member of the US delegation.
- March 1945 William Colby Leads the OSS Norwegian Special Operations Group's Operation Rype against the Nordland railway.
- March 1945 Allen Dulles Opens secret talks on a German surrender in northern Italy.
- April 1945 Reinhard Gehlen Dismissed by Hitler shortly after promotion to major general.
- 9 April 1945 Abwehr Canaris and his former deputy Hans Oster are hanged at Flossenbürg.
- 25 April 1945 Alger Hiss Secretary-General of the San Francisco conference that drafts the UN Charter.
- 29 April 1945 OSS Surrender of German forces in Italy is signed at Caserta after Dulles's Sunrise contacts with SS General Karl Wolff.
- May 1945 Markus Wolf Returns to Germany and works for Berlin radio; reports on the Nuremberg trial.
- 8 May 1945 Germany's unconditional surrender takes effect (VE Day).
- 22 May 1945 BND Reinhard Gehlen surrenders to the US Army in Bavaria and offers his files and staff.
- 22 May 1945 Dulles and Gaevernitz's report on SUNRISE-CROSSWORD: 'The First German Surrender' (1945) The OSS Bern account, written three weeks after the event, of the secret talks with SS General Karl Wolff that ended in the surrender of German forces in Italy on 2 May 1945, sent to OSS director William Donovan.
- 2 June 1945 Klaus Fuchs Hands Harry Gold atomic bomb material in Santa Fe.
- 2 June 1945 Harry Gold Collects material from Fuchs in Santa Fe; next day from David Greenglass in Albuquerque.
- 30 June 1945 StB State Security is formed as the plain-clothes branch of the National Security Corps.
- 20 July 1945 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 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.
- August 1945 Morris and Lona Cohen Lona Cohen reportedly collects atomic material from Theodore Hall in Albuquerque.
- 6 August 1945 The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
- 7 August 1945 The OSS interrogation of Richard Kauder, alias Klatt (August 1945) The first American interrogation report on the Viennese Jew who ran the Abwehr's 'Klatt Bureau' in Sofia and Budapest, whose reports on the Red Army may have been a Soviet deception.
- September 1945 Virginia Hall Receives the Distinguished Service Cross privately from William Donovan.
- 5 September 1945 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.
- 5 September 1945 GRU GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defects in Ottawa.
- 7 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko Taken into RCMP protection after Soviet officials break into his apartment.
- 12 September 1945 Hoover tells the White House about Gouzenko (September 1945) Two FBI letters written within three weeks of Igor Gouzenko's defection in Ottawa: the first warning to Truman's White House of a Soviet spy network in Canada, an atomic spy, and a source inside the State Department.
- 20 September 1945 OSS Executive Order 9621 dissolves OSS effective 1 October 1945.
- 20 September 1945 Reinhard Gehlen Flown with three associates to the United States.
- 1 October 1945 The OSS is dissolved by executive order; its branches pass to the War and State Departments.
- 7 November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley Begins full debriefing by the FBI.
- 8 November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley Hoover reports her allegations to the White House.
- 1946 SOE SOE disbanded; responsibility for its records passes to an SOE Adviser at the Foreign Office.
- 1946 SDECE The DGER is cut down and reorganized as the SDECE, which settles on the boulevard Mortier.
- 22 January 1946 CIA Truman's directive creates the National Intelligence Authority and the Central Intelligence Group.
- 13 February 1946 Igor Gouzenko Royal Commission begins hearing evidence, with Gouzenko as its main witness.
- 22 February 1946 The Long Telegram (1946) George Kennan's telegram 511 from Moscow, 22 February 1946: a five-part analysis of Soviet conduct that described a 'concealed Comintern' and shaped the American strategy of containment.
- March 1946 Cheka–NKVD People's commissariats renamed ministries: the NKVD becomes the MVD and state security the MGB.
- 5 March 1946 Churchill's "iron curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri.
- 5 March 1946 GCHQ UKUSA agreement signed in Washington.
- April 1946 GCHQ Renamed Government Communications Headquarters and moved to Eastcote, northwest London.
- 1 May 1946 What the Germans could read: the TICOM report, Volume 1, Synopsis (1946) The US Army Security Agency's 1946 summary of what TICOM learned from captured German codebreakers: which American and British systems the Axis read, which it could not, and how Germany's six agencies worked.
- June 1946 BND The Gehlen Organization begins work under US Army sponsorship in the American zone.
- June 1946 Reinhard Gehlen Begins running the Gehlen Organization for the US Army.
- 30 August 1946 Truman approves the expansion of Paperclip (August–September 1946) Dean Acheson's memorandum asking President Truman to approve bringing up to 1,000 German and Austrian specialists, with their families, to the United States. Truman wrote "Approved 9/3/46" in the margin.
- 1947 James Jesus Angleton Joins the CIA's clandestine service; becomes liaison to allied services.
- 1947 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Questioned by British security officers; declines to talk.
- 12 March 1947 The Truman Doctrine: aid to Greece and Turkey against Communist pressure.
- 26 July 1947 The National Security Act of 1947 Public Law 80-253, signed on 26 July 1947, created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and a Secretary of Defense. One elastic clause later became the CIA's warrant for covert action.
- 30 August 1947 Meredith Gardner's first Venona report: "Covernames in Diplomatic Traffic" (1947) The Army codebreaker's August 1947 catalog of the cover names he could read in wartime Soviet cables, including an unidentified LIBERAL whose wife was called Ethel: the start of Venona's spy hunt.
- 18 September 1947 OSS The National Security Act creates the CIA, which inherits OSS personnel and methods.
- 18 September 1947 CIA The Central Intelligence Group becomes the CIA under the National Security Act of 1947.
- 1948 MI6 SIS hosts the London Conference on War Planning with the new CIA.
- 1948 Isser Harel Becomes the first head of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service.
- 1948 Donald Maclean Appointed Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Cairo.
- 1948 Vasili Mitrokhin Joins Soviet foreign intelligence (then part of the MGB).
- February 1948 StB The Communist Party takes power; the security services are given a free hand against its opponents.
- March 1948 StB Operation KAMEN begins: fake border crossings and fake US Army posts to trap people fleeing west.
- 18 June 1948 CIA NSC 10/2 authorizes covert operations and creates the Office of Special Projects (later Policy Coordination) within the CIA.
- 18 June 1948 NSC 10/2: covert action authorized (1948) The June 1948 National Security Council directive that put peacetime covert operations inside the CIA, defined them, and wrote the idea of 'plausible deniability' into American policy.
- 24 June 1948 The Soviet blockade of West Berlin begins; the Western airlift supplies the city until May 1949.
- 31 July 1948 Elizabeth Bentley Testifies in public before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
- 3 August 1948 Whittaker Chambers Testifies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
- 3 August 1948 Alger Hiss Named by Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
- 6 November 1948 George Blake Arrives in Seoul under cover as vice-consul.
- 14 November 1948 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Lands at Quebec on the passport of Andrew Kayotis and soon enters the United States.
- 17 November 1948 Whittaker Chambers Produces typed State Department copies and handwritten notes in Hiss's libel suit.
- 2 December 1948 Whittaker Chambers Hands investigators microfilm hidden in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm.
- 15 December 1948 Alger Hiss Denies passing documents before a federal grand jury, which indicts him for perjury.
- 1949 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 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.
- 1949 MI6 SIS and the CIA begin infiltrating émigré agents into Albania.
- 1949 StB Soviet advisers arrive and reshape the service on the Soviet model.
- 1949 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) With MI5's help, has his death from malaria reported in Angola; settles in Venezuela.
- 1949 Kim Philby Posted to Washington as SIS liaison with American intelligence.
- 4 April 1949 The North Atlantic Treaty is signed in Washington, founding NATO.
- 5 April 1949 Noor Inayat Khan Posthumous George Cross gazetted.
- 20 May 1949 NSA Armed Forces Security Agency created to centralize military cryptologic work under the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
- 22 June 1949 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.
- July 1949 BND The CIA takes over sponsorship from the Army.
- 29 August 1949 The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, years earlier than US estimates expected.
- September 1949 Klaus Fuchs FBI and British investigators identify him as the Venona source REST/CHARLES.
- 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China.
- 29 November 1949 OPC's revaluation of the Albanian operation (29 November 1949) Written weeks after the first landings in Albania, this OPC paper counts the losses, admits the operation was no secret, and still recommends pressing on with armed teams and arms drops to overthrow Hoxha.
- 13 December 1949 Mossad Founded as a central coordinating institute for intelligence, with Reuven Shiloah at its head.
1950s
- 1950 FBI Venona-assisted investigations lead to Harry Gold and the Rosenbergs.
- 1950 MI5 Klaus Fuchs confesses to MI5's interviewer and is sentenced to fourteen years.
- 1950 Morris and Lona Cohen The Cohens leave the United States and disappear.
- 1950 George Blake Interned after North Korean forces take Seoul; offers his services to Soviet intelligence during captivity.
- 1950 Guy Burgess Posted to the British Embassy in Washington as Second Secretary.
- 1950 Donald Maclean Appointed head of the Foreign Office's American Department.
- 1950 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Leaves Britain for East Germany shortly before Fuchs's trial.
- 21 January 1950 Alger Hiss Convicted on two counts of perjury at his second trial.
- 27 January 1950 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.
- 27 January 1950 Klaus Fuchs Signs his confession in London.
- 27 January 1950 FBI file: 'Stay-Behind Special Agent Program in Alaska', the 1950 papers (Part 1, opening pages) The first FBI papers on what became Operation WASHTUB: an Anchorage memo of January 1950 on a military plan for 'sleeper agents' in Alaska, and the Bureau's wary response through mid-1950.
- 8 February 1950 Stasi The Volkskammer passes the law creating the Ministry; Wilhelm Zaisser becomes minister and Erich Mielke state secretary.
- 1 March 1950 Klaus Fuchs Pleads guilty at the Old Bailey; sentenced to fourteen years.
- 14 April 1950 NSC 68 (1950) The April 1950 State–Defense review that recast containment as a military build-up and called for covert political and economic warfare to stir 'unrest and revolt' in the Soviet satellites.
- 22 May 1950 Harry Gold Confesses to the FBI in Philadelphia.
- 25 June 1950 North Korea invades South Korea; the Korean War begins.
- 17 July 1950 Julius Rosenberg Arrested at his home in Knickerbocker Village, New York.
- 7 August 1950 Ethel Rosenberg Appears before a federal grand jury and declines to answer questions.
- 11 August 1950 Ethel Rosenberg Arrested by the FBI.
- October 1950 Francis Gary Powers Enlists in the US Air Force; later commissioned and trained as a fighter pilot.
- 7 December 1950 Alger Hiss Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.
- 9 December 1950 Harry Gold Sentenced to thirty years in federal court in Philadelphia.
- 1951 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.
- 1951 Anthony Blunt Helps arrange the defection of Burgess and Maclean.
- 1951 John Cairncross Comes under suspicion after notes in his handwriting are found in Burgess's flat.
- 1951 Melita Norwood Security clearance revoked.
- 4 January 1951 Allen Dulles Joins the CIA as Deputy Director for Plans.
- March 1951 Mossad Reorganized as an independent service under the Prime Minister's Office.
- March 1951 Elizabeth Bentley Testifies at the Rosenberg trial.
- March 1951 Harry Gold Testifies for the prosecution at the Rosenberg trial.
- March 1951 Theodore Hall Questioned by the FBI; not charged.
- 29 March 1951 Ethel Rosenberg Convicted with her husband and Morton Sobell.
- 29 March 1951 Julius Rosenberg Convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.
- 5 April 1951 Julius Rosenberg Sentenced to death.
- May 1951 Dmitri Polyakov Posted to New York with the Soviet delegation to the UN Military Staff Committee.
- 25 May 1951 Guy Burgess Leaves Southampton with Donald Maclean; both reach Moscow.
- 25 May 1951 Donald Maclean Flees with Guy Burgess via Southampton and St. Malo.
- July 1951 Kim Philby Asked to resign from the Foreign Service after the flight of Burgess and Maclean.
- 9 August 1951 Hearings on American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case (HUAC, 1951) The House Un-American Activities Committee's 1951 hearings with the procurator who interrogated Sorge and MacArthur's intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby: how the confession was made, and a Cold War case built on it.
- 13 December 1951 NSA Truman orders a review of US communications intelligence; the Brownell Committee reports on 13 June 1952.
- 1952 MI5 Maxwell Fyfe Directive puts the Service under the Home Secretary and defines its role.
- 1952 GCHQ Main move to Cheltenham begins; complete by the following year.
- 1952 John Cairncross Resigns from government service and moves abroad.
- 1952 Whittaker Chambers Publishes his memoir, Witness.
- 31 March 1952 Alan Turing Convicted of gross indecency; sentenced to probation conditional on hormone treatment.
- September 1952 Mossad Isser Harel becomes director and also directs the Shin Bet.
- September 1952 Isser Harel Appointed director of the Mossad, keeping authority over the Shin Bet.
- 24 October 1952 NSA Truman's memorandum on communications intelligence activities makes COMINT a national responsibility and provides for a Director of NSA.
- 4 November 1952 NSA NSA comes into existence, replacing AFSA, with the Secretary of Defense as executive agent.
- 26 February 1953 Allen Dulles Becomes Director of Central Intelligence.
- March 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.
- 5 March 1953 Stalin dies; Beria, head of the security organs, is arrested in June and shot in December.
- 13 April 1953 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.
- 19 June 1953 Ethel Rosenberg Executed at Sing Sing prison.
- 22 June 1953 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.
- July 1953 Stasi After the June uprising the ministry is downgraded to a state secretariat; Ernst Wollweber replaces Zaisser.
- 27 July 1953 The Korean Armistice Agreement ends the fighting in Korea.
- August 1953 MI6 SIS and the CIA back the coup that overthrows Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.
- 12 August 1953 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.
- 19 August 1953 CIA The CIA-backed coup in Iran removes Prime Minister Mosaddeq.
- 28 August 1953 Richard Helms Attends the CIA's internal debriefing on the Iran coup as chief of operations in the Directorate of Plans.
- 28 August 1953 Iran 1953: Kermit Roosevelt's debriefing at CIA headquarters A verbatim record of 28 August 1953, printed in the 2017 FRUS retrospective volume on Iran, in which the CIA's field commander told agency leaders how the TPAJAX coup against Mosaddeq was saved after it failed.
- September 1953 Markus Wolf Takes charge of East Germany's foreign intelligence service (from 1956 the HV A).
- 4 September 1953 William J. Donovan Presents credentials as US Ambassador to Thailand; leaves post on 21 August 1954.
- December 1953 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.
- 1954 Morris and Lona Cohen Settle in Ruislip, near London, as Peter and Helen Kroger.
- 1954 James Jesus Angleton Named chief of the new Counterintelligence Staff.
- 1954 Igor Gouzenko His novel The Fall of a Titan wins a Governor General's Award.
- 1954 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) Establishes himself in Canada under the identity of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale (some accounts say 1953).
- January 1954 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Takes a photo studio at 252 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, as 'Emil Goldfus'.
- 13 March 1954 KGB Created by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet as the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers.
- 7 June 1954 Alan Turing Dies of cyanide poisoning at Wilmslow, Cheshire.
- 27 June 1954 CIA Guatemala's President Árbenz resigns under CIA-organized pressure.
- July 1954 Yuri Andropov Appointed Soviet ambassador to Hungary.
- 2 July 1954 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.
- 9 September 1954 Günter Guillaume Registered by the HV A under the codename 'Hansen.'
- 30 September 1954 The Doolittle Report (1954) Eisenhower's private 1954 review of CIA covert operations, best known for its line that 'there are no rules in such a game,' and otherwise a hard-headed audit of personnel, security and money.
- 24 November 1954 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.
- 27 November 1954 Alger Hiss Released from Lewisburg federal prison.
- 1955 George Blake Posted to Berlin by SIS.
- 1955 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) Settles in Britain and enrolls to study Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (some accounts say 1954).
- 27 January 1955 Dulles asks Egypt to spare the Lavon affair prisoners (27 January 1955) A one-page State Department telegram in which John Foster Dulles asked Egypt, informally, to commute the death sentences passed on two members of Israel's sabotage network in Cairo. Four days later both men were hanged.
- 14 May 1955 The Warsaw Pact is signed.
- 11 July 1955 BND The federal cabinet decides to take the organization over as a state service.
- 25 October 1955 John Anthony Walker Enlists in the US Navy.
- November 1955 James Jesus Angleton Proposes expanding the CIA's New York mail-opening program, HTLINGUAL, which his staff runs until 1973.
- 7 November 1955 Kim Philby Cleared in the Commons by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan.
- 1956 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.
- 1956 KGB KGB chairman Ivan Serov supervises the aftermath of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
- 1956 Anthony Blunt Appointed KCVO.
- 1956 Günter Guillaume Moves to Frankfurt am Main with his wife Christel, posing as a refugee from the East.
- February 1956 Guy Burgess Appears with Maclean at a short press conference in Moscow.
- February 1956 Donald Maclean Appears with Burgess at a press conference in Moscow.
- 1 April 1956 BND The Bundesnachrichtendienst is founded, attached to the Federal Chancellery, with Gehlen as president.
- May 1956 Francis Gary Powers Leaves the Air Force to fly the U-2 as a civilian CIA employee.
- August 1956 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.
- August 1956 FBI Begins COINTELPRO against the Communist Party.
- August 1956 J. Edgar Hoover FBI begins its first counterintelligence program, against the Communist Party.
- 23 October 1956 The Hungarian Revolution begins; Soviet forces crush it in November.
- November 1956 Yuri Andropov In Budapest during the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution.
- 28 November 1956 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 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.
- 3 January 1957 Frank Church Takes his seat as a Democratic senator from Idaho.
- February 1957 Eli Cohen Arrives in Israel after being expelled from Egypt following the Suez war.
- June 1957 FBI Arrests the Soviet illegal Rudolf Abel in New York.
- 21 June 1957 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Arrested at the Hotel Latham, New York; gives his name as Rudolf Ivanovich Abel.
- September 1957 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.
- 4 October 1957 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
- 25 October 1957 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Convicted on three counts of conspiracy.
- 1 November 1957 Stasi Erich Mielke becomes minister and stays until November 1989.
- February 1958 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 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.
- 1959 William Colby Posted to Saigon; becomes CIA chief of station.
- 8 February 1959 William J. Donovan Dies in Washington, D.C.; buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- 23 June 1959 Klaus Fuchs Released; leaves for East Germany.
- 29 August 1959 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.
1960s
- 1960 Eli Cohen Recruited by Israeli intelligence for a deep-cover mission against Syria.
- 17 March 1960 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.
- 28 March 1960 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Supreme Court upholds his conviction, 5 to 4.
- 28 March 1960 Abel v. United States: the Supreme Court and the spy's wastebasket (1960) The 5–4 Supreme Court decision that upheld the conviction of the Soviet illegal known as Rudolf Abel, and with it the immigration arrest and warrantless searches that produced his hollow pencil and cipher pad.
- 1 May 1960 Francis Gary Powers Shot down near Sverdlovsk on Operation GRAND SLAM and captured.
- 9 May 1960 After the U-2: the President and his advisers (May 1960) The record of the 9 May 1960 National Security Council meeting, where Eisenhower told his advisers to 'endure the storm' over Francis Gary Powers's downed U-2 and the CIA assessed why Khrushchev was exploiting it.
- 11 May 1960 Mossad A Mossad team seizes Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.
- 22 June 1960 NRO Grab, the Naval Research Laboratory's signals-intelligence satellite and later an NRO program, is launched from Cape Canaveral.
- 21 July 1960 What the CIA told the State Department about Eichmann (July 1960) A three-page CIA summary, sent to the State Department two months after Mossad seized Adolf Eichmann, of everything in the agency's files on him, including a 1958 report that he had lived in Argentina as 'Clemens'.
- August 1960 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.
- 12 August 1960 Oleg Penkovsky Approaches two American students on a Moscow bridge with an offer to spy.
- 18 August 1960 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.
- 19 August 1960 NRO First CORONA film capsule recovered from orbit.
- 19 August 1960 Francis Gary Powers Convicted of espionage in Moscow and sentenced to ten years' deprivation of liberty.
- 27 August 1960 Allen Dulles's cable on Lumumba: 'an urgent and prime objective' (August 1960) The CIA director's cable to the Leopoldville station of late August 1960 declaring Patrice Lumumba's removal 'an urgent and prime objective' and widening the station's authority, the cable the Church Committee placed at the start of the assassination plot.
- 5 September 1960 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) MI5 secretly examines the contents of his bank safe-deposit box.
- 1961 MI5 Portland spy ring tried and convicted after a long MI5 surveillance operation.
- 1961 Eli Cohen Builds his cover as Kamel Amin Thabet among Syrian émigrés in Buenos Aires.
- 1961 Isser Harel The Shin Bet exposes Israel Beer, an adviser close to the defense establishment, as a Soviet agent.
- 7 January 1961 KGB The KGB illegal 'Gordon Lonsdale' is arrested in London.
- 17 January 1961 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.
- March 1961 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) Convicted at the Old Bailey and sentenced to 25 years.
- April 1961 GRU GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky begins working for the CIA and MI6.
- 17 April 1961 CIA The CIA's Cuban exile brigade lands at the Bay of Pigs and is defeated.
- 20 April 1961 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.
- 20 April 1961 Oleg Penkovsky Arrives in London with a Soviet delegation; first meeting with CIA and MI6 officers.
- May 1961 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.
- 3 May 1961 MI6 SIS officer George Blake pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union.
- 2 July 1961 Oleg Penkovsky First film handover in Moscow to Janet Chisholm.
- 13 August 1961 East Germany seals the border in Berlin; the Berlin Wall goes up.
- 6 September 1961 NRO Defense Secretary McNamara and DCI Allen Dulles agree to create the NRO under co-directors Joseph Charyk and Richard Bissell.
- October 1961 The Inspector General's survey of the Cuban operation (1961) CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick's October 1961 post-mortem on the Bay of Pigs blamed the agency's own planning, intelligence and organization. Twenty copies were made; it was released in 1998.
- November 1961 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.
- November 1961 KGB KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky surrenders in West Germany and reveals the killings of two Ukrainian émigré leaders.
- November 1961 Allen Dulles Leaves the CIA; succeeded by John McCone.
- 6 November 1961 BND Heinz Felfe, head of the BND's Soviet counterintelligence section, is arrested as a KGB agent.
- 8 November 1961 Dmitri Polyakov Volunteers to the FBI in New York; code-named TOPHAT.
- 30 November 1961 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.
- 18 January 1962 Lansdale's first Cuba Project program review (18 January 1962) Seven weeks into Operation Mongoose, Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale set out its goal, admitted how little the CIA had inside Cuba, and handed the agencies 32 tasks with February deadlines.
- February 1962 Eli Cohen Settles in Damascus.
- February 1962 Richard Helms Succeeds Richard Bissell as Deputy Director for Plans.
- 10 February 1962 Rudolf Abel (William Fisher) Exchanged for Francis Gary Powers in Berlin.
- 10 February 1962 Francis Gary Powers Exchanged for Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge, Berlin.
- 20 February 1962 Lansdale's "The Cuba Project" (1962) Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale's program review of 20 February 1962 for Operation Mongoose, with a six-phase timetable that aimed at an 'open revolt and overthrow' of the Castro government in October 1962.
- 22 February 1962 Francis Gary Powers before the CIA Board of Inquiry (22 February 1962) The transcript of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers's sworn testimony to the CIA's Prettyman board, twelve days after his release: his briefings, the shoot-down near Sverdlovsk, his capture and his interrogation.
- 6 March 1962 Francis Gary Powers Appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which commends him.
- 9 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.
- 13 March 1962 The Northwoods memorandum (1962) On 13 March 1962 the Joint Chiefs sent the Secretary of Defense a list of staged incidents that could justify invading Cuba, from a fake attack on Guantanamo to a sham terror campaign in Florida. None was carried out.
- May 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.
- 23 July 1962 NRO Charyk sets up the "alphabet" structure: Program A (Air Force), B (CIA), C (Navy) and D (aircraft).
- 10 August 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.
- 27 August 1962 Oleg Penkovsky Last known delivery: about 600 pages of photographed documents.
- 19 September 1962 SNIE 85-3-62: the estimate that ruled out missiles in Cuba (1962) The conclusions of the US intelligence community's estimate of 19 September 1962, which judged Soviet missiles in Cuba unlikely four weeks before a U-2 photographed them. Printed by the CIA History Staff in 1992.
- 14 October 1962 NRO U-2 overflight finds Soviet missile sites in Cuba.
- 16 October 1962 16 October 1962: the first White House meeting on the missile sites The transcript of the meeting at which President Kennedy and his advisers first discussed U-2 photographs of Soviet medium-range missile sites in Cuba, and began weighing an air strike against a blockade.
- 22 October 1962 Oleg Penkovsky Arrested by the KGB.
- 23 October 1962 SDECE CIA's Sherman Kent briefs SDECE chief General Paul Jacquier on Soviet missiles in Cuba.
- 28 October 1962 Khrushchev announces that the missiles in Cuba will be dismantled.
- 1963 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.
- 23 January 1963 MI6 Former SIS officer Kim Philby disappears from Beirut.
- March 1963 Mossad Harel resigns over the campaign against German rocket scientists in Egypt; Meir Amit succeeds him.
- March 1963 Isser Harel Resigns after Ben-Gurion curbs his campaign against German rocket scientists in Egypt.
- 12 March 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.
- 16 May 1963 Oleg Penkovsky Executed after a joint trial with Greville Wynne.
- 1 July 1963 Kim Philby Government tells Parliament that Philby worked for the Soviets and warned Maclean in 1951.
- 26 July 1963 The CIA Inspector General's inspection of MKULTRA (1963) The 1963 report, prepared in a single copy, in which the CIA's Inspector General described the MKULTRA behavior-control program, its drug tests on unwitting Americans, and recommended ending those tests.
- 5 August 1963 The Limited Test Ban Treaty is signed in Moscow.
- November 1963 Allen Dulles Appointed to the Warren Commission on the Kennedy assassination.
- 22 November 1963 President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.
- 1964 John Cairncross Makes a partial confession to MI5.
- 9 January 1964 The CIA's Tibet program reviewed for the Special Group (January 1964) A three-page CIA paper that put a price on the Tibet program for fiscal 1964: $1,735,000 for guerrillas in Nepal, a subsidy to the Dalai Lama, a Colorado training camp and Tibet Houses abroad.
- 13 February 1964 Cuba 1962: Khrushchev's Miscalculated Risk (CIA staff study, 1964) A CIA staff study of February 1964 that rebuilt the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba from photography and reports, and argued that Moscow had judged the risk of an American military response to be slight.
- April 1964 Anthony Blunt Confesses to MI5 after an offer of immunity from prosecution.
- April 1964 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) Exchanged for the British businessman Greville Wynne.
- 5 May 1964 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.
- 4 August 1964 NSA NSA reporting supports a second North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that did not occur.
- November 1964 Eli Cohen On his last visit home, tells his handlers he fears exposure.
- November 1964 J. Edgar Hoover FBI mails Martin Luther King Jr. a tape and anonymous letter.
- 5 November 1964 Richard Sorge Named a Hero of the Soviet Union by decree.
- 1965 Dmitri Polyakov Posted to Rangoon as military attaché and GRU chief; met by the CIA.
- 24 January 1965 Mossad Eli Cohen is arrested in Damascus.
- April 1965 Francis Gary Powers Receives the CIA's Intelligence Star, withheld two years earlier.
- 28 April 1965 Richard Helms Becomes Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
- 18 May 1965 Eli Cohen Publicly hanged in Marjeh Square, Damascus.
- August 1965 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Posted to Paris under trade cover as a Line X officer.
- 11 August 1965 NRO Fourth Defense-CIA agreement confirms the NRO as a Defense agency with the Secretary of Defense in final control of its budget.
- 29 October 1965 SDECE Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka is abducted in Paris; an SDECE contact is implicated.
- 1966 SDECE De Gaulle moves the SDECE from the prime minister's office to the Ministry of Defense.
- 1966 Virginia Hall Retires from the CIA at the mandatory age of 60.
- 1966 Alias George Wood: CIA's case history of Fritz Kolbe (1966) A classified Studies in Intelligence case history of Fritz Kolbe, the German diplomat who smuggled Foreign Office telegrams to Allen Dulles in Bern, including von Papen's first report on the spy 'Cicero'.
- May 1966 Harry Gold Paroled from Lewisburg penitentiary.
- 30 June 1966 Richard Helms Becomes Director of Central Intelligence.
- 16 August 1966 Mossad An Iraqi pilot recruited by the Mossad lands a MiG-21 in Israel.
- 22 October 1966 George Blake Escapes from Wormwood Scrubs prison and reaches the Soviet Union.
- 1967 KGB Yuri Andropov becomes chairman, serving until 1982.
- 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.
- March 1967 The CIA's trained-cats memo (1967) A two-page CIA memorandum of March 1967, heavily redacted, that closed the project later known as Acoustic Kitty: cats could be trained to move short distances, but the technique was not practical for the Agency.
- May 1967 Yuri Andropov Appointed chairman of the KGB.
- 23 May 1967 The CIA Inspector General's report on plots to kill Castro (1967) Inspector General J. S. Earman's 1967 report for Richard Helms on CIA plots against Fidel Castro: the Mafia poison pills, their revival under William Harvey, and the AMLASH operation with Rolando Cubela.
- June 1967 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.
- 8 June 1967 NSA Israeli forces attack the intelligence ship USS Liberty; 34 crew are killed.
- 3 July 1967 Yuri Andropov Proposes the KGB Fifth Directorate to combat political dissent.
- August 1967 James Jesus Angleton Chooses the officer to run the Special Operations Group, later Operation CHAOS.
- 15 August 1967 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.
- 25 August 1967 The FBI letter that opened COINTELPRO against black nationalist groups (1967) Hoover's FBI headquarters letter of 25 August 1967 to 23 field offices, setting up a counterintelligence program to 'expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize' black nationalist organizations.
- 20 October 1967 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 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.
- December 1967 John Anthony Walker Volunteers at the Soviet embassy in Washington (some official accounts say 1968).
- 1968 William Colby Returns to Vietnam to run the CORDS pacification effort, including Phoenix.
- 23 January 1968 NSA North Korea seizes the intelligence ship USS Pueblo with its cryptologic crew.
- April 1968 BND Gehlen retires; Gerhard Wessel succeeds him.
- April 1968 Reinhard Gehlen Retires as president of the BND.
- 24 June 1968 The CIA's history of the Berlin Tunnel (1968) CS Historical Paper No. 150, the CIA's in-house account of PBJOINTLY: how the 1,476-foot tunnel was planned and dug, what it produced, how the Soviets found it, and the late discovery that George Blake had betrayed it.
- 20 August 1968 Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague Spring.
- 1969 Isser Harel Elected to the Knesset for the State List.
- 1969 The Rote Drei: CIA's study of the 'Lucy' radio traffic (c. 1969) A classified Studies in Intelligence article that rebuilt the wartime Soviet network in Switzerland from 437 surviving radio messages, and found that 'Lucy' was a go-between rather than a master spy.
- March 1969 'The Trust': the CIA's unpublished study of the OGPU's great deception (c. 1969) An internal CIA study, completed around March 1969 and never published, of the Soviet 'Trust' operation of 1921–27, with the 1988 memo explaining how a copy reached a historian outside the agency.
- 1 July 1969 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.
- October 1969 Morris and Lona Cohen Released from British prison under an Anglo-Soviet exchange agreement.
1970s
- 1 January 1970 Günter Guillaume Hired by the Federal Chancellery despite security doubts.
- 17 February 1970 William Colby on Phoenix before the Senate (1970) The opening day of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's 1970 hearings on pacification, when William Colby, head of CORDS, defended the Phoenix program under oath and conceded that prisoners had probably been killed wrongly.
- 15 September 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.
- 15 September 1970 Richard Helms Receives Nixon's order to try to block Allende in Chile.
- 15 September 1970 "Make the economy scream": Helms's notes of 15 September 1970 One page of handwritten notes, with a typed copy, that CIA Director Richard Helms took in the Oval Office when Nixon ordered the agency to stop Salvador Allende taking office in Chile: the founding record of Track II.
- 6 November 1970 SDECE Alexandre de Marenches becomes director and purges the service.
- 1971 KGB Britain expels 105 Soviet intelligence officers in Operation FOOT.
- 28 April 1971 FBI Ends COINTELPRO after the Media, Pennsylvania, burglary.
- October 1971 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 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.
- 1972 Günter Guillaume Becomes Willy Brandt's party aide.
- 1972 Vasili Mitrokhin Begins supervising the move of the First Chief Directorate archive to Yasenevo, copying files by hand.
- 1972 Penkovskiy's Legacy: a CIA analyst on the IRONBARK papers (1972) A Secret 1972 Studies in Intelligence article by a CIA Directorate of Intelligence analyst explaining why the Soviet military documents Oleg Penkovsky photographed were still being mined for doctrine and weapons ten years on.
- 2 May 1972 J. Edgar Hoover Dies in office; lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
- 25 May 1972 NRO Last CORONA launch.
- 26 May 1972 Nixon and Brezhnev sign the SALT I interim agreement and the ABM Treaty.
- September 1972 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.
- 1973 Richard Helms Leaves the CIA and becomes Ambassador to Iran.
- May 1973 William Colby Co-signs with James Schlesinger the directive that produces the 'Family Jewels'.
- May 1973 The "Family Jewels" (1973) The CIA's own 1973 inventory of activities that might have broken its charter, from mail opening and wiretaps on reporters to plots against Castro. Kept secret for 34 years, it was released in June 2007.
- 21 July 1973 Mossad A Mossad team kills a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, mistaking him for a Black September leader.
- 4 September 1973 William Colby Sworn in as Director of Central Intelligence.
- 1974 CIA The Hughes–Ryan Amendment requires presidential findings and reports to Congress for covert actions.
- 1974 Dmitri Polyakov Promoted to major general while GRU chief in New Delhi.
- 1974 Duško Popov (TRICYCLE) Publishes the memoir Spy/Counterspy.
- 1974 The Battle for Iran: the CIA History Staff's account of the 1953 coup (c. 1974) An undated CIA History Staff account of Iran and the 1953 coup, released in 2011 and posted in 2013. In it the CIA states that the coup was carried out under its direction as an act of US policy.
- 5 March 1974 William Colby Ends Operation CHAOS.
- April 1974 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Posted to the Soviet trade mission in Montreal.
- 24 April 1974 Stasi West German police arrest Günter Guillaume, an HV A officer working as Chancellor Brandt's aide.
- May 1974 Kissinger to Nixon on Brandt's fall: the blackmail reports (May 1974) An undated Secret memorandum in which Henry Kissinger passed to President Nixon what a German security official said the Guillaume investigation had found, and press claims that fear of blackmail helped push Willy Brandt to resign.
- September 1974 John Anthony Walker Recruits his friend Jerry Whitworth in a San Diego restaurant.
- December 1974 James Jesus Angleton Forced out after the New York Times reports CIA domestic spying.
- 27 January 1975 The Senate creates the Church Committee to investigate the intelligence agencies.
- 27 January 1975 Frank Church Senate creates the Select Committee on intelligence activities, 82 to 4; Church becomes chairman.
- 27 May 1975 Ford's meeting on the submarine leak (27 May 1975) The White House record of the hour President Ford spent with Schlesinger, Colby, Rumsfeld, Ingersoll and Scowcroft two days after the New York Times exposed US submarine spying off the Soviet coast, and talked of prosecuting the paper.
- 6 June 1975 The Rockefeller Commission on Operation CHAOS (1975) Chapter 11 of the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report: the first official account of the CIA's Special Operations Group, its 13,000 files and 300,000-name index, and its finding that CHAOS broke the CIA's charter.
- 11 July 1975 Frank Church In questioning Robert McNamara, asks whether the CIA was 'a rogue elephant rampaging out of control'.
- 1 August 1975 The Helsinki Final Act is signed by 35 states.
- 24 September 1975 James Jesus Angleton Withdraws, before the Church Committee, his statement that a secret service need not obey 'all the overt orders of the government'.
- 29 October 1975 NSA Director Lew Allen Jr. testifies before the Church Committee on MINARET and SHAMROCK.
- 29 October 1975 Church Committee Hearings, Volume 5: The NSA and Fourth Amendment Rights (1975) The first public Senate testimony by an NSA director, Lew Allen's account of the watch lists, the committee's disputed vote to reveal SHAMROCK, and the 1969 MINARET charter and other NSA papers printed as exhibits.
- 6 November 1975 Frank Church Reads the committee's report on NSA's Operation Shamrock into the public record.
- 20 November 1975 CIA The Church Committee publishes its report on assassination plots.
- 20 November 1975 Frank Church Committee publishes its interim report on assassination plots against foreign leaders.
- 20 November 1975 Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975) The Church Committee's interim report of 20 November 1975 found that US officials plotted to kill Castro and Lumumba and backed plotters in three other countries where leaders died. Ford opposed publication.
- 15 December 1975 Günter Guillaume Sentenced by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court to 13 years for treason.
- 1976 FBI Attorney General Edward Levi issues guidelines limiting domestic security investigations.
- 1976 Erich Mielke Becomes a full member of the SED Politburo.
- 12 January 1976 Robert Hanssen Sworn in as an FBI special agent.
- 30 January 1976 William Colby Leaves office, succeeded by George H. W. Bush.
- 23 April 1976 The Church Committee's report on the NSA: 'National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans' (1976) The Church Committee's 1976 staff report on the NSA: the MINARET watch lists, the drug intercepts, thirty years of telegram copying under SHAMROCK, and the NSA Office of Security's own files and break-ins.
- 29 April 1976 Frank Church Committee issues its final report, with 96 recommendations.
- July 1976 John Anthony Walker Retires from the Navy as a chief warrant officer and keeps spying.
- 1977 StB Charter 77 is published; the StB later launches Operation Asanace to force signatories into exile.
- 1977 Stasi Warsaw Pact services agree to build the joint SOUD database of 'hostile persons.'
- 1977 Richard Helms Pleads nolo contendere to two misdemeanor counts of failing to testify fully to Congress.
- 1977 Ruth Werner (SONYA) Publishes her memoir, Sonjas Rapport, in East Germany.
- January 1977 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.
- January 1977 Adolf Tolkachev Drops a note in the car of the CIA station chief at a Moscow gas station.
- 1 August 1977 Francis Gary Powers Killed when his television news helicopter crashes in Los Angeles.
- 1978 BND A federal law places the intelligence services under parliamentary oversight.
- 1978 Markus Wolf Swedish security photographs him in Stockholm; a defector identifies the picture.
- 1 March 1978 Adolf Tolkachev Identifies himself in an eleven-page note handed to the station chief.
- 30 June 1978 'CIA Agents Imprisoned in the Soviet Union': a retiring officer's memo on captured REDSOX agents (1978) On his last day at the CIA, 30 June 1978, an officer asked the Director to find out whether three Latvian REDSOX agents captured in 1957 were still alive and to consider them for an exchange.
- 5 July 1978 KGB Renamed the KGB of the USSR and raised to a state committee.
- 1 October 1978 NRO President Carter publicly confirms that the United States uses reconnaissance satellites.
- 25 October 1978 The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act becomes law, requiring court warrants for national-security wiretaps in the US.
- 25 October 1978 NSA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act signed, putting domestic foreign-intelligence surveillance under court warrant.
- 1 January 1979 Adolf Tolkachev First meeting with a CIA case officer in Moscow.
- 26 June 1979 The Afghan program begins: the Special Coordination Committee, 26 June 1979 The White House record of the 55-minute meeting at which Carter's advisers agreed to give Afghan insurgents covert cash and propaganda support, six months before the Soviet invasion: the first decision of the program later called Operation Cyclone.
- 3 July 1979 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 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.
- November 1979 Robert Hanssen Volunteers to the GRU in New York.
- November 1979 Dmitri Polyakov Robert Hanssen volunteers to the GRU and later betrays a long-time FBI asset in it.
- 4 November 1979 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.
- 15 November 1979 Anthony Blunt Named in the Commons by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; stripped of his knighthood.
- 24 December 1979 Soviet forces begin entering Afghanistan.
1980s
- 1980 The CIA Iran Task Force's account of the Canadian Caper (1980) A short, heavily redacted CIA review written soon after January 1980. Its one surviving passage gives the Agency's own dated chronology of how six American diplomats were got out of Tehran.
- 9 May 1980 The Afghan covert program in May 1980: INR's briefing for Secretary Muskie A short State Department briefing of 9 May 1980 for the new Secretary of State: how the CIA's Afghan program had grown from radio and cash to Soviet-made weapons flown via Saudi Arabia, with Egyptian SA-7s on the way.
- June 1980 Dmitri Polyakov Recalled from New Delhi; retires.
- 4 November 1980 Frank Church Loses his Senate seat.
- 1981 SDECE The DST begins running KGB officer Vladimir Vetrov, code-named FAREWELL.
- 1981 KGB KGB and GRU begin Operation RYaN to look for signs of a Western nuclear first strike.
- 1981 Günter Guillaume Released early and returned to East Germany.
- February 1981 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.
- February 1981 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Begins supplying documents to the French DST, which gives him the code name FAREWELL.
- May 1981 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.
- May 1981 GRU Andropov announces a joint KGB–GRU collection effort against a feared US first strike.
- May 1981 Yuri Andropov With Brezhnev, tells senior KGB officers the US is preparing a surprise nuclear attack; launches RYAN.
- July 1981 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Mitterrand tells Reagan about the source at the Ottawa summit.
- 4 December 1981 President Reagan signs Executive Order 12333, the framework for US intelligence activities.
- 22 February 1982 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Kills a man and wounds his mistress in Moscow; arrested for murder.
- 2 April 1982 SDECE The SDECE is replaced by the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE).
- May 1982 Yuri Andropov Leaves the KGB for the Central Committee Secretariat.
- 12 November 1982 Yuri Andropov Elected General Secretary two days after Brezhnev's death.
- April 1983 Adolf Tolkachev A security inquiry at his institute frightens him into burning his spy gear.
- 5 April 1983 SDECE France expels 47 Soviet officials identified by the DST's FAREWELL material.
- 17 July 1983 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.
- November 1983 GRU GRU residencies tasked to look for US mobilization during NATO's Able Archer exercise.
- November 1983 Yuri Andropov Seriously ill during the Able Archer war scare.
- 2 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.
- 1984 GCHQ Government bans trade union membership at GCHQ; the ban is lifted in 1997.
- 1984 Vasili Mitrokhin Retires; types up his notes into ten volumes of studies.
- 9 February 1984 Yuri Andropov Dies in Moscow.
- 18 May 1984 SNIE 11-10-84: the intelligence community reads the war scare (May 1984) The Special National Intelligence Estimate of 18 May 1984 that judged Soviet war talk after Able Archer 83 to be posturing, not fear of attack. Six years later the President's advisory board faulted its certainty.
- October 1984 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.
- 9 November 1984 The CIA historian's case against the Taylor Committee (1984) Volume IV of the CIA's official Bay of Pigs history: Jack Pfeiffer's attack on the 1961 White House inquiry led by Maxwell Taylor, arguing that the Kennedy administration, not the CIA, caused the defeat.
- 1985 FBI Arrests in a string of espionage cases lead the press to call it the 'Year of the Spy'.
- 1985 "Project AZORIAN: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer" A 50-page in-house CIA history of the 1974 attempt to raise the Soviet submarine K-129, written by an unnamed participant for Studies in Intelligence and released, heavily redacted, in 2010.
- 23 January 1985 Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) Executed for treason.
- 11 March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
- 12 March 1985 The FBI's case write-up on the Duquesne spy ring (1985) A 15-page FBI summary, dated 12 March 1985, of the 1941 case against 33 German agents: how William Sebold was turned, the Long Island radio, and what each spy did and got.
- 16 April 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.
- 20 May 1985 John Anthony Walker Arrested by the FBI at a Maryland motel after a dead drop.
- June 1985 Adolf Tolkachev Arrested; on 13 June a CIA officer is seized on the way to meet him.
- September 1985 Soviet Acquisition of Militarily Significant Western Technology: An Update (1985) The US government's 1985 white paper on the Soviet machine for acquiring Western technology, built on the Soviets' own statistics. It never names Farewell, but journalists tie its figures to Vetrov's documents.
- 1 October 1985 Robert Hanssen Mails his first letter to the KGB, naming three FBI sources.
- 28 October 1985 John Anthony Walker Pleads guilty under an agreement covering his son.
- 19 November 1985 Keeping the Nation's Secrets: the Stilwell Commission report (1985) The Pentagon's security review ordered after the Navy spy arrests of May 1985: 63 unanimous recommendations on clearances, polygraphs, document control and counterintelligence, delivered to Weinberger in November 1985.
- 1986 Stasi Markus Wolf retires as head of foreign intelligence.
- February 1986 Markus Wolf Retires as head of the HV A.
- 7 July 1986 Dmitri Polyakov Arrested by the KGB after Aldrich Ames's 1985 disclosures.
- 24 September 1986 Adolf Tolkachev Executed for high treason.
- 3 October 1986 Meeting the Espionage Challenge: the Senate's verdict on the Year of the Spy (1986) The Senate Intelligence Committee's public report of October 1986 on US counterintelligence after the Walker, Pelton, Howard and Pollard cases: what the spies cost, what failed, and 95 findings and recommendations.
- 6 November 1986 John Anthony Walker Sentenced to two life terms plus ten years.
- November 1987 The congressional Iran-Contra report (1987) The joint House and Senate committees' report of November 1987: their executive summary of how the NSC staff sold arms to Iran, ran a private war in Nicaragua and diverted profits to the Contras, plus the chapter on the diversion.
- 8 December 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty.
- 1988 GRU GRU general Dmitri Polyakov, a long-serving American source, executed.
- 15 March 1988 Dmitri Polyakov Executed after a death sentence by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court.
- 27 April 1989 MI5 Security Service Act 1989 receives Royal Assent, giving the Service a statutory basis for the first time.
- 9 November 1989 The Berlin Wall is opened.
- 13 November 1989 Erich Mielke Gives his only speech to the Volkskammer: 'But I love all people.'
- 17 November 1989 StB Police break up a student march in Prague, starting the Velvet Revolution.
- 17 November 1989 Stasi The ministry is renamed the Office for National Security.
- 7 December 1989 Erich Mielke Arrested by the GDR military prosecutor.
1990s
- 15 January 1990 Demonstrators enter the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin; the files are secured.
- 15 January 1990 Stasi Demonstrators occupy the Berlin headquarters to stop the destruction of files.
- 1 February 1990 StB State Security is abolished.
- 15 February 1990 The Soviet "War Scare" (PFIAB, 1990) A 1990 review by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluding that Soviet fear of a US first strike in 1983 was genuine, and that American intelligence had underrated it. Declassified in 2015.
- 3 October 1990 Germany is reunified.
- August 1991 KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov joins the failed coup against Gorbachev and is arrested.
- 19 August 1991 Hardliners, including KGB chairman Kryuchkov, attempt a coup against Gorbachev; it collapses within three days.
- 14 November 1991 Stasi The Bundestag passes the Stasi Records Act, opening the files to the people they concern.
- December 1991 Robert Hanssen Breaks off contact with the KGB as the Soviet Union collapses.
- 3 December 1991 KGB USSR law abolishes the KGB and divides its functions among new bodies.
- 26 December 1991 The Soviet Union is formally dissolved.
- 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin Rejected at the US embassy in Riga; exfiltrated with his family and archive by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.
- 1992 Melita Norwood Mitrokhin's notes reach British intelligence and confirm suspicions about her.
- 1992 The CIA's history of OXCART: 'The U-2's Intended Successor' (1992) Chapter 6 of the CIA's in-house history of overhead reconnaissance: how the A-12 was chosen, built in titanium and tested at Area 51, flown over Vietnam and North Korea in 1967–68, and retired in favor of the SR-71.
- 7 May 1992 GRU Soviet GRU dissolved; the Russian Federation's GRU takes over its work.
- 18 September 1992 NRO The government declassifies the fact of the NRO's existence.
- 1993 Markus Wolf Convicted of treason and bribery by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court and sentenced to six years.
- October 1993 Erich Mielke Convicted by the Berlin Regional Court of the 1931 murders and sentenced to six years.
- 1994 MI6 Intelligence Services Act gives SIS a statutory basis; the service moves to Vauxhall Cross.
- 1994 Operation PBSUCCESS: the CIA's own history of the Guatemala coup (Cullather, 1994) The CIA History Staff's account of the 1954 operation against Jacobo Arbenz, written from the agency's files by Nicholas Cullather. It concludes that Arbenz fell to an army coup, not to CIA radio and bombing.
- 26 May 1994 GCHQ Intelligence Services Act 1994 gives GCHQ a statutory basis.
- 22 February 1995 NRO Executive Order 12951 releases CORONA imagery.
- 10 April 1995 Günter Guillaume Dies at Eggersdorf near Berlin.
- May 1995 CORONA: the CIA's 1995 documentary history of its first spy satellite The CIA History Staff volume published three months after CORONA was declassified in 1995. It reprints the Agency's 1973 Top Secret history of the program and the first reports built on its film.
- 15 May 1995 Markus Wolf The Federal Constitutional Court rules on the prosecution of former GDR spies; his conviction is set aside.
- July 1995 Theodore Hall Venona release makes his identification public.
- August 1995 Erich Mielke Released early from Moabit prison.
- 1996 Mossad The name of the serving director is made public for the first time.
- December 1996 StB StB files are opened to people who were watched.
- 1997 Markus Wolf Convicted of deprivation of liberty, coercion and bodily harm; two years suspended.
- 1999 Robert Hanssen Resumes contact with Russian intelligence.
- 1999 NSA's secret history of the Pelton trial and the Ivy Bells leak (1999) Four pages from Book IV of NSA's classified Cold War history, released in 2024: how the Agency took Ronald Pelton to trial, what it would and would not say about Ivy Bells, and its fight with the Washington Post.
- 21 January 1999 Juan Pujol García (GARBO) First MI5 files on GARBO opened at The National Archives (KV 2/39 onward).
- September 1999 Vasili Mitrokhin The Mitrokhin Archive, written with Christopher Andrew, is published; Melita Norwood is exposed.
- September 1999 Melita Norwood Publicly exposed; admits to the press that she helped the Soviet Union.
- 21 October 1999 Melita Norwood Home Secretary Jack Straw sets out the history of her case to the Commons.
2000s
- 13 June 2000 Vasili Mitrokhin Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee publishes its Mitrokhin Inquiry Report.
- 20 September 2000 BND The CIA acknowledges its relationship with Gehlen in a court filing under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
- February 2001 The FBI's affidavit against Robert Hanssen (2001) The 100-page sworn statement that charged FBI agent Robert Hanssen with espionage in February 2001, rebuilding the KGB's 'B' operation letter by letter and drop by drop, and setting out the evidence that 'B' was Hanssen.
- 18 February 2001 Robert Hanssen Arrested at the Foxstone Park dead drop in Vienna, Virginia.
- 6 July 2001 Robert Hanssen Pleads guilty to 15 espionage-related counts.
Nothing matches those filters.