Dossiers
Pieces that span agencies or countries — single operations told in depth, scandals reconstructed from primary documents, thematic surveys.
Coups & covert action
Covert action — operations to influence political outcomes abroad while preserving deniability for the sponsoring state — produced a recurring pattern across the early Cold War record. Operation Ajax restored the Shah of Iran in 1953 after the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; the joint CIA–SIS operation became the institutional template for subsequent regime-change cases and is now the subject of a 2013 CIA acknowledgement. The Phoenix Program in South Vietnam pursued the systematic neutralisation of Viet Cong infrastructure under combined CIA and military command. Iran-Contra documents what happens when statutory restraints on covert action collide with executive determination to circumvent them — the Walsh Report and the pardons that followed. Operation Mockingbird sits between covert action and propaganda: a domestic media programme that became part of the same operational toolkit.
Iran-Contra
The 1985-1987 covert programme through which the Reagan Administration sold arms to Iran and diverted the proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of the Boland Amendment.
The Phoenix Program
The CIA-led counter-insurgency programme in South Vietnam between approximately 1965 and 1972, combining intelligence collection on the Viet Cong infrastructure with operations to "neutralise" identified members.
Operation Ajax
The 1953 joint CIA–SIS operation that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Operation Mockingbird
The Cold War-era programme of Central Intelligence Agency engagement with the United States and partner-state press — the recruitment of paid and unpaid journalist relationships, the funding of front publications, the placement of articles, and the related editorial influence — substantially documented by the 1976 Church Committee Final Report, by the *Family Jewels* internal CIA inventory declassified in 2007, and by Carl Bernstein's October 1977 *Rolling Stone* article identifying approximately 400 American journalists with intelligence-relationship histories. The colloquial label "Operation Mockingbird" covers a set of distinct programmes; the *Family Jewels* document uses MOCKINGBIRD specifically for a 1962–65 wiretap of two Washington journalists.
How dossiers differ from agency pages
An agency page sits in one country and covers one service — its history, statutory basis, role, and the public record of its operations. A dossier crosses those boundaries. A dossier picks up an operation, a scandal, or a thematic question and follows it across whichever services and states are implicated, footnoted to primary documents and the most defensible secondary record.
The Salisbury attack is a dossier rather than an agency entry because it implicates the GRU, MI5, the SIS, the Metropolitan Police, the OPCW, and the parallel Czech investigation into Vrbětice — no single agency page can carry it. The Snowden disclosures are a dossier because they involve the NSA, GCHQ, CSE, ASD, GCSB, the partner services that received the product, the journalism that processed the archive, and the long arc of post-disclosure legal and policy change. MKULTRA is a dossier because the operation was institutional in a way that has now been substantially documented by the Senate, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and successive declassifications.
Coverage here is editorial: dossiers are written when there is a coherent public-record account that can be reconstructed at depth. The list grows as new dossiers are written and as additional declassifications expand what can responsibly be said about cases that remain partly closed.