Dossiers
Pieces that span agencies or countries — single operations told in depth, scandals reconstructed from primary documents, thematic surveys.
Direct action & assassinations
Direct action — the use of intelligence services to kill, abduct, or otherwise physically remove a target — sits at the limit of what states will openly acknowledge. The Wrath of God dossier reconstructs the Mossad campaign against Black September operatives connected to the 1972 Munich attack, including the Lillehammer affair that ended in the killing of an unrelated Moroccan waiter. The Khashoggi killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is documented in the 2021 ODNI assessment and the UN Special Rapporteur's report. The Salisbury attack and the Vrbětice munitions-depot explosions both attribute to GRU Unit 29155: the 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Wiltshire, and the 2014 destruction of Czech ammunition stocks disclosed in 2021. The OPCW, court, and government findings of attribution form the sourcing spine.
The Khashoggi Killing
The 2 October 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by a 15-person Saudi state team — and the international investigation that followed.
The Salisbury Novichok Attack
The 4 March 2018 attempted assassination of former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, with a Novichok-class nerve agent — and the subsequent identification of GRU Unit 29155.
The Vrbětice Explosions
The October–December 2014 explosions at a Czech Army ammunition depot in Vrbětice, attributed in April 2021 by the Czech Government to GRU Unit 29155.
Operation Wrath of God
The Mossad-led campaign of targeted killings of Black September and Palestine Liberation Organisation members held responsible for the September 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
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.