Dossiers
Pieces that span agencies or countries — single operations told in depth, scandals reconstructed from primary documents, thematic surveys.
Domestic programs & scandals
The largest body of declassified American intelligence record concerns the use of intelligence capabilities against domestic political life rather than foreign adversaries — and the Church Committee's 1975–1976 work remains the single most important institutional reckoning with that record. COINTELPRO documents the FBI's 1956–1971 programs of surveillance, infiltration, and disruption directed at the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, the SCLC, the Klan, and other domestic organisations. MKULTRA covers the CIA's 1953–1973 human-experimentation programme into behavioural modification, including the unwitting administration of LSD. The CIA Detention and Interrogation dossier reconstructs the post-September 2001 black-site programme using the Senate SSCI Study summary. Project SHAMROCK and Operation Mockingbird document the cable-traffic-collection and media-cultivation programmes of the same era.
The CIA Detention and Interrogation Programme
The post-2001 CIA programme of overseas detention sites at which detainees were subjected to techniques the agency described as "enhanced interrogation" and which the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded constituted torture.
COINTELPRO
The FBI Counter-Intelligence Programs of 1956 to 1971, directed at domestic political organisations including the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Project MKUltra
The CIA programme of human experimentation involving the administration of psychoactive drugs, including LSD, to unwitting subjects between 1953 and 1973.
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.