Expedientes
Piezas que abarcan agencias o países — operaciones individuales contadas en profundidad, escándalos reconstruidos a partir de documentos primarios, panorámicas temáticas.
Orígenes y reclutamiento de la Guerra Fría 5
The Gehlen Organization
The 1949–1956 Central Intelligence Agency-controlled phase of the post-war German foreign-intelligence apparatus built around General Reinhard Gehlen and the surviving cadre of the Wehrmacht's Foreign Armies East branch — the entity formally converted on 1 April 1956 into the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND).
Operation Bloodstone
The 1948 United States State Department-led, NSC-coordinated programme to recruit Eastern European émigrés — including former Nazi collaborators, members of wartime fascist movements in occupied territories, and Vlasovite veterans — for psychological warfare, covert action, and clandestine operations against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-bloc states, run principally through Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination.
The Klaus Barbie Case
The 1947–1983 case of SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie — the wartime Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, responsible for the deaths of approximately 4,000 individuals — including his 1947 recruitment by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria, his 1951 exfiltration via the Vatican-organised "ratlines" to Bolivia, his 1972 identification by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, his 1983 extradition to France, and his 1987 trial and conviction for crimes against humanity by the Lyon Court of Assises.
Operation Rusty
The 1946–1949 US Army G-2 and Counter Intelligence Corps operation that re-employed General Reinhard Gehlen and the surviving cadre of the Wehrmacht's Foreign Armies East branch as an American-controlled intelligence-collection apparatus in occupied Germany, prior to its transfer to CIA control on 1 July 1949.
Operation Paperclip
The 1945–1959 United States Government programme — administered by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency under the Joint Chiefs of Staff — that recruited approximately 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians from the defeated Third Reich into US Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA-predecessor, and other federal employment, including individuals whose wartime work and political affiliations contradicted President Truman's September 1946 directive excluding "ardent Nazis" from the programme.
Golpes y acción encubierta 4
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 1967 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](/dossiers/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.
Acción directa y asesinatos 4
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.
Vigilancia y recolección masiva 9
Pegasus and NSO Group
The mobile-spyware tool developed by Israeli firm NSO Group that, between approximately 2011 and the present, has been deployed by state customers across more than forty countries against journalists, activists, opposition figures, and senior government officials.
The Snowden Disclosures
The June 2013 disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of the largest body of classified material on contemporary signals-intelligence operations in any single disclosure of the post-Cold War period.
Tempora
The UK Government Communications Headquarters' bulk-collection programme tested from 2008 and operational from 2011 onward at the UK fibre-optic-cable landing-points to intercept and buffer the bulk internet-and-telephone traffic transiting UK telecommunications infrastructure. The operational successor to the earlier Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation programmes; disclosed by Edward Snowden in June 2013.
PRISM and Upstream
The two NSA collection programmes operating under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 — PRISM (downstream collection of communications from US technology providers including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple, beginning September 2007) and Upstream (backbone collection at US telecommunications-partner facilities under codenames including BLARNEY, FAIRVIEW, OAKSTAR, and STORMBREW) — which constitute the operational core of post-2008 US foreign-intelligence internet collection. Disclosed by Edward Snowden in June 2013; documented in subsequent FISA Court declassifications, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reports, and academic-and-policy literature.
Bullrun and EDGEHILL
The NSA's Bullrun and GCHQ's parallel EDGEHILL programmes — the institutional cryptographic-defeat effort operating from approximately 2000 onward to undermine the encryption protecting internet communications, through influence on standards bodies, covert intervention with US technology vendors (most prominently the Dual_EC_DRBG backdoor in NIST SP 800-90A), and cryptanalytic exploitation of widely deployed protocols. Disclosed in joint *New York Times*, *Guardian*, and ProPublica reporting on 5–6 September 2013.
Project MINARET
The 1967–1973 National Security Agency watchlist programme under which the international communications of approximately 1,650 United States citizens — including civil-rights leaders, anti-war activists, two sitting US Senators, and the boxer Muhammad Ali — were intercepted, disseminated to recipient agencies under a "for background use only" caveat that concealed NSA's role as collector, and operated without statutory authority or judicial process. Terminated by NSA Director Lew Allen Jr. in October 1973 and exposed by the Senate [Church Committee](/dossiers/church-committee) in 1975–76. The companion programme to Project SHAMROCK in the post-Vietnam reckoning with NSA domestic collection.
Five Eyes / The UKUSA Agreement
The post-war signals-intelligence partnership between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — the most enduring intelligence alliance in modern history.
Project SHAMROCK
The 1945–1975 United States signals-intelligence operation, run jointly by the Army Security Agency and its successor the National Security Agency, under which RCA Global, ITT World Communications, and Western Union International provided microfilm copies — and from the 1960s onward magnetic-tape copies — of all international telegrams entering and leaving the United States, including the communications of US citizens, in the absence of statutory authority and without judicial process.
Bletchley Park and Ultra
The wartime British signals-intelligence operation conducted at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, in which the Government Code and Cypher School broke the German Enigma and Lorenz cipher systems and produced the high-level intelligence product distributed under the security designation Ultra — credited by the official British history of intelligence in the Second World War as having materially shortened the conflict.
Operaciones cibernéticas e intrusiones 6
HAFNIUM — Microsoft Exchange
The early-2021 mass-exploitation campaign against on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server installations, in which four previously undisclosed vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065 — collectively the "ProxyLogon" cluster) were exploited at scale across more than 250,000 servers globally — formally attributed by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, NATO, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada in a coordinated statement of 19 July 2021 to actors associated with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of State Security.
SolarWinds — SUNBURST
The 2019–2020 supply-chain compromise of the SolarWinds Orion network-management product, in which a software-build-server intrusion enabled the surreptitious insertion of the SUNBURST trojan into legitimate signed Orion update packages distributed to approximately 18,000 customers worldwide, with subsequent active exploitation against approximately 100 high-value organisations including nine United States federal agencies — attributed by the United States Government on 15 April 2021 to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR).
Vault 7
The 2017 series of WikiLeaks publications of approximately 8,761 documents and files describing the cyber-tools and operational tradecraft of the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence — sourced by former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte, who was convicted in 2022 by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and sentenced in February 2024 to forty years' imprisonment.
The Shadow Brokers
The institutional disclosure sequence by the anonymous entity self-designated The Shadow Brokers, between August 2016 and April 2017, of NSA Tailored Access Operations hacking tools — the operational inventory of the Equation Group, including ETERNALBLUE, DOUBLEPULSAR, ETERNALROMANCE, EXPLODINGCAN, and adjacent exploits and persistence frameworks. The downstream operational consequences across the May 2017 WannaCry ransomware (North Korean Lazarus Group) and the June 2017 NotPetya destructive malware (Russian GRU Sandworm Team) impacted approximately 200,000 systems in 150 countries with documented damages exceeding $10 billion.
The 2015 OPM Data Breach
The 2014–2015 cyber-intrusion campaign against the United States Office of Personnel Management — disclosed in June 2015 and attributed by the United States Government to Chinese state actors, subsequently associated by analysts with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of State Security — that resulted in the exfiltration of approximately 22.1 million records, including the SF-86 security-clearance background-investigation files of approximately 21.5 million current and former federal employees, contractors, and family members, and 5.6 million sets of fingerprints.
Stuxnet — Operation Olympic Games
The joint US-Israeli cyber-sabotage operation that physically damaged Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges at Natanz between 2007 and 2010.
Divulgaciones y denunciantes 2
Sednaya and the Caesar Files
The Syrian Military Police detention facility at Sednaya — and the body of approximately 55,000 photographs of detainees who died in regime custody, smuggled out of Syria in August 2013 by a defector working as a forensic photographer.
The Manning–WikiLeaks Disclosures, 2010
The 2010 series of four publication events by WikiLeaks of classified United States military and diplomatic material sourced by US Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning — the *Collateral Murder* video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the Cablegate State Department cables — together constituting the largest single unauthorised disclosure of classified United States Government records on record at the date of the publications.
Contrainteligencia y fracasos 4
The 7 October 2023 Warning Failure
The intelligence failure of the Israeli services to warn of the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, characterised by the Director of Military Intelligence and the head of Mossad as the most consequential failure of their careers.
The 2003 Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure
The 2002–2003 US intelligence-community assessment of Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction programs that supplied the public case for the March 2003 invasion. Three principal failure modes — Curveball human-source reporting, the aluminum-tubes assessment, and the Niger-yellowcake forgery — converged in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and the 5 February 2003 Powell UN Security Council presentation, and were documented as system-wide failures by the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee Report and the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission.
The Mitrokhin Archive
The archive of approximately 25,000 pages of handwritten notes copied by Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin from the operational files of the KGB First Chief Directorate between 1972 and 1984, smuggled out of the Russian Federation following his defection to the British Secret Intelligence Service through Latvia in November 1992, and published in declassified form in two volumes co-authored with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew (1999 and 2005). The archive identified Soviet intelligence agents, operations, and assets across multiple Western jurisdictions and produced a series of subsequent prosecutions, public unmaskings, and parliamentary inquiries.
The Cambridge Five
The five Soviet agents — Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — recruited at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s who became the most consequential foreign penetration of British intelligence in the twentieth century.
Programas domésticos y escándalos 9
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.
MindWar
The 1977–1985 episode in which the US Army Intelligence and Security Command attempted to integrate "consciousness research" into doctrine and training — Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion (1979), Aquino and Vallely's From PSYOP to MindWar paper (1980), and Major General Albert Stubblebine's Trojan Warrior course (1983–84). Distinct from the parallel STARGATE remote-viewing programme; never adopted as Army doctrine.
The Church Committee
The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, established by S. Res. 21 on 27 January 1975. Across approximately fifteen months of investigation the Committee produced the public-record reconstruction of US intelligence-service activity in the post-1947 period, documented across an Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots (November 1975) and a Final Report in six books (April 1976). The investigation produced the foundational architecture of contemporary US intelligence oversight: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and the successive Executive Orders governing US intelligence activities.
The Family Jewels
The 693-page internal Central Intelligence Agency compendium produced in May–June 1973 in response to Director James Schlesinger's directive to CIA personnel to report any activities they believed to lie outside the Agency's statutory authority. The document became the principal internal-disclosure base for the Rockefeller Commission and Senate [Church Committee](/dossiers/church-committee) investigations of 1975–76, and was declassified by CIA on 25 June 2007.
Operation CHAOS
The Central Intelligence Agency's 1967–1974 domestic-surveillance programme, codenamed MHCHAOS and run from the CIA Counter-Intelligence Staff's Special Operations Group under Richard Ober. Originated as a Johnson-administration tasking to determine whether the US anti-war movement was meaningfully influenced by foreign powers; expanded into a large-scale database operation indexing approximately 300,000 Americans and producing intelligence files on approximately 7,200 individuals. Terminated 1974 under Director William Colby; documented in the Rockefeller Commission and [Church Committee](/dossiers/church-committee) reports of 1975–76.
Project HUNTER
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's 1959–1966 mail-opening programme directed against Soviet diplomatic establishments in the United States, conducted principally at the international-mail-routing facility in New York City. The longest-running of the FBI's eight separate mail-opening programmes documented by the [Church Committee](/dossiers/church-committee). Terminated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1966 on legal-risk grounds and documented in Senate Church Committee Book III (April 1976).
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.
HTLINGUAL
The Central Intelligence Agency's 1952–1973 mail-opening programme, conducted principally at the international-mail-routing facility at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport (and its predecessor at Idlewild). Operated initially against mail to and from the Soviet Union and progressively expanded to China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and the communist-bloc envelope. Terminated by Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger in 1973 and documented by the Rockefeller Commission and Senate [Church Committee](/dossiers/church-committee) in 1975–76.
Éxitos documentados 1
Otros 4
The Waco Siege
The 51-day federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas (28 February – 19 April 1993) — initiated by a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempt to execute search and arrest warrants on alleged firearms violations, transitioned to the FBI Hostage Rescue Team after the failed ATF raid, and concluded on 19 April 1993 with the fire that killed approximately seventy-six Branch Davidians including David Koresh and approximately twenty-five children. The institutional event that, alongside the August 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, substantively produced the post-1993 American militia movement and the operational predicate for the 19 April 1995 Oklahoma City federal-building bombing.
Ruby Ridge
The August 1992 standoff at Randy Weaver's cabin in Boundary County, Idaho — initiated by a US Marshals Service attempt to arrest Weaver on a 1991 firearms charge — that produced the deaths of Marshal William Degan, Sammy Weaver (14), and Vicki Weaver (Randy's wife, holding her infant), and that became, alongside the February 1993 Branch Davidian standoff at Waco, the principal proximate institutional event in the militancy-of-the-1990s political-violence sequence that culminated in the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The Unabomber Investigation
The seventeen-year FBI investigation into the mail-bomb campaign of Theodore J. Kaczynski (1978–1995) — sixteen bombings, three killed, twenty-three injured — and the institutionally consequential 1995 decision to publish Kaczynski's 35,000-word manifesto in the *Washington Post* and *The New York Times*, which produced the family-recognition arrest in April 1996.
Project STARGATE
The 1972–1995 sequence of US Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency programmes that funded "remote viewing" research at Stanford Research Institute and ran an operational remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade. Terminated by CIA in 1995 after an external review concluded the operational utility was unclear.
En qué se diferencian los expedientes de las páginas de agencia
Una página de agencia se sitúa en un país y cubre un servicio — su historia, su base estatutaria, su papel y el registro público de sus operaciones. Un expediente cruza esas fronteras. Un expediente toma una operación, un escándalo o una pregunta temática y la sigue a través de cualquier servicio y Estado que esté implicado, con notas a documentos primarios y al registro secundario más defendible.
El ataque de Salisbury es un expediente y no una entrada de agencia porque implica al GRU, al MI5, al SIS, a la Policía Metropolitana, a la OPAQ y a la investigación checa paralela sobre Vrbětice — ninguna página única de agencia puede sostenerlo. Las revelaciones de Snowden son un expediente porque involucran a la NSA, GCHQ, CSE, ASD, GCSB, los servicios aliados que recibieron el producto, el periodismo que procesó el archivo y el largo arco de cambio legal y de políticas tras la divulgación. MKULTRA es un expediente porque la operación fue institucional de un modo que ahora ha sido sustancialmente documentado por el Senado, la Comisión Rockefeller, el Comité Church y las desclasificaciones sucesivas.
La cobertura aquí es editorial: los expedientes se escriben cuando existe un relato coherente del registro público que puede reconstruirse en profundidad. La lista crece a medida que se redactan nuevos expedientes y a medida que desclasificaciones adicionales amplían lo que puede decirse responsablemente sobre casos que siguen parcialmente cerrados.
