How to use this site
A reference on the world's intelligence services and what they have done. The corpus runs to dozens of agencies, themes, and dossiers — this page is the on-ramp.
The site is a working reference, not a news site. Pages are written from declassified records, court findings, congressional inquiries, primary documents, and the most defensible secondary record. They are not commentary. The goal is that a curious reader can build, over time, an accurate picture of how this part of the world actually works — what the services do, how they are constrained, what is on the public record, and what is not.
If you are new to the topic, the paths below are the recommended way in.
1. Take a walk
Each country page with two or more video readouts auto-assembles into a continuous, captioned, auto-advancing playlist. The walk is the use case: pick a country, leave the phone in your pocket, listen.
United States
12 readouts
Sixteen-agency intelligence community overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, built around a foreign/domestic split.
United Kingdom
3 readouts
Three core agencies under ministerial oversight: SIS (foreign), the Security Service (domestic), and GCHQ (signals).
Russia
3 readouts
Three principal successors to the Soviet KGB — the FSB (domestic), the SVR (foreign), and the GRU/GU (military) — operating under direct presidential authority with limited civilian oversight.
2. Read first
Five dossiers picked for span — a documented success, a strategic Cold War case, a domestic-abuse case, a disclosure, a cyber-era operation. Different decades, different shapes. Each links through to a fully footnoted reference piece.
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Bletchley Park and Ultra
1939-08-15
A documented success — British codebreaking against Enigma and Lorenz, openly acknowledged after 1974.
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The Cuban Missile Crisis Intelligence
1962-10-14
A Cold War strategic case — U-2 photography and Penkovsky's reporting during October 1962.
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Project MKUltra
1953-04-13
A domestic-abuse case — the CIA's 1953–1973 human-experimentation programme.
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The Snowden Disclosures
2013-06-05
A disclosure case — the largest-scale leak in the public record, basis for most subsequent law on Section 702.
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Stuxnet — Operation Olympic Games
2010-06
A cyber-era operation — the worm deployed against the Natanz centrifuge cascade.
3. Household acronyms
Most readers have encountered some of these in fiction, in news, or in court reporting. The pages reset the framing back to the public record — what each service does, what it is constrained by, and what it has been documented to have done.
Central Intelligence Agency
US foreign intelligence
Federal Bureau of Investigation
US domestic
National Security Agency
US signals
Secret Intelligence Service
UK foreign — known publicly as MI6
Security Service
UK domestic
Mossad
Israeli foreign intelligence
Main Directorate of the General Staff
Russian military intelligence
4. Browse by theme
The dossier index supports filtering by theme. Each theme page carries a short orientation and the dossiers that belong to it — useful when a particular kind of operation, programme, or scandal is what you are trying to learn about.
5. Vocabulary
If a term is unfamiliar — HUMINT, plausible deniability, finding, asset, station, tradecraft — the Lexicon gives short reference definitions. The dossiers and agency pages assume most of these terms; the Lexicon is where to look when one of them stops the read.
6. Going deeper
- Methodology — how operations are categorised as confirmed, alleged, or disputed; what the public record can and cannot tell us; the corpus's selection bias.
- Full agency index — every service on the site, alphabetical.
- Countries index — the institutional landscape of each state's services.
- All dossiers — the long-form pieces.
- Search — full-text across the corpus.