FBI / Power & scandal · History
The FBI’s mole kept searching for himself. The warning went unread.
Robert Hanssen’s case exposed failures in file controls, background checks and computer auditing that the bureau’s own watchdog documented in detail.
SPY REGISTER
United States
CIA / Cyber & technology · History
France’s KGB mole handed Washington Moscow’s technology shopping list
The Farewell source exposed a collection network—and gave the Americans a route into its requirements.
The Codebreaker Who Turned Rum-Runners’ Radio Chatter Into 650 Prosecutions
Elizebeth Friedman read the smugglers’ secrets, trained their pursuers and later helped expose Nazi agents across South America.
The CIA could buy the guns. Pakistan controlled how fast they reached Afghanistan.
Declassified 1980 memoranda reveal the aircraft, intermediaries and bargaining behind an expanding covert arms pipeline.
Member article
CIA / Power & scandal · History
The CIA Drugged Americans. Then It Destroyed the Files.
MKULTRA’s surviving paperwork exposes a vast research network, unwitting subjects and a chemist worried about what his testimony might cost him.
AMAN / Unit 8200 / Power & scandal · History
Kissinger’s Warning About Israel’s False-Flag Bombers
Twenty-one years after the Egyptian bomb plot, America’s secretary of state brought it up in the Oval Office as a reason to distrust a new arrangement.
CIA / Spy games · History
The CIA’s sunken-submarine gamble—and the burglary that exposed it
Project AZORIAN put a giant claw on the Pacific seabed. Mechanical failure and a stolen document left the CIA’s recovery mission unfinished.
CIA / Cyber & technology · History
The CIA Built a Robot Dragonfly. A Breeze Could Blow Its Cover.
A miniature engine made its wings beat; a laser was meant to guide it. Crosswinds kept the Insectothopter out of the field.
North Korea Seized an American Spy Ship With Its Secrets Still Aboard
The Pueblo’s crew tried to destroy the cryptographic equipment. The ship’s design made that desperate job harder.
CIA / Cyber & technology · History
The White House Retired the CIA’s 2,200-MPH Spy Plane After One Campaign
OXCART delivered nearly a mile of film on its first operational flight. Satellites and the Air Force’s Blackbird narrowed its future.
Mossad Hunted a Missing Boy Across Three Continents
A child hidden under false identities became a mission for the spy chief who had captured Eichmann.
CIA / Spy games · History
The CIA Raided a Soviet Ice Station and Hooked Its Men Out of the Arctic
Operation COLDFEET recovered 150 pounds of documents, film and equipment. Getting the collectors home required a balloon, a line and a passing B-17.
NSA / Spy games · History
The Pentagon’s Plan to Frame Cuba for Terror in America
The Joint Chiefs approved proposals for manufactured attacks, a wrecked American ship and a fake airliner incident to build support for an invasion.
Janet Chisholm kept Penkovsky’s Moscow film pipeline moving
The Soviet colonel’s intelligence depended on an inside contact who collected his photographs, replenished supplies and heard his fears.
CIA / Cyber & technology · History
America’s Spy Satellite Dropped Its Secrets Into a Waiting Aircraft
CORONA photographed the Soviet Union from orbit. Reading the film required an extraordinary catch over the Pacific.
MI5 Had to Make an Atom Spy Confess to Protect Its Codebreaking Secret
Klaus Fuchs helped build the bomb and passed its secrets to Moscow. Catching him required turning intelligence into a prosecution.
Opinion · The Editorial
CIA / Spy games · History
United Fruit Lost Its Land. Guatemala Lost Its President.
The banana company’s property dispute became entangled with Washington’s Cold War crusade. The CIA’s own record shows how far the intervention went.
Member article
The CIA’s Instructions for Overthrowing Iran’s Prime Minister
A surviving internal account sets out the target, the replacement and the political machinery behind Mosaddeq’s fall.
FBI / Spy games · History
A Paperboy Dropped a Nickel. Moscow’s Secret Fell Out.
A five-cent coin split open on a Brooklyn floor in 1953. The coded message inside defeated the FBI for four years.
Moscow Gave America Its Own Seal—with a Spy Inside
Soviet schoolchildren delivered the gift. An American ambassador hung it in his office. The listening device stayed hidden until 1952.
CIA / Spy life · History
Virginia Hall escaped the Gestapo’s hunt—and went back
Rejected by the Foreign Service after losing a leg, Hall built resistance networks in France and returned for an OSS mission before D-Day.
NSA / Cyber & technology · History
Churchill’s Secret Telephone Ran on Records That Operators Destroyed
SIGSALY turned encrypted speech into a vast operation of turntables, couriers and technicians.
The reused code pages that opened Moscow’s secrets
VENONA grew from a small Army project into a decades-long intelligence partnership. Its surviving messages also show the limits of reading an enemy’s traffic.
NSA / Spy games · History
A Fake Water Shortage Helped Nimitz Set Japan’s Midway Trap
American codebreakers planted a lie where Japanese intelligence could find it.