United States

The CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947 as the successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Its Directo...

Established by President Truman in 1952, the NSA intercepts foreign communications and protects American government networks. Head...

Founded in 1908 and shaped by J Edgar Hoover, who directed it from 1924 to 1972, the FBI combines criminal investigation with coun...

The DIA was created in 1961 under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to unify intelligence across the military services. It manages...

The NRO, formed in 1961 after the first Corona satellite successes, designs, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites ...

Founded as NIMA in 1996 and renamed in 2003, the NGA analyzes satellite imagery and geospatial data for defense, intelligence, and...

The OSS was created in 1942 under General William Donovan as the first centralized American intelligence service. It ran espionage...

ONI was established in 1882 to catalog foreign warships and coastal defenses, and its reporting proved vital during the Spanish Am...

INR provides all source analysis directly to diplomats and the Secretary of State, focusing on the intersection of intelligence an...

Operation Ajax, jointly run with the British SIS under the codename TPAJAX, toppled Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized the A...

Operation Paperclip, run by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency from 1945, recruited German scientists, engineers, and techni...

Operation Gold dug a tunnel from West Berlin under the sector boundary to intercept Soviet military communications cables, jointly...

Operation Mongoose was launched in late 1961 after the Bay of Pigs failure, comprising thirty three plans ranging from crop sabota...

Operation Ivy Bells began in the early 1970s, when divers delivered from submarines installed recording pods on Soviet communicati...

Project Acoustic Kitty surgically implanted a microphone and antenna in a cat during the 1960s, aiming to eavesdrop on conversatio...

Project Azorian used the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a ship built under a manganese nodule mining cover story, to lift part of the Sov...

Corona launched its first successful recovery in August 1960, when an aircraft snatched a film capsule from the Discoverer 14 miss...

MAGIC was the codename for American decryption of Japanese diplomatic communications, achieved by Army and Navy cryptanalysts agai...

MK-Ultra ran from 1953 into the early 1970s as a program of experiments on behavior modification, including the dosing of unwittin...

VENONA began in 1943 when analysts detected reused key material in Soviet diplomatic cables encrypted with one time pads that had ...

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union and executed in June 1953...

Aldrich Ames spied for the USSR and then Russia from 1985 to 1994, selling the identities of CIA assets in exchange for millions o...

Robert Hanssen spied for Moscow in spells from 1979 and then continuously from 1985 until his arrest in February 2001, selling som...

The ring led by Navy warrant officer John Walker Jr passed cryptographic keys and manuals that let Soviet intelligence read Americ...

The Japanese strike of December 7, 1941 caught American intelligence dispersed and stovepiped. Cryptanalysts were reading diplomat...

A U-2 flight piloted by Major Richard Heyser on October 14, 1962 photographed Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba, and...

The USS Pueblo, a Navy signals intelligence ship, was attacked and captured by North Korean forces on January 23, 1968 in waters w...

The Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church investigated assassination plotting, domestic surveillance, and covert meddlin...

The September 11 attacks revealed warning signs scattered across agencies that never fused into alarm. The FBI Phoenix memo and in...

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate judged that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles and was reviving nuc...

Herbert Yardley ran the Cipher Bureau, known as the Black Chamber, in New York after the First World War with State Department and...

Established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 after the 9/11 Commission criticized poor information ...

Operation PBSuccess targeted President Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform expropriated unused holdings of the United Fruit Company a...

In April 1961 about 1,400 Cuban exiles of Brigade 2506, trained and equipped by the CIA, landed at the Bay of Pigs on the southern...

Begun in 1956 against the Communist Party USA, the FBI Counterintelligence Program expanded under J Edgar Hoover to target civil r...

On 1 May 1960 a Soviet surface to air missile brought down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flown by Francis Gary Powers near Sve...

In 1985 and 1986 officials of the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran, then under an arms embargo, hoping to free...