The Cold War
The Cold War pitted the United States and Soviet Union in a decades-long contest fought through proxies, espionage, and secret programs rather than direct war. Its declassified operations, from psychological warfare to undersea wiretaps to human experiments, are among the best-documented conspiracies on record. These files gather the era's covert programs and the disputed events around them.
Reference: Wikipedia
Federal agents ran an undercover operation against protest organisers, climate groups and labour unions in Minnesota, infiltrating meetings in churches and libraries and pulling union financial records
On 13 August 2026 a defence lawyer in a Minnesota federal case filed a motion asking for more of the material investigators had gathered. Attached to it were government documents describing an operation nobody outside it had heard of. Homeland Security Investigations had run a programme called Operation Puppet Master, aimed at what officials described as a network of conspirators assisting violent opportunists and agitators, and a later effort called Project Whipple Shield. According to the records, undercover officers sat in on organising meetings in churches, schools, libraries and parks; agents monitored activist chat groups and used licence plates to work out who had attended; and the government pulled years of financial records on labour unions and campaign groups, asking a Federal Reserve transfer system not to disclose the request for an indefinite period. One slide, headed 'The Conspiracy', mapped 18 organisations including a bicycle repair collective and the largest federation of unions in the country. Most files on this site rate a claim that outran its evidence. This one is the other kind: a conspiracy chart that exists, drawn by a federal agency, and now sitting in a court file.
Read the case file →Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist purge killed an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people, with documented United States complicity
In the early hours of 1 October 1965, a group calling itself the 30 September Movement (G30S) abducted and killed six senior Indonesian army generals in Jakarta. Within days the army, led by Major General Suharto, blamed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and launched a nationwide campaign of extermination. Over roughly the next six months, soldiers and army-organized militias killed an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people across Java, Bali, Sumatra, and beyond, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands more without trial. The purge destroyed what had been the largest communist party outside the socialist bloc and brought Suharto to power for three decades. This file treats the killings and the documented role of the United States as substantiated, drawing on declassified US Embassy cables, academic scholarship, and the 2016 International People's Tribunal. It keeps that documented core separate from the still-disputed question of who actually instigated the 30 September Movement.
Read the case file →Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured alive in Bolivia in 1967 and executed the next day on the orders of the Bolivian army, with a CIA officer present, as shown by declassified U.S. documents
On 8 October 1967, a U.S.-trained Bolivian Ranger battalion cornered a small guerrilla band in the Quebrada del Yuro ravine and captured Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary and comrade of Fidel Castro, wounded but alive. He was held overnight in the one-room schoolhouse of the hamlet of La Higuera. The next afternoon, after an order came by radio from the army high command in La Paz, a Bolivian sergeant shot him dead. Present through the final hours was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban-American CIA operative attached to the Bolivian unit. The Bolivian government first told the world that Guevara had died of battle wounds, a version that quickly frayed. This file separates the documented core, a capture followed by an execution on Bolivian orders with a CIA man on the ground, from the still-argued questions of what Washington wanted, who precisely gave the order, and where the body lay hidden until 1997.
Read the case file →Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted on a Paris street in 1965 and made to disappear in a cross-border state operation, as a French court found when it convicted Morocco's interior minister in absentia
Mehdi Ben Barka was the most prominent figure of the Moroccan left, founder of the National Union of Popular Forces and a leading organizer of the Tricontinental movement of anti-colonial and revolutionary parties. Exiled and sentenced to death in absentia at home, he was living between European cities when, on 29 October 1965, he was stopped outside the Brasserie Lipp on Paris's Boulevard Saint-Germain by two French police officers, driven to a suburban villa, and never seen again. The disappearance set off a scandal that reached the top of the French state. This file separates the documented event, an abduction on French soil carried out with the involvement of French police and intelligence, from the questions that remain unresolved: exactly who ordered his death, how he died, and where his body went. It reports what the French courts found and what de Gaulle acknowledged, and treats the wider allegations, including the roles of King Hassan II, the CIA, and Mossad, as attributed claims rather than proven facts.
Read the case file →The Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the Vietnam War was misrepresented
The naval battle that supposedly launched America into Vietnam turned out to be half real. The first attack happened. The second (the one Congress voted on) almost certainly did not, and the National Security Agency's own declassified history says the signals intelligence used to sell it was misread and then misrepresented.
Read the case file →The Cambridge Five: British establishment insiders secretly spied for the Soviet Union
The Cambridge Five is the rare 'conspiracy' that is entirely real and fully documented. In the 1930s Soviet intelligence recruited a group of idealistic, well-connected young men at Cambridge University (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross) and steered them into the heart of the British establishment: the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6, Bletchley Park, and the wartime atomic project. For roughly twenty years they handed Moscow a torrent of secret material, including diplomatic traffic, intelligence on British and American operations, code-breaking work, and early information on the Anglo-American atomic bomb programme. Maclean and Burgess bolted to Moscow in 1951; Philby followed in 1963; Blunt confessed secretly in 1964 and was exposed to the public by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979; Cairncross was eventually confirmed as the 'fifth man'. This case file sets out that record, anchored in the men's confessions and the MI5 files declassified at the UK National Archives, and marks the genuine questions that historians still argue over.
Read the case file →The United States covertly worked for years to destabilize Salvador Allende's Chile before the 1973 coup
For three years the Nixon administration ran a covert campaign to keep Salvador Allende out of Chile's presidency, and then to make his government fail: funding opposition media and strikes, backing a plot that got Chile's army commander killed, and, in Nixon's own recorded instruction, moving to 'make the economy scream.' All of this is documented in the U.S. government's own files. The harder question is what the United States did on the day of the coup itself, and there the plain answer is narrower than the shorthand.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly influenced the news media during the Cold War
That the CIA covertly recruited journalists and shaped US news coverage during the Cold War sounds like a classic conspiracy theory. It isn't one: a Senate investigation and a major press exposé both confirmed the core relationships were real. What is not confirmed is the popular name attached to them, or the idea of a single, centrally run operation that controlled the American press.
Read the case file →The CIA ran a secret program to overthrow Castro and plotted his assassination
Operation Mongoose, also called the Cuban Project, was a real, government-wide covert program authorized by President Kennedy in November 1961 to sabotage and overthrow Fidel Castro's government after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Alongside it, and separately, the CIA ran assassination plots against Castro (some using organized-crime contacts) later confirmed in detail by the Senate's Church Committee. The program is not a theory; it is documented history. What remains genuinely contested is how far up the chain of command the assassination plotting was known and approved.
Read the case file →The CIA and British intelligence secretly overthrew Iran's elected prime minister in 1953
Not a theory in the usual sense but a covert operation the US government spent sixty years denying, then admitted in its own words. In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized the British-controlled oil industry, and installed the Shah as an absolute monarch in his place.
Read the case file →South America's military dictatorships ran a joint campaign of cross-border assassination and terror
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil ran a secret joint operation, code-named Condor, to hunt down, kidnap, torture and kill each other's political exiles across borders, reaching as far as a car bomb on a Washington, D.C. street. It sounded like the kind of thing only a paranoid exile would claim, until a judge in Paraguay pulled three tons of the regimes' own paperwork out of a police station.
Read the case file →NATO and the CIA ran secret armies across Western Europe during the Cold War
Not a rumor but an admitted state secret: for roughly forty years, NATO and Western European intelligence services ran clandestine 'stay-behind' paramilitary networks, armed and trained to resist a Soviet occupation that never came. Italy's prime minister confirmed it to Parliament in 1990, and the European Parliament condemned it days later. What remains genuinely disputed is a darker, narrower claim layered on top: that these networks were turned against their own citizens.
Read the case file →The US military drew up plans to fake terror attacks and blame Cuba
Long before 'false flag' entered everyday vocabulary, America's own Joint Chiefs of Staff put their names to a plan to stage fake terrorism against American citizens and pin it on Cuba. The proposal is real, signed, and declassified. It was also rejected, and it never happened.
Read the case file →The US secretly brought Nazi scientists to America after WWII
Not a rumor but a documented program: after WWII, US intelligence recruited around 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians (including rocket engineer Wernher von Braun) and in a number of cases rewrote their Nazi Party and SS histories to slip them past America's own immigration bar on 'ardent Nazis'.
Read the case file →The U.S. Navy secretly sprayed bacteria over San Francisco in a Cold War biological-warfare test
For a week in September 1950 the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of live bacteria over San Francisco to see how a real biological attack might spread. The program stayed secret for a quarter-century, surfaced in the press in 1976, and was confirmed under oath in 1977, by which time one of the supposedly harmless test bacteria, Serratia marcescens, had been reclassified as a genuine human pathogen and blamed for a fatal infection.
Read the case file →The Church of Scientology infiltrated the U.S. government to steal and destroy its files
In the early-to-mid 1970s the Church of Scientology ran a coordinated campaign, code-named Operation Snow White, to plant covert operatives inside federal agencies and steal or destroy government files it judged unfavorable to Scientology and its founder, a scheme so extensive that when the FBI finally raided its offices in 1977, the paper trail alone was enough to convict eleven of the Church's most senior officials.
Read the case file →The US Navy, NSA, and CIA secretly wiretapped a Soviet undersea military cable in the Sea of Okhotsk
Not a rumor but a documented Cold War intelligence operation: in the early 1970s, US Navy divers working from a modified submarine placed a covert tap on a Soviet military communications cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk, recording years of unencrypted Soviet naval traffic, until an NSA analyst sold the secret to the KGB and was convicted of espionage for it.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly experimented on people with drugs and mind control
Long dismissed as paranoia, the claim that the CIA ran covert mind-control and drug experiments on often unwitting subjects turned out to be documented fact: a case study in why institutional distrust is not always irrational.
Read the case file →The FBI ran a secret campaign to spy on and sabotage domestic political activists
For fifteen years the FBI ran a secret program, code-named COINTELPRO, to not just watch but actively disrupt civil-rights, anti-war and other domestic political movements, a claim that sounded like paranoia until burglars stole the paperwork and Congress confirmed the rest.
Read the case file →The US government secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the money to Nicaraguan rebels
Not a rumor but a proven, prosecuted scandal: senior Reagan administration officials secretly sold arms to Iran, then under a US embargo, and diverted the proceeds to arm Nicaraguan rebels Congress had explicitly forbidden the government to fund. Exposed in late 1986, it produced a presidential commission, a joint congressional inquiry, and criminal convictions of the operation's key figures.
Read the case file →The Pentagon Papers proved the government systematically lied to the public about Vietnam
A classified Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, secretly commissioned by Robert McNamara and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, showed on the government's own paper trail that Truman through Johnson had misled Congress and the public about the war's scope and its odds of success. The Supreme Court refused to block publication, and in 2011 the study was declassified in full.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly built a ship to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific floor
Not a rumor but a declassified CIA operation: in the early 1970s, the agency secretly built a purpose-designed ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to lift a sunken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine from nearly three miles down in the Pacific, all under the cover story that reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes was mining seabed minerals. Leaked to the press in 1975 and partially declassified by the CIA in 2010, it also produced the legal doctrine now known as the 'Glomar response.'
Read the case file →The U.S. Army secretly planned to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles in tunnels under the Greenland ice
Camp Century was sold to the world in 1960 as a marvel of peacetime science: an under-ice 'city' beneath the Greenland ice sheet, powered by the first mobile nuclear reactor, where U.S. Army engineers studied Arctic construction and glaciologists drilled the first ice core to bedrock. What the public (and even the Danish government that hosted it) was not told is that the base doubled as a feasibility test for Project Iceworm, a top-secret plan to bury up to 600 nuclear missiles in a shifting maze of ice tunnels aimed at the Soviet Union. The scheme was abandoned when the ice itself proved too unstable, and it stayed secret until Danish investigators forced the documents into the open in the 1990s.
Read the case file →The U.S. government spent two decades studying psychic spies
For more than twenty years, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Army really did fund an effort to gather intelligence by clairvoyance, a program eventually code-named Star Gate. That the program existed is beyond dispute; it was declassified in 1995 and its files fill the CIA's reading room. Whether "remote viewing" ever actually worked is a separate question, and the government's own final review answered it in the negative.
Read the case file →In 1949 the U.S. government secretly released a radioactive cloud over its own citizens and hid it for decades: the Hanford 'Green Run'
For nearly forty years, an official secret sat in classified files: one December night in 1949, the U.S. government intentionally released a radioactive cloud over its own farmland and told no one. The Hanford Site, the plutonium factory that fueled the Nagasaki bomb, ran what insiders called the Green Run. Operators dissolved 'green' fuel, irradiated uranium cooled for only about sixteen days instead of the usual months, and let the resulting iodine-131 and xenon escape up the stack, apparently to generate a signature that would help U.S. aircraft detect the Soviet Union's new nuclear program. Weather scattered the plume farther than planned, across a region of dairy farms, and no evacuation or warning was issued. The release only came to light in 1986, through declassified documents pried loose by local journalists and activists. This case file lays out what the record firmly establishes, and where the science of downwind harm remains honestly unresolved.
Read the case file →The US military secretly weaponized the weather over Vietnam
For five years the United States ran a classified cloud-seeding program over Southeast Asia, flying military aircraft into monsoon clouds and dumping silver iodide to make it rain harder and longer on North Vietnamese supply routes. The airmen's own motto was 'make mud, not war.' The Pentagon denied it under oath, then admitted it in closed Senate testimony, and the scandal produced the world's first treaty outlawing environmental warfare.
Read the case file →The US military secretly exposed thousands of its own service members to real chemical and biological warfare agents in Cold War tests, then concealed the program for decades
Between 1962 and 1973 the Department of Defense conducted Project 112, a classified chemical and biological warfare test program run out of the Deseret Test Center in Utah. Its sea-based arm, Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), used Navy ships and Army tugboats to gauge how vulnerable US forces were to chemical and biological attack. Roughly 5,900 service members took part. Many tests used harmless simulants and tracer chemicals, but a number involved real agents, including the biological agents that cause Q fever and tularemia, and trace amounts of nerve agents such as sarin and VX. The Pentagon denied the program's existence for decades until a journalist's investigation aired on CBS in 2000, after which the Department of Defense released detailed fact sheets, testified before Congress, and the VA began contacting participants. This case file separates the record (a real, now-acknowledged program of chem-bio tests involving service members who were often not told what they were exposed to) from the questions that are still genuinely open (above all, whether the exposures caused lasting harm). On the existence and concealment of the tests, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →The 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz was a covert CIA operation, not a spontaneous anti-communist uprising
In June 1954 Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, was forced from power after a small exile army crossed the border from Honduras, unmarked planes bombed Guatemala City, and a clandestine radio network flooded the country with reports of an unstoppable invasion. At the time the United States described the events as an internal Guatemalan anti-communist revolt and denied any role. Decades of declassification told a different story. The operation, code-named PBSuccess, was planned and run by the Central Intelligence Agency, authorized by President Eisenhower in 1953, and built around psychological warfare rather than a real military conquest. This case file separates the record (a coup that unfolded largely as a covert US operation) from the claim it rates (that the CIA orchestrated it), which the agency's own files now confirm. The verdict is substantiated. It also flags what is still argued: the mix of motives behind the operation, and the documented but unconsummated assassination planning that ran alongside it.
Read the case file →The CIA plotted to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and Western powers engineered his 1961 death
Patrice Lumumba was the first elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, in office for barely ten weeks in 1960 before he was dismissed, arrested, and, on 17 January 1961, executed in the breakaway province of Katanga. For decades the charge that Western intelligence services had a hand in his death was treated as anti-colonial rhetoric. Then the documents arrived. In 1975 the U.S. Senate's Church Committee found that the CIA, under authorization traced to the Eisenhower administration, had plotted to assassinate Lumumba, going so far as to ship poison to its Congo station. In 2001 a Belgian parliamentary inquiry found that Belgian officials helped organize his transfer to his enemies and bore moral responsibility for his death. This case file separates the record (a real CIA assassination plot, and heavy Belgian involvement in the killing) from the sweeping claim (that the CIA itself murdered him). The plot is substantiated; the identity of who actually carried out the killing is a separate and carefully attributed question.
Read the case file →The US Army secretly exposed thousands of volunteer soldiers to nerve agents and mind-altering chemicals at Edgewood Arsenal
Between roughly 1955 and 1975, the US Army Chemical Corps conducted classified human research at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, exposing about 7,000 volunteer soldiers to more than 250 chemical substances. The list included nerve agents such as sarin and VX given at low doses, nerve agent antidotes, and a class of incapacitating psychochemicals, most notably BZ and LSD, meant to disorient rather than kill. The stated purpose was defensive: to understand how these agents affected troops and to develop protective gear, antidotes, and detection. The work was secret until congressional hearings in the mid-1970s brought it into public view, after which the program was shut down and later reviews found the volunteers had not been properly informed of the risks. This case file separates the record (a real, government-acknowledged testing program) from the contested edges (how much lasting harm it caused, and the darker readings that cast it as a scheme to build assassins or to kill its subjects). On the core claim that the testing occurred as described and was concealed for years, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →The Lincolnshire Poacher was a British intelligence numbers station, broadcasting coded one-time-pad messages to undercover agents
For more than three decades a strange transmission drifted across the shortwave bands. It opened with a snatch of the English folk tune The Lincolnshire Poacher, then a clipped, English-accented female voice read out group after group of five digits, the last digit of each group pitched higher, before signing off and vanishing. Anyone with a cheap radio could hear it; no one broadcasting it ever explained it. Enthusiasts nicknamed it after the melody, catalogued it as E03, and, using directional antennas, traced its signal to the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri on Cyprus. The widely held reading is that this was a British Secret Intelligence Service numbers station, sending one-time-pad-encrypted instructions to agents in the Middle East and beyond. This case file keeps two things apart: a genuine, long-running government shortwave broadcast of coded number groups, transmitting from a British military site until July 2008; and the specific claim it rates, that MI6 ran it to message spies. The phenomenon is real and its espionage function is well established in general; the exact operator and the meaning of the traffic remain officially unconfirmed.
Read the case file →The "Swedish Rhapsody" shortwave broadcast, with its music-box tune and childlike synthesized voice, was a covert numbers station transmitting coded orders to intelligence agents
For much of the Cold War, anyone tuning across the shortwave bands might stumble onto one of the strangest sounds in radio: a short, tinkling music-box melody, like an ice-cream van in the distance, followed by a flat, childlike voice reciting groups of numbers in German, over and over, to no one who would identify themselves. Monitors catalogued it as G02 and nicknamed it Swedish Rhapsody, after a piece some listeners thought they recognized in the jingle. For years its origin, purpose, and operator were unknown, and the uncanny little voice fed rumors of everything from spy rings to something stranger. This case file keeps two things apart: a genuine, decades-long, precisely repeating shortwave transmission; and the claim it rates, that it was a covert numbers station broadcasting coded orders to intelligence agents. On the evidence, that claim is substantiated: expert consensus and Polish records point to a Cold War intelligence operation, even as the finest official details remain unconfirmed.
Read the case file →German minister-president Uwe Barschel was murdered in a Geneva hotel, and the truth was covered up
On 11 October 1987, nine days after resigning over a dirty-tricks scandal that had wrecked his career, Uwe Barschel, the Christian Democratic minister-president of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, was found dead, fully clothed, in the bathtub of room 317 at the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva. Reporters from the magazine Stern discovered the body. His system held a mixture of sedatives and other drugs. Swiss investigators treated the death as a self-administered overdose, but the crime scene was compromised, the family never accepted suicide, and toxicologists and later DNA work kept the question open for decades. This file separates what is documented, an unexplained death and an unresolved investigation, from the contested claim that Barschel was murdered and silenced, which remains unproven.
Read the case file →Italian statesman Aldo Moro's 1978 kidnapping and murder was carried out by the Red Brigades, but the case has long drawn unproven claims of Operation Gladio, P2, or CIA collusion
On the morning of 16 March 1978, a Red Brigades commando ambushed the car of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democracy party and a former prime minister, on Via Fani in Rome. They killed his five bodyguards in seconds and seized Moro, who was on his way to a session that would have sealed his historic compromise bringing the Communists into the governing majority. For 55 days the Red Brigades held him, issued communiqués, and demanded a prisoner exchange the government refused. On 9 May 1978 his body was found in the boot of a red Renault 4 parked near the headquarters of both governing parties. Italian courts convicted the Red Brigades members who carried out the crime. This file keeps that documented core separate from the long-running conspiracy layer: the theories that Operation Gladio, the P2 lodge, or the CIA had a hand in the operation, which remain unproven.
Read the case file →The Somerton Man was a Cold War spy killed by a secret code and poison
An unidentified man found dead on an Adelaide beach in 1948, with his labels cut out, an untraceable poison, and a scrap reading 'Tamám Shud' sewn into his trousers: a mystery that fed decades of Cold War spy speculation until 2022 DNA work pointed to a Melbourne engineer, without explaining how or why he died.
Read the case file →Project 1794, the US Air Force's secret flying-saucer program, is the real explanation behind Cold War flying-saucer UFO reports
In the early Cold War the US Air Force quietly funded a Canadian firm, Avro Aircraft Limited of Malton, Ontario, to design a flying saucer. Under the code name Project 1794, engineers led by John Frost sketched a disc-shaped, vertical-takeoff craft meant to reach between Mach 3 and Mach 4, climb above 100,000 feet, and intercept Soviet bombers. A low-speed proof-of-concept vehicle, the VZ-9 Avrocar, was actually built and flown. When the National Archives declassified the program's records in 2012, the documents made headlines and revived an old idea: that secret craft like these, not aliens, were what people saw when they reported flying saucers. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, failed saucer-aircraft program, now declassified; and the claim it rates, that the program explains the era's UFO reports. The program's existence is not in question; the UFO-explanation claim is unproven, and its strongest form is undercut by how poorly the aircraft actually flew.
Read the case file →A secret committee called Majestic 12 controls recovered UFOs
The paper trail behind one of ufology's most durable legends: a roll of anonymous film, a purported 1947 Truman order, and the forensic history that led the FBI to stamp the whole file 'BOGUS.'
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