The Soviet Union and the KGB
The Soviet Union and its security service, the KGB, ran espionage, assassination, and disinformation across the Cold War and left a set of enduring mysteries behind the Iron Curtain. Successor Russian services carry some of these stories into the present. These files involve the USSR, the KGB, or their modern heirs as central actors.
Reference: Wikipedia, Wikipedia
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 with a ricin pellet fired from a modified umbrella, on the orders of the Bulgarian secret service with KGB help
On 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a 49-year-old Bulgarian writer and broadcaster who had defected in 1969 and gone on to ridicule the Sofia regime on the airwaves of the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe, and Deutsche Welle, was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. He turned to see a man picking up a dropped umbrella, who murmured an apology and left by taxi. Markov fell ill with a high fever and died four days later. A postmortem recovered a pinhead-sized platinum-iridium pellet drilled with two tiny cavities that had held ricin, a poison for which there is no antidote. A coroner ruled that he had been unlawfully killed. This case file separates the documented record (a poisoning ruled an unlawful killing) from the rated claim (that the Bulgarian secret service, aided by the KGB, was responsible), which is the accepted historical account and is rated substantiated, with the genuine loose ends noted.
Read the case file →A foreign adversary attacked US personnel with a secret energy weapon and the government is hiding it
Beginning in late 2016, US diplomats and intelligence officers in Havana reported a frightening set of symptoms: a sudden sensation of pressure or piercing sound, followed by headaches, dizziness, ringing ears, and lasting cognitive problems. More than 1,000 of these 'anomalous health incidents' have since been reported worldwide. This case file separates two things that are often merged. The symptoms are real, sometimes disabling, and deserve to be taken seriously. The specific conspiracy claim, that a foreign adversary struck personnel with a secret microwave or directed-energy weapon and that the US government is concealing the true cause, is the claim rated here, and on the current record it is unproven: the March 2023 Intelligence Community assessment found a foreign adversary 'very unlikely', while a 2020 National Academies report and a number of unexplained cases keep the medical question genuinely open.
Read the case file →The 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts were a covert state sabotage operation whose real perpetrator is being concealed
In the early hours of 26 September 2022, underwater explosions tore open the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismographs recorded the blasts, gas boiled to the surface for days, and investigators from three countries found residue of explosives. That it was deliberate sabotage is established. Who ordered it is not. The vacuum filled quickly with rival state-actor theories: a pro-Ukrainian operation, a Russian false flag, a covert US strike. This case file keeps the settled fact (sabotage) apart from the contested claim (attribution plus an alleged cover-up), and weighs what each official investigation actually found. On the culprit, the record does not yet support a verdict beyond unproven.
Read the case file →UVB-76, 'The Buzzer,' is a secret Russian military 'doomsday' channel
A shortwave station on 4625 kHz has broadcast a monotonous, roughly-once-every-few-seconds buzz for more than forty years, occasionally breaking off for a short coded message in Russian. No state has ever admitted running it. It is widely presumed to be a Russian military command channel; just as widely, and far less securely, rumored to be a nuclear doomsday system.
Read the case file →The Dyatlov Pass hikers were killed in a military or paranormal cover-up
Nine experienced hikers died in the Ural Mountains in February 1959, their tent slashed open from inside and their bodies scattered with injuries the original inquest called the result of an 'unknown compelling force.' Six decades of secrecy and strangeness later, a 2021 avalanche study offers the most complete natural explanation yet, without quite closing the file.
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