22 fascinating posts as introduction to this blog. There are many more posts to discover when you use the Home link or the Search Index.
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Mysterious Cold War Signals. All kinds of radio signals, voice, Morse, data, radar or telemetry filled the aether during the Cold War. Despite all efforts by Electronic Intelligence and espionage, some mysterious signals remained unidentified for decades. There was much speculation, sometimes feeding the Cold War paranoia with eery assumptions. Learn more about some of the most notorious signals of the Cold War [...] |
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Martha Peterson and TRIGON. Stationed in Moscow as the first ever female CIA operations officer, Martha Peterson was responsible for the exchange of communications and spy items with Soviet spy Aleksandr Ogorodnik, codenamed TRIGON. In 1977, after eighteen months of successful operations, she was grabbed by three KGB men and driven straight to the dreaded Lubyanka prison in KGB headquarters [...] |
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Castle Feuerstein Laboratorium sounds like a sequel to the Castle Wolfenstein game? Not at all. Burg Feuerstein was an important target of TICOM, the secret Allied operation to capture German scientists and seize SIGINT stations, crypto and communications equipment, before Germany surrendered. Feuerstein was build by Dr Vierling, a physicist, electronics engineer and professor electroacoustics and high-frequency technology [...] |
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1983 - The Brink Of Apocalypse is one of the most frightening episodes of the Cold War and probably the closest we ever got to an all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. And it all happened in total secrecy. In 1983, NATO started command post exercise ABLE ARCHER, simulating a conflict that culminated in DEFCOM 1 and nuclear war. The Soviets however were convinced that any attack by NATO would start under disguise of an exercise [...] |
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The Military Liaison Mission was established after the Second World War to accredit military liaison missions near the headquarters of the occupation zones in Germany. Initially implemented for economical monitoring and a communications channel between the different allied powers in occupied Germany, the liaison's mission gradually changed into a military intelligence mission when tension rose between the East and West [...] |
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OXCART and its ELINT Research was CIA's top secret program to produce the Lockheed A-12 stealthy high-speed high-altitude spy plane, developed by the legendary Skunk Works. PALLADIUM, another project, measured the performance of Soviet radar and determined the specifications for the OXCART stealth program. Although the A-12 never achieved full stealth, it could outfly any surface-to-air missile and was even faster than its successor USAF SR-71 Blackbird [...] |
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Dead End: The Road to Afghanistan is the English translation of ВИРУС A (Virus A), published by the National Security Archive. This thrilling account of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan tries to unravel the chain of events and why the Soviets became engaged in a battle they were destined to lose. In this post we explain the internal conflicts and political instability in Afghanistan that lead to the Kremlin's decision to intervene [...] |
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Radio Moscow and the Cold War. The iconic shortwave broadcasting station Radio Moscow World Service was one of many stations with a mission to inform people or influence their political views. Discover its history and listen to many fascinating recordings that capture historical moments in the Cold War era, preserved in the WNYC's New York Municipal Archives and the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive [...] |
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USS Pueblo Incident was the capture of a U.S. Navy AGER-2 ship by North Korea. Officially a technical research ship for oceanographic survey, the vessel was stuffed with SIGINT and ELINT equipment. Its mission was a Navy/NSA spy program to eavesdrop on North Korean and Soviet communications. The USS Pueblo incident was one of the most catastrophic events to have damaged NSA's codebreaking efforts [...] |
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The Cold War Vogelsang Twins are two military bases that became part of Cold War history. They were both located in Germany but on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain that devided Europe in East and West. Although both places are named Vogelsang, these military twins were quite different, as twins often are, and they have a fascinating military history [...] |
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Crypto AG Fallout. In 2020 it was revealed that CIA and the West-German BND already in 1970 joint-purchased and took full control over Crypto AG, the renowned crypto equipment manufacturer. This enabled the CIA, in cooperation with NSA, to develop unnoticeable weakened crypto equipment, sell these worldwide and eavesdrop for decades on the compromised communications of both enemies and friends [...] |
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Igor Gouzenko - The Man Who Revealed the Cold War was a GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa. He decided in August 1945 to defect and seek asylum. The documents he took along from his GRU cipher office proved to be of exceptional intelligence value and revealed a large Soviet spy operation in Canada, Britain and the United States. The one single case that truly marked the beginning of the Cold War [...] |
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Peace Ambassador in the Cold War is the story of Samantha Smith, a ten year old American girl who wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982. She was worried about the tense relations between the U.S and the Soviet Union and asked him whether he would start a nuclear war or not. Andropov answered and invited her to visit Russia. She became a symbol of hope and friendship during the Cold War [...] |
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BAPCO 's Use of One Time Pads During WWII is a rare documented early example of a commercial firm using the unbreakable one-time pad. In 1943, a censorship was imposed on all communications of the BAPCO oil refinery in Bahrein, to prevent disclosure of information that might be useful to the Axis forces. BAPCO asked permission to encrypted their cables between the local branch and their New York office with one-time pads, in order to continue their operations for the war effort [...] |
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The GUNMAN Project was a secret NSA operation that started when U.S intelligence was notified by a friendly nation on the discovery of a very sophisticated bug. NSA had to transport all computers, printers, crypto equipment and other electronics in total secrecy out of the Moscow Embassy to NSA in Fort Meade to examine every devices. It turned out to be a most spectacular case of electronic espionage by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War [...] |
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Camp Century - Greenland Going Nuclear The U.S. Army started in 1960 the construction of Camp Century on a remote icy plain in Greenland, between the U.S. and Russia. They build an arctic research complex for construction experiments and small nuclear power plants. A least, that was the official version. Project Iceworm would prepare an under-ice network of nuclear missile launch sites [...] |
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Deep Undercover by Jack Barsky is the incredible story of Albrecht Dittrich, a talented student from East Germany who was recruited by the KGB and trained to become an illegal, a KGB spy operating under the false identity of Jack Barsky in the United States. The book is a real page-turner that explains how this spy became the successful American Jack Barsky, why he ended his spying career, how he was finally catched and his surprising redemption [...] |
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Operation Ivy Bells was a most spectacular Cold War U.S. SIGINT success and top secret joint operation between the US Navy, CIA and NSA. Ivy Bells enabled U.S. intelligence to eavesdrop on high level communications of the Soviet Pacific Fleet by tapping the undersea cable that connected the Soviet submarine base in Kamchatsky with Vladivostok Fleet headquarters [...] |
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Windscale's Fatal Race for the Bomb is the story of Britain's first ever nuclear reactor, build to produce fission material for the hydrogen bomb. In 1957, a fire in the reactor graphite core burned for three days, causing a radioactive contamination that spread across the UK and Europe, resulting in the worst ever nuclear incident in Western Europe [...] |
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Operation Vula's Secure Communications was the brainchild of Tim Jenkin, who had no background whatsoever in intelligence, espionage tradecraft or secure communications. He used his creativity to set up an ingenious international secure network in South Africa to support Operation Vula, the underground ANC leadership and their fight against the apartheid regime, changing South Africa's history [...] |
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3 Seconds From World War 3 was a 1983 event that showed how quickly the Cold War could turn hot. Lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov arrived at his night shift in a Strategic Rocket Forces bunker. When the computers reported a missile launch from a U.S. base, the protocol required Petrov to report the attack to higher command to enable a Soviet counter-attack. Petrov however could not believe the U.S. would start World War 3 and reported the warning as false alarm. Was he risking the lives of millions of Soviets? [...] |
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US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR is a collection of declassified interviews with former Soviet officials. They reveal that US Strategic Intelligence exaggerated the aggressiveness of the Soviets during the Cold War. The interviews confirm that the USSR never had the intend to launch a first strike, but did consider a preemptive attack in case of a real threat. With a US first strike scenario in mind, they believed their nuclear overweight would deter the US of executing a first strike [...] |
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Podcast Nuggets is a series of selected podcasts from experienced podcasters across the Internet, covering signals intelligence, technology, intelligence agencies, spy stories, and military history, from the Cold War and beyond. Many hours of listening pleasure with fascinating stories [...] |
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