The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was an intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is an American remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) built by General Atomics that was used primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Conceived in the early 1990s for aerial reconnaissance and forward observation roles, the Predator carries cameras and other sensors. It was modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft entered service in 1995, and saw combat in the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the NATO intervention in Bosnia, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Iraq War, Yemen, the 2011 Libyan civil war, the 2014 intervention in Syria, and Somalia.
Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc. Both relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies in this pursuit.
William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. He is best known for serving as the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during World War II. He is regarded as the founding father of the CIA, and a statue of him stands in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
Operation Gold was a joint operation conducted by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1950s to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin using a tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone. This was a much more complex variation of the earlier Operation Silver project in Vienna.
Intelligence assessment, or simply intel, is the development of behavior forecasts or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organisation, based on wide ranges of available overt and covert information (intelligence). Assessments develop in response to leadership declaration requirements to inform decision-making. Assessment may be executed on behalf of a state, military or commercial organisation with ranges of information sources available to each.
The National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) is an American museum of cryptologic history that is affiliated with the National Security Agency (NSA). The first public museum in the U.S. Intelligence Community, NCM is located in the former Colony Seven Motel, just two blocks from the NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. The motel was purchased, creating a buffer zone between the high security main buildings of the NSA and an adjacent highway. The museum opened to the public on December 16, 1993, and now hosts about 50,000 visitors annually from all over the world.
The International Spy Museum is an independent non-profit history museum which documents the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. It holds the largest collection of international espionage artifacts on public display. The museum opened in 2002 in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and relocated to L'Enfant Plaza in 2019.
Thurman F. "Jack" Naylor was an American inventor. Naylor was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Naylor learned to fly early. After joining the USAF, he trained and saw combat in P51 fighter planes over France and Germany. He switched to B24s and flew forays over Eastern Europe and ended up bombing the infamous oil refineries in Ploiesti, Romania. It was a momentous time and out of the windows of his bomber planes he was able to feed his growing passion for photography by shooting aerial pictures using a purloined Voigtländer. While based in Bengasi, Libya, he met Margaret Bourke-White and flew her along on his missions. She insisted on traveling with "Captain Jack" because he always "came back" which was a major feat back and forth over the Mediterranean.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), known informally as the Agency, metonymously as Langley and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action through its Directorate of Operations. The agency is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
The High Standard HDM is an American semi-automatic pistol equipped with an integral silencer. Based on the High Standard H-D pistol, it was adopted by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Because of legal concerns during wartime, full-metal-jacketed .22 LR rounds were developed for this pistol.
Berlin Operations Base was the headquarters of the CIA in West Berlin during the Cold War. Established in 1945 by Allen Dulles, it was located in a villa at 19-21 Föhrenweg in the suburb of Dahlem in the Zehlendorf District, which had suffered minimal bomb damage during World War II. The building housing BOB was designed by Albert Speer and built in 1936–1940 with air raid protection in mind; accordingly, it had three stories underground. By the early 1950s the Berlin Operations Base was shifted from the Föhrenweg villa to the more secure U.S. Armed Forces Headquarters Berlin Command compound located nearby on the Clayallee.
The Cold War Museum is a history museum in Warrenton, Virginia, focused on Cold War history.
Near the city's western end, a historic C&O railroad station, as well as American Civil War battle sites near historic Lee Hall along U.S. Route 60 and several 19th century plantations have all been protected. Many are located along the roads leading to Yorktown and Williamsburg, where many sites of the Historic Triangle are of both American Revolutionary War and Civil War significance. The first modern duel of ironclad warships, the Battle of Hampton Roads, took place not far off Newport News Point in 1862.
Project Azorian was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor in 1974 using the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer. The 1968 sinking of K-129 occurred about 1,560 miles (2,510 km) northwest of Hawaii. Project Azorian was one of the most complex, expensive, and covert intelligence operations of the Cold War at a cost of about $800 million, or $4.9 billion today.
The George Bush Center for Intelligence is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, located in the unincorporated community of Langley in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, near Washington, D.C.
Spying, as well as other intelligence assessment, has existed since ancient history. In the 1980s scholars characterized foreign intelligence as "the missing dimension" of historical scholarship." Since then a largely popular and scholarly literature has emerged. Special attention has been paid to World War II, as well as the Cold War era (1947–1989) that was a favorite for novelists and filmmakers.
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
The MİT Museum of Espionage is a non-public museum owned by the Turkish National İntelligence Organization and located in Ankara, Turkey. Situated within the campus of the MİT, it is dedicated to the history of espionage featuring a collection of spying equipment.
Though not officially a belligerent during the Soviet–Afghan War, the United Kingdom was heavily involved, playing a key covert role in the conflict. Also known as the Second Great Game, the British provided both indirect and direct support for the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union, including secretly arming, funding and supplying various factions. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) primarily supported the Mujahideen group Jamiat-e Islami, commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud who, having received little support from the US and Pakistan, became Britain's key ally in the conflict. Fighting in the Panjshir valley, Massoud and his fighters with British support and intelligence, overcame nine Soviet offensives and held out up to the Soviet withdrawal from the vital valley in 1986. Massoud became the most successful and feared out of any of the Mujahideen commanders.
