Cold War espionage
Date Topic Event
1939 Whittaker Chambers meets with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle ; names 18 current and former government employees as spies or Communist sympathizers including Alger Hiss , Donald Hiss , Laurence Duggan , and Lauchlin Currie . Berle notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) of Chambers 's information in March 1940
1941-08-10 The Soviet GRU reestablished contact with Klaus Fuchs , a German emigre scientist , who transferred from the British Tube Alloys nuclear research program to the US-led Manhattan Project in 1943
1942 Nuclear espionage US communist Jacob Golos put Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ( and their associated communist cell ) in direct contact with Soviet intelligence operatives in New York . The Rosenberg cell provided information on newest developments in electrical and radio engineering to the XY Line of the NKGB foreign intelligence
1944 Nuclear espionage Yuri Modin became the KGB controller of the Cambridge Five ring of atomic spies
1945 Starting in November 1945 , Elizabeth Bentley , under the code name 'Greogry ' , started naming almost 150 Union Spies ; among those , at least 35 were in fact federal government employees
1946-12-20 The Venona counter-intelligence program is first able to decode Soviet intelligence messages thereby discovering the Soviet spying activities within the Manhattan Project . The project operated for 37 years and obtained around 3,000 messages , some lead to the discovery of the Cambridge Five and other messages led to the discovery of Soviet spies ( including The Rosenbergs ) operating within a US nuclear facility
1949 Nuclear espionage A Mossad agent assumed , seeing CIA agent James Jesus Angleton dining with Cambridge Five mole Kim Philby , that the former had turned the latter into a triple agent
1950 Klaus Fuchs voluntarily confesses to MI5 that he has been spying for the USSR . Fuchs identifies Harry Gold who identifies David Greenglass which in turn leads to the arrest and trial of the Rosenbergs
August 1952 Communications Interception Operation Vagabond-Able launches floating transmitter USCGC Courier the most powerful radio broadcasting station on a ship . Additional to broadcasting VOA programming to countries behind the Iron Curtain , Courier docked at Rhodes Greece received information from American spies in the Soviet Union and relayed info to the US . Ship was manned by US Coast Guard , USIA , CIA , and funded by US State Department . Template : Cite online CIA memorandum USIA : Possible Intelligence Training Needs : https : //www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-06365a000800010020-2
August 1955 Communications Interception Joint US/UK ( CIA/SIS ) Operation Gold puts a tunnel under the frontier in occupied Berlin to tap into Soviet army communications . Already aware of the plan through George Blake , the Soviets let the operation run rather than compromise their agent
April 1956 Communications Interception The Soviets discover the tunnel being used to tap their communications and to protect their mole George Blake , they stage a crew to accidentally discover the tunnel . However in just the short time it was operational the tap collected about 40,000 hours of Soviet telephone conversations
1959-06 Corona ( satellite ) Under the covername Discoverer the camera-carrying Corona satellite missions start
1959-10-15 Active measures Ukrainian politician Stepan Bandera was assassinated on KGB orders
1960 1960 U-2 incident Pilot Francis Gary Powers ' Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile . The US is forced to publicly admit that they were operating surveillance missions over the USSR
August 1960 Discoverer 14 is the first Corona mission to successfully take reconnaissance pictures from orbit and return them to earth
1961 The Berlin Wall is erected , marking the Soviet desire to stop the flow of goods and information into their territory clear . At this time the importance of the city an intelligence base for the US located within Soviet territory was solidified as well
1962 Oleg Penkovsky provides information to SIS and CIA about Soviet missile capabilities and deployment to Cuba . The Soviets are aware of his activities through their own agent within the NSA
1962-10-26 Cuban Missile Crisis Under the pseudonym of Aleksandr Fomin , the KGB Station Chief in Washington proposed the crisis ' diplomatic solution
1964 Operation Neptune A ruse was used to indicate West Germany 's spies remaining from World War II had been exposed
1974 Oleg Gordievsky , a KGB agent becomes a double agent of MI6 . In 1982 , Gordievsky is given position as KGB 's Resident in London in charge of intelligence gathering in UK
Chronology
Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War (circa 1947-1991) between the Western allies (chief US, UK and NATO) and the Eastern Bloc (The Soviet Union and aligned countries of Warsaw Pact). Because each side was preparing to fight the other, intelligence on the opposing side's intentions, military, and technology was of paramount importance. To gather information, the two relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies. While several organizations such as the CIA and KGB became synonymous with Cold War espionage, many others played key roles in the collection and protection of the section concerning detection of spying, and analysis of a wide host of intelligence disciplines.