APPLE: Agent team seen in 1952 by CIA/OPC as best bet to successfully continue BGFIEND Project aimed to harass/overthrow Albanian communist regime. Team was arrested, communists controlled radio ops for 16 months, luring more agents into Albania in 1953, and trying and executing original agents in 1954 to suddenly end BGFIEND.

ARTICHOKE: Anti-interrogation project. Precursor to MKULTRA.

AZORIAN: Project to raise the Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean.

BGGYPSY: Communist.

BIRCH

BLACKSHIELD: A-12 aircraft reconnaissance missions off Okinawa.

BLUEBIRD: mind control program

BOND: Puerto Barrios, Guatemala.

CATIDE: Bundesnachrichtendienst

CHARITY: Joint CIA/OSO-Italian Naval Intelligence information gathering operation against Albania (1948–1951).

CHERRY: Covert assassination / destabilization operation during Vietnam war, targeting Prince (later King) Norodom Sihanouk and the government of Cambodia. Disbanded.

DTFROGS: El Salvador

ESCOBILLA: Guatemalan national.

ESMERALDITE: Labor informant affiliated with AFL-sponsored labor movement.

ESQUIRE: James Bamford, author of “The Puzzle Palace”.

ESSENCE: Guatemalan anti-communist leader.

FDTRODPINT : Afghan tribal agents, formerly known as GESENIOR, reactivated in the 1990s by the CIA to hunt Mir Aimal Kasi and later Osama bin Laden.

FIR

FUBELT: operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile

FJGROUND: Grafenwöhr, West Germany paramilitary training ground.

FJHOPEFUL: Military base.

FPBERM: Yugoslavia

GESENIOR: Afghan tribal agents working with the CIA during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Later called FDTRODPINT.

GOLD: covert American and British (Operation Stopwatch) tunnel under the Berlin Wall to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin. Soviet authorities were informed about Operation Gold from the very beginning by their mole George Blake and “discovered” the tunnel in 1956.

GPFLOOR: Lee Harvey Oswald

GPIDEAL: John F. Kennedy, US president.

GRALLSPICE: Pyotr Popov, CIA Soviet agent

GUSTO: Project to design a follow-on to the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Succeeded RAINBOW. Succeeded by OXCART.

HBFAIRY: France

HTCURIO: American or U.S.

IAFEATURE: Operation to support the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) during the Angolan civil war.

IDIOM: Initial work by Convair on a follow-on to the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Later moved into GUSTO.

Project JBEDICT: Tripartite Stay-Behind project.

JENNIFER: Document control system for Project AZORIAN.

KEMPSTER: Project to reduce the radar cross section (RCS) of the inlets of the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft.

KMHYMNAL: Maine-built motor sailer JUANITA purchased by CIA to use as floating, clandestine, propaganda broadcast facility in Mediterranean/Adriatic (1950–53).

LEMON

LNWILT: US Counterintelligence Corps (CIC)

LPMEDLEY: Surveillance of telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States.

MAGPIE: US Army Labor Service Organization

MATADOR: Project to recover section of Soviet submarine K-129 dropped during Project AZORIAN. Cancelled after Soviet protest.

MIDNIGHT CLIMAX: Prostitutes lured young men to safehouses where they were surreptitiously dosed with LSD and observed through a two-way mirror

MKULTRA: mind control experiments, among other things

MOCKINGBIRD: Recruitment of American journalists for CIA work.

MONGOOSE: “Primarily a relentless and escalating campaign of sabotage and small Cuban exile raids that would somehow cause the overthrow of Castro,” which “also included plans for an invasion of Cuba in the fall of 1962”.

NORTHWOODS: plan for U.S. government to perform a series of violent terrorist acts in U.S. cities — bombings, hijackings, riots, sabotage — which would be blamed on Cuba to build support for war.

OAK: Operation to assassinate suspected South Vietnamese collaborators during Vietnam war.

PANCHO: Carlos Castillo Armas, President of Guatemala, also RUFUS.

PAPERCLIP: US recruiting of German scientists after World War II.

PBFORTUNE: Attempt to overthrow democratically elected government of Guatemala. Precursor to PBSUCCESS

PBHISTORY: a failed effort to justify the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala

PBSUCCESS: 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, which installed the dictator Castillo Armas and led to four decades of brutal civil war.

PHOENIX: Vietnam covert intelligence/assassination operation.

PINE

RAINBOW: Project to reduce the radar cross section (RCS) of the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Succeeded by GUSTO.

QKWAVER: Egypt

RUFUS: Carlos Castillo Armas, President of Guatemala, also PANCHO.

RYBAT: Secret

SARANAC: Training site in Nicaragua.

SCRANTON: Training base for radio operators near Nicaragua.

SGCIDER: Germany

SGUAT: CIA Station in Guatemala

SHERWOOD: CIA radio broadcast program in Nicaragua begun on May 1, 1954.

SKILLET: Whiting Willauer, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

SKIMMER: The “Group” CIA cover organization supporting Castillo Armas.

SLINC: Telegram indicator for PBSUCCESS Headquarters in Florida.

STANDEL: Jacobo Arbenz, President of Guatemala.

STARGATE: Investigation of psychic phenomena, especially “remote viewing”

STBAILEY: political action and propaganda part of STBARNUM

STBARNUM: CIA Tibetan program (covert action in Tibet, 1950s onwards)

STCIRCUS: aerial part of STBARNUM

STSPIN: Three P-3A Orion aircraft operated from Taiwan in 1966.

SYNCARP: The “Junta,” Castillo Armas’ political organization headed by Cordova Cerna.

THERMOS: Unclassified codeword used in lieu of RAINBOW

THROWOFF/2: Albanian ethnic agent/radio operator employed by Italian Navy Intelligence/CIA in several early Cold War covert operations against Albania. Was captured, operated radio under communist control to lure CIA agents to capture/death, tried in 1954, death sentence commuted, freed after 25 years. CIA paid his son $40,000 in 1996.

OPERATION TILT: The CIA’s name for “an operation put together by John Martino, who was fronting for his boss Santo Trafficante and his roommate Johnny Roselli”. OPERATION TILT used “some of the same people working on the CIA-Mafia plots in the spring of 1963 … involved sending a Cuban exile team into Cuba to retrieve Soviet technicians supposedly ready to defect and reveal the existence of Soviet missiles still on the island”.

TROPIC: Air operations flown over North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union by CAT pilots during the 1950s.

VALUABLE: British MI-run Albanian operations 1949 to 1953.

WASHTUB: Operation to plant Soviet arms in Nicaragua.

WBFISHY: British Foreign Office

WSBURNT: Guatemala

WSHOOFS: Honduras

ZAPATA: Bay of Pigs Invasion 1961.

References