Verisoph story dossier
What the secret record revealed when it came to light: the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, WikiLeaks, Snowden, the Panama and Pandora Papers, and the great declassifications.
What the secret record revealed when it came to light: the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, WikiLeaks, Snowden, the Panama and Pandora Papers, and the great declassifications.
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Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had helped compile the classified Vietnam study, began secretly photocopying it after concluding the war was unwinnable and that officials had misled the public. He first tried to get members of Congress to release the material before turning to the press in 1971. His decision grew from a belief that citizens had a right to know how the war was waged.
Journalist Seymour Hersh reported that US soldiers had killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. The account, and later published photographs, shifted American public opinion on the Vietnam War.
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The New York Times began publishing a secret government history of the Vietnam War leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The case tested press freedom against government claims of national security.
A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters led to reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that tied the crime to President Nixon's re-election campaign and White House. The scandal ended with Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
Karen Silkwood, a technician at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, gathered evidence of safety and contamination problems and was herself contaminated. She died in a car crash while driving to meet a reporter, and the documents she was said to be carrying were never found. Her family later won a civil case over the contamination, and questions about the crash remain unresolved.
A US Senate committee led by Frank Church held public hearings and issued reports documenting illegal activities by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, including assassination plots and domestic spying. The findings led to permanent intelligence oversight committees and later reforms.
A Church Committee interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, documented CIA plots against figures including Congo's Patrice Lumumba and Cuba's Fidel Castro. It described a scheme to poison Lumumba, with lethal materials sent to station chief Larry Devlin in Leopoldville, though Lumumba was killed in 1961 by Congolese rivals before the CIA plan was used. The report was the first official confirmation, drawn from classified files and sworn testimony, of US assassination planning.
After most files were destroyed in 1973, surviving records of the CIA's MK-Ultra mind control experiments surfaced through a Freedom of Information request and Senate hearings. The documents detailed drug and behavior experiments often conducted without consent.
Journalists and scholars established the National Security Archive at George Washington University to obtain and publish declassified US government records. Using Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits, it built one of the largest nongovernmental collections of formerly secret documents. Its work has forced the release of files on coups, nuclear policy, and covert operations.
Former technician Mordechai Vanunu gave The Sunday Times detailed accounts and photographs of the Dimona nuclear site, indicating Israel had built an undeclared nuclear arsenal. He was later abducted by Israeli agents and imprisoned for 18 years.
Journalist Duncan Campbell publicly named ECHELON, a global signals intelligence system run by the United States and allied nations. Later reporting and a 2001 European Parliament report detailed its interception of communications worldwide.
Germany enacted the Stasi Records Act, allowing citizens to read the files that the East German secret police had kept on them. Public access began in January 1992 and exposed the scale of surveillance and informing under the GDR.
Congress passed a law requiring the government to gather and release records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Millions of pages were declassified over the following decades, with further releases continuing into 2023.
Former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Britain with copies of secret Soviet intelligence files he had transcribed over years. The Mitrokhin Archive later exposed Soviet agents and operations across the world.
A judge and activists discovered a large cache of Paraguayan police files, later called the Archive of Terror, documenting Operation Condor. The records detailed how South American military governments coordinated in the 1970s and 1980s to track, detain, and kill political opponents across borders. The archive became key evidence in later human rights trials.
The NSA began releasing decrypted Soviet intelligence cables from the 1940s that US codebreakers had secretly read for decades. The Venona material shed new light on Soviet espionage in the United States during the early Cold War.
Former Brown and Williamson executive Jeffrey Wigand told CBS's 60 Minutes that his company had knowingly manipulated nicotine to keep smokers addicted. CBS at first withheld the interview under legal pressure before airing it in February 1996. His account helped states win a landmark settlement with tobacco makers.
The Center for Public Integrity launched the ICIJ as a global network of reporters working across borders on corruption and accountability. It later became the coordinating body behind the largest financial leaks, including the Panama, Paradise, and Pandora Papers. The consortium became an independent organization in 2017.
A US law required the declassification of records on Nazi war criminals, leading an interagency group to release millions of previously secret pages. The files revealed postwar recruitment of former Nazis by Western intelligence agencies.
Under a Clinton administration order, US agencies declassified around twenty-four thousand documents on Chile, covering the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power and the repression that followed. The files detailed US knowledge of, and in some cases support for, actions against Salvador Allende's government. They also shed light on the killings of American citizens after the coup.
Enron vice president Sherron Watkins wrote to chairman Kenneth Lay warning that the company's accounting could collapse in a wave of scandals. Enron filed for bankruptcy months later in one of the largest corporate frauds in US history. Her memo made her a central witness in the investigations that followed.
Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan publicly confessed to running a network that sold nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. The revelation exposed the largest known illicit trade in nuclear know-how.
Former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was identified in Vanity Fair as Deep Throat, the anonymous source who guided Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting. The disclosure ended one of the longest running mysteries in American journalism.
NSA official Thomas Drake argued that a costly agency data program wasted money and endangered privacy, taking unclassified concerns to a reporter after internal complaints went nowhere. The government charged him under the Espionage Act in 2010, but the case collapsed and he pleaded to a minor count. His prosecution is often cited as a warning that pushed later leakers toward the press.
Julian Assange and associates registered and launched WikiLeaks as a website for publishing leaked documents from anonymous sources. It went on to release many of the largest classified disclosures of the following decade.
The CIA released a long secret internal report, compiled in 1973, cataloguing the agency's illegal and questionable activities. The family jewels documented assassination plots, domestic spying, and other abuses.
US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning passed hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. The material fueled the year's major WikiLeaks releases and led to Manning's arrest in May 2010.
WikiLeaks released classified US military video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians and two Reuters staff. The footage drew global attention to the conduct of the Iraq War.
WikiLeaks released about 75,000 classified US military reports on the war in Afghanistan, coordinated with several major newspapers. The documents detailed civilian deaths and previously unreported incidents.
WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports from the Iraq War, the largest leak of its kind at the time. The records documented civilian casualties, detainee abuse, and other incidents.
WikiLeaks and partner newspapers began publishing more than 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables. The release strained relations between the United States and numerous governments.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a large trove of records exposing owners of offshore companies and trusts in tax havens. It was the first of the consortium's major offshore investigations.
NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents exposing bulk collection of phone records and internet data through programs such as PRISM and XKeyscore. The disclosures set off a global debate on surveillance and privacy.
On the coup's sixtieth anniversary, the National Security Archive published declassified CIA documents that acknowledged the agency's role in the 1953 overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, code named TPAJAX. An internal agency history described the operation as an act of US foreign policy carried out under CIA direction. The release confirmed an intervention that Washington had long declined to admit.
Leaked documents revealed secret tax deals that Luxembourg granted to hundreds of multinational companies to sharply reduce their tax bills. The reporting fueled European debate over corporate tax avoidance.
Journalists reported on leaked data from HSBC's Swiss private bank, obtained by former employee Herve Falciani, that revealed accounts used for tax evasion and hidden wealth. The disclosures prompted investigations in several countries.
Hackers leaked internal files from the Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, revealing sales of intrusion software to governments including ones with poor human rights records. The breach exposed the commercial market for state spyware.
An international consortium of journalists published a leak of 11.5 million files from the law firm Mossack Fonseca, exposing offshore holdings of politicians, business leaders, and celebrities. The revelations led to resignations and investigations across many countries.
The US government released a long classified section of the 2002 congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks, known as the 28 pages. The material described contacts between some hijackers and individuals connected to Saudi Arabia, raising questions about possible foreign support. Officials stressed the passages held unverified leads rather than proven findings, and the Saudi government denied any involvement.
WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee days before the party's convention. The disclosure influenced the 2016 US presidential campaign and prompted investigations into the source of the hack.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a leak of records from the Bahamas corporate registry, naming officers and directors of offshore companies. The data added public detail on politicians and business figures who used the jurisdiction. It followed months after the Panama Papers.
WikiLeaks published a large set of documents describing CIA hacking tools used to compromise phones, computers, and other devices. It was one of the largest disclosures of the agency's cyber capabilities.
Reporters with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and partners detailed a scheme, dubbed the Russian Laundromat, that moved billions of dollars out of Russia through shell companies and complicit banks. The system used fake loans and Moldovan court orders to disguise the flows. The investigation drew on leaked banking records.
A journalist consortium published a leak of about 13.4 million files, much of it from the offshore firm Appleby, detailing tax avoidance by corporations and wealthy individuals. The reporting named public figures and multinational companies.
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Reporting and whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed that the firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from millions of Facebook users without consent for political profiling. The scandal led to regulatory scrutiny of Facebook and the firm's collapse.
British police arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after Ecuador withdrew the asylum he had held in its London embassy since 2012. The United States sought his extradition on charges tied to the 2010 leaks.
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The ICIJ and partners reported on more than seven hundred thousand leaked files detailing how Isabel dos Santos, daughter of Angola's former president, built a fortune through deals with state companies. The reporting alleged she moved public money through a web of offshore firms while much of the country stayed poor. Dos Santos denied wrongdoing and called the investigation politically motivated.
Journalists reported on leaked US Treasury suspicious activity reports showing that major banks moved trillions of dollars in suspect funds. The files exposed weaknesses in global anti money laundering controls.
A consortium of news organizations reported that the Israeli firm NSO Group's Pegasus spyware had been used to target journalists, activists, and officials worldwide. The investigation drew on a leaked list of potential surveillance targets.
Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen provided internal research to the Wall Street Journal and regulators, indicating the company knew of harms linked to its platforms. She revealed her identity in October 2021 and testified before Congress.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a leak of nearly 12 million files exposing offshore finances of current and former world leaders and public officials. It was among the largest such collaborations to date.
A whistleblower leaked data on thousands of Credit Suisse accounts to a German newspaper, which shared it with a journalist consortium. The reporting linked accounts to people accused of corruption, crime, and human rights abuses. Credit Suisse rejected the findings and said many of the accounts were old or already closed.