RANCH-HAND: The secret history of Vietnam was also the chemical war. The spraying of a deadly poison called Dioxin. Its aim was to destroy the forests where the Viet-Cong were. And it was confined to South Vietnam, which America had come to save. The spraying was called Operation Hades and was hardly reported at the time. And when it was, it was changed to the more friendly Operation Ranch-Hand ... Dioxin is a thousand times more powerful than Thalidomide. John Pilger, Vietnam, The Last Battle, ITV 1995
REACTIVATE: Hundreds of thousands of unsolved rape and sexual assault cases are lying dormant in police archives across the UK. One major crime unit has launched a pioneering and investigative project. They are reviewing more than 5,400 unsolved sexual offences from the last 50 years …
Two sexual assaults from 2002 … by the same man … The offender in Operation Reactivate is not on the National DNA database, but it is still possible to search the database for his close relatives. The team has narrowed down the list to the 21 most likely family members. Cold Case Investigators: Solving Britain’s Sex Crimes I, victim, BBC 2024
RED LIGHT: I saw the names of projects. I saw a project that was to fly recovered alien craft that had been recovered intact and undamaged, and some of them were recovered intact and undamaged, and how that happened I have no idea. It was called Project Redlight, and was first conducted from the Tonopah Test Range in the Nevada Test Site and then was moved to a specially built area, ordered built by President Eisenhower, called Area-51, code-named Dreamland ... if you write letters to the government, they will tell you it doesn’t exist. However, if you go out there at several places and see it, fly outside the boundaries and look down and see it, you know it’s there, but according to the government it doesn’t exist. Bill Cooper, lecture ‘A Seminar on Majic 12’
The project to test-fly these craft was ongoing until sometime in 1962 when a craft blew up not far from the test-site, in the air, and the explosion was seen over a three-state area. The pilots were killed. They [the government] had no idea what had happened or why the craft blew up, but they put Project Redlight on hold until a later date when the aliens supplied us with three craft, and personnel to help us learn how to fly them craft. That project is ongoing [now] and we now have not only alien craft that we are flying, we have craft we have built, using the captured technology, and some of the UFOs that people report seeing in the United States, and maybe even elsewhere, are flown by United States personnel. ibid.
Redlight is the project to test-fly recovered alien craft. It is conducted at Area 51 (Dreamland) in Nevada. It was aided when the aliens gave us craft and helped us fly them. The initial project was somewhat successful in that we flew a recovered craft but it blew up in the air and the pilots were killed. The project was suspended at that time until the aliens agreed to help us. Bill Cooper, Operation Majority, material released 31st May 1996
RELENTLESS: On March 6th 2008 Viktor Bout, a former Soviet military intelligence officer and billionaire protected by the Russian state, touched down in Bangkok. He was there to shake hands on a substantial arms deal, yet Viktor Bout’s arrival in Thailand marked the closing stages of Operation Relentless. This is the story of one of the most audacious sting operations ever conducted in the War on Terror. How a team of undercover operatives pitted their wits against a notorious criminal known as the Merchant of Death. Damian Lewis: Spy Wars s1e7: Merchant of Death, History 2019
RESTORE HOPE: 1992: President George Bush orders American troops into Somalia. This failed east-African state is being torn apart by warlords. But Operation Restore Hope is to go badly wrong. 11 months later in October 1993 two US army helicopters are shot down over Mogadishu … The United States are still operating in Somalia. Only this time it’s in the shadows. Secret Wars Uncovered s1e3: Somalia, Sky History 2020
ROLLING THUNDER: On March 2nd 1965 the United States began a systematic bombardment of targets in North Vietnam codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder. Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War III, PBS 2017
RYAN: Operation RyaN is a runing tally of all possible signs that the West is getting ready for nuclear attack. Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game I, BBC 2024
SAN LOREZO: A miracle beyond imagining: to rescue intact thirty-three human beings who were trapped underground longer than anyone in the history of mining. Against all odds Operation San Lorenzo becomes a symbol of unity, endurance, and faith, and changed Chile and the miners for ever. Chilean Miners: Buried Alive, 2011
SEAGULL: Two hundred law enforcement officers arrested the heads of 36 polygamous households and nine women on July 24, 1953 in the town of Short Creek (currently called Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona) on the Utah/Arizona border. Instead of making direct allegations of polygamy, they used extensive charges of conspiracy to violate laws from statutory rape to misappropriation of school funds.
This raid was the climax of Operation Seagull, planned for 26 months, and included investigations of a host of Mormon polygamy splinter groups in both states. Cheryl Vaught, Plural Bride to Be
SHAMPOO: Southall: Holy Smokes v Tooti Nungs: Operation Shampoo was about to lift the lid off of organised crime in Southall. Gangs of Britain with Gary and Martin Kemp s1e5: London E&W, 2014
Operation Shampoo: it would unearth one of the largest heroin-smuggling operations ever discovered in Britain. ibid.
SHAMROCK: Operation Shamrock was a program of the National Security Agency to collect, to obtain access to, telegrams that were leaving the United States. L Britt Snider, Church Committee Investigator 1975-6
SIGMA: The project which first established communications with the aliens and is still responsible for communications. Bill Cooper, Operation Majority, material released 31st May 1996
SIGN: In order to contain the popular excitement the government created the so-called Project Sign, which was officially in charge of collecting and explaining the hundreds of [UFO] sightings that were being reported from all over the country. PSTV.tv – UFOs & The Military Elite
Project [Sign] itself was renamed Grudge. ibid.
SILVER BUG: It was a circular aircraft about thirty-five feet in diameter … [and] had a crew of one pilot and was capable of vertical take-off and about two thousand miles an hour. Michael Schratt, military historian
SNOWBIRD: Established as a cover for project Redlight. Several flying-saucer-type craft were built using conventional technology. They were unveiled to the press and flown in front of the press. The purpose was to explain accidental sightings or disclosure of Redlight as having been Snowbird craft. Bill Cooper, Operation Majority, material released 31st May 1996
SNOW WHITE: Very early one morning in July 1977 the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled Operation Freakout. It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or ‘truth serum’, and question her under the anaesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled Operation Freakout. The goal of the operation was to get Cooper ‘incarcerated in a mental institution or jail’. Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, 2015