Farewell Dossier - Definition and Overview

The Farewell Dossier was a collection of documents containing intelligence gathered by a Soviet defector named Colonel Vetrov, code-named Farewell, in the Cold War. An engineer, he was assigned to evaluate information on US hardware and software, which had been gathered by US-based spies ("Line X") for Directorate T. He ultimately divulged information on many members of Line X.

This information led to a counter-intelligence operation of CIA that amounted to modifying valuable hardware designs to include subtle faults which would later result in complete failure of the system, and slipping Trojan horses into software. These were planted to be stolen by the spies in Line X. It is claimed that this eventually acted as sabotage of the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, and the subsequent explosion of it, which has been compared to a 3-kiloton bomb.

The details of the operation were declassified in 1996 and are publicly available from the CIA (see external link).

External link

The Farewell Dossier (http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm)