Operation Cyclone

Significance

Operation Cyclone was the CIA program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen from 1979 to 1992, running through the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. As a covert instrument of Cold War competition, it represented a sustained U.S. effort to impose costs on Soviet forces by sustaining armed resistance inside Afghanistan. Britain's MI6 conducted separate parallel covert actions in support of the same mujahideen forces. The program's duration — spanning more than a decade — made it one of the longest-running covert assistance efforts of the Cold War period.