CIA Bosses Ran Fake 'Star Wars' Fan Site to Communicate With Spies Around the World
CIA bosses ran a fake Star Wars fan site to communicate with spies in other countries.
May 27 2025, Published 6:30 p.m. ET
CIA bosses ran a fake Star Wars fan site to communicate with spies around the world.
RadarOnline.com can reveal how a security researcher made the bombshell discovery and "found sites the spy agency built to communicate with informants."
How The Discovery Was Made
One of the websites was a fan site for 'Star Wars.'
Ciro Santilli, the security researcher, found the websites the CIA built in the early 2000s, one being StarWarsWeb.net, 404 Media reported.
The fan site, which was shut down over a decade ago and currently redirects to the CIA's homepage, included a stock image of a young boy dressed as a Jedi, pictures of R2D2 and C-3P0, and Star Wars video games and Lego set ads.
According to the report, the fan page was part of CIA sites that were discovered by Iranian authorities before a handful of deaths of CIA sources in China back in the early 2010s.
According to the report, the discovery was made after Santilli dug through a mass of historic domain names, analyzed each site’s HTML and then "used a small army of Tor bots to overcome the Wayback Machine's IP throttling and greatly increase our checking capacity."
Santilli explained in his own write-up about the bombshell discoveries how he did all this research without paying for any data and used free tools for his research.
He added: "The scraping of expired domain trackers to Github was one of the positive outcomes of this project. Finally, at the very end of our pipeline, we were left with a few hundred domains, and we just manually inspected them one by one as far as patience would allow it to confirm or discard.
"You can never have enough Wayback Machine tabs open. This is how the end of the fingerprint pipeline looks like: as many tabs as you have the patience to go through one by one!"
Other Websites Used
Santalli joked: 'There must have been some massive Johnny Carson fan among the CIA contractors at that time.'
Besides Star Wars-themed websites, the CIA used other websites too for communication – including a fan site for the late comedian Johnny Carson, one about extreme sports and another for fans of Brazilian music.
Santalli joked in his write up: "There must have been some massive Johnny Carson fan among the CIA contractors at that time!"
In his own writeup, Santilli said some of the sites appear to have targeted Germany, France, Spain, and Brazil – based on their language and content.
He wrote: "It reveals a much larger number of websites, it gives a broader understanding of the CIA's interests at the time, including more specific democracies which may have been targeted which were not previously mentioned, and also a statistical understanding of how much importance they were giving to different zones at the time, and unsurprisingly, the Middle East comes on top."
New Information Continues To Drop
Ciro Santilli, the security researcher, found the websites the CIA built in the early 2000s.
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Zach Edwards, an independent cybersecurity researcher, told the website: "The recent efforts to uncover the websites the CIA used to communicate with their spies all over the world aligns with what I understood about this network. We’re now about 15 years past when these websites were being actively used, yet new information continues to drip out year after year.
"The simplest way to put it – yes, the CIA absolutely had a Star Wars fan website with a secretly embedded communication system – and while I can’t account for everything included in the research from Ciro, his findings seem very sound.
"This whole episode is a reminder that developers make mistakes, and sometimes it takes years for someone to find those mistakes. But this is also not just your average 'developer mistake' type of scenario."
About the shocking discoveries, Santilli said: "At the very least, the potential public benefit of enlightening history seems to be greater than that risk now. I really hope we're right about this.
"It is also cute to have more content for people to look at, much like a museum. It's just cool to be able to go to the Wayback Machine and be able to see a relic spy gadget ‘live’ in all its glory."
