30 Nefarious Government Operations That Have been Declassified

“Operation Vegetarian” was a 1942 plan by the British military to drop linseed cakes infected with anthrax on German fields where they would be eaten by cows and thus infect the civilian population that ate them. The test site in Scotland remained uninhabitable until the 1990s.

Operation Rocky Top was an FBI mission that discovered corruption in the Tennessee State government in late 1980s. With the help of a first-year state representative, the FBI had arrested 50 people including state officials, which led to two state officials committing suicide to avoid trial.

Operation Mockingbird was a classified CIA program spanning from the '50s through to late '70s which was intended to influence the media and create ‘a propaganda network’ of leading American journalists. CIA recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, funding student/cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts.

Operation Looking Glass was a 24-hour a day, continuously airborne command center capable of directing all of the United States' nuclear assets as a backup, should SAC's ground facilities be destroyed. Taking turns, the airplanes stayed continuously staffed for 29 years.

In 1953 CIA launched Operation Ajax which was a plot to overthrow Iran's democratically elected government. As part of the mission, CIA agents bombed the house of a prominent Muslim while posing as pro-government supporters. Iran’s democratically elected leader was successfully overthrown and about 200-300 people were killed.

Winston Churchill had a plan called "Operation Unthinkable" to invade the Soviet Union in a surprise attack immediately after the end of World War 2. His plan was finally shot down when it was learned that the Soviet troops remaining outnumbered allied troops 3:1.

In 2003, the U.S. military planned to attach caged chickens to the top of their Hum-Vees as they entered Iraq, to act as an early warning system to any dangerous chemicals or nerve agents. The operation was dubbed Operation Kuwaiti Field Chicken (KFC).

Operation INFEKTION was a disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to spread information that the United States invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night was a 1945 plan developed by Japanese army medical officer Shirō Ishii to wage biological warfare upon civilian population centers in Southern California in the United States during the final months of World War 2, using plague fleas from unit 731.

In 1962 the US Government proposed Operation Northwoods, a plan to commit acts of 'false flag' terrorism on American soil, for which Cuba would be blamed, in an effort to gain public support for a US invasion of Cuba. The plan was rejected by the Kennedy Administration.