30 Nefarious Government Operations That Have been Declassified

British intelligence once executed "Operation Cupcake" to hack an online al-Qaeda magazine, replacing bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.

Operation Christmas Drop is an air force training exercise where the US Air Force drops presents and supplies in Micronesia. This is the longest running humanitarian airlift in the world. Supplies and presents have been dropped every Christmas since 1952.

Operation Wetback was a 1954 operation by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove illegal immigrants, mostly Mexican nationals from the southwestern United States.

At the start of Operation Good Hope, US forces were supposed to land on the beaches of Mogadishu, Somalia under the cover of darkness. Instead, they were met by CNN who was covering the landing live on television.

Operation Cornflakes was a US operation during World War 2 which involved tricking the German postal service into distributing anti-Nazi propaganda by dropping false letters next to bombed mail trains. When recovering the mail, the postal service would confuse the false mail for the real thing.

Operation London Bridge has been a codename which refers to the plan for what would happen in the days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. This plan has been extensively prepared by most British government and media organizations since the 1960s.

During Operation Cottage over 300 allied casualties were reported during the invasion of an undefended island named Kiska. Some of these were due to friendly fire, as Canadian and U.S. troops mistook each other from the absent Japanese garrison.

As part of Operation Meetinghouse, the firebombing of Tokyo was the single deadliest air raid of World War 2, which was greater than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events. The bombing resulted in over 100,000 deaths.

After the fall of France in 1940 Churchill launched Operation Catapult, in which he ordered the Royal Navy to seize or destroy the French Navy to prevent Hitler from using it. In one British attack, 1,297 French sailors were killed. This proved to the United States that Britain would resist Nazi Germany whatever the cost.

During Operation Claymore in World War 2, a British soldier sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler, which read “Herr Hitler. Reference your last speech, I thought you said that whenever British troops land on the continent of Europe, German soldiers will face them. Well, where are they?”