34 Secretive Military & Government Operations Few People Know

The largest movement of physical wealth in history was during World War 2. “Operation Fish” had 186,332 gold bars and more than 8 million ounces of gold coins sent to Canada from the United Kingdom with not even one crate or treasury bill going missing.

2. The US government had a secret military operation called “Project Eldest Son” during the Vietnam War. It involved leaving behind thousands of rounds of faulty ammo that would backfire in Vietcong AKs while also leaking fake documents that questioned quality control in Chinese munitions factories.

3. The record for most passengers ever carried by a commercial airliner is 1,088, by an El Al Boeing 747 during Operation Solomon, which involved the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and started on 24 May 1991. This figure included two babies born on the flight.

4. “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.

5. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

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

15. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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?”

24. Operation Paul Bunyan included 60 US troops, 64 South Korean Special Forces troops, 7 attack helicopters, an array of attack jets, nuclear ready B-52 bombers, and 12,00 troops on standby to finish cutting down a tree after North Korean soldiers killed 2 US soldiers who were cutting a tree.

25. During Cold War, CIA launched Operation Kitty in which cats were surgically implanted with bugging devices to eavesdrop on Soviet conversations after all who would suspect a cat of wearing a wire. The 1st mission failed after the cat was run over and the $15 million operation was dropped.