The Covert World: 25 Fascinating Facts About Government and Military Operations

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.

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.