10 Insane Plans You Won't Believe The Military Tried
3. At The Height Of The Cold War, MI6 Stole Soviet Toilet Paper
Apparently, to tamarisk is jargon for sifting through the detritus of military exercises. Which is why the Cold War-era plan to steal all of the Soviet Union's toilet paper so they would have to start wiping their arses on official documents, that Western spies could then steal from the bowl, was known as Operation Tamarisk.
Coming to prominence thanks to Richard Aldrich's non-fiction book The Hidden Hand, Operation Tamarisk was a co-ordinated effort by American, British and French counter-intelligence working in concert with sympathetic East German spies to nick discarded paper, letters, and rubbish from Soviet trash bins and military manoeuvres.
To speed up the process, the countries began starving the Soviet Union of toilet paper, so they started using documents that might be helpful for military purposes. Spies complained about having to fish out documents surrounded by poo and in hospital bins severed limbs.
They asked for the limbs to, to see what shrapnel the Ruskies were using.