Two British spies crawl through a thick, brown, sludge in the dark of night.
They are not crawling through mud, instead, these spies are sifting through the poop of
Soviet soldiers.
They are looking for treasure more important than gold: classified documents.
During the Cold War spies would do whatever it took to retrieve intel on the enemy.
But the Soviet Union had a bigger problem than the threat NATO posed.
They had almost no toilet paper.
And that meant things were about to get messy.
This led to Soviet soldiers using some very unique items to clean themselves after going
number two.
Some of which was any paper they had handy or just laying around; even if it contained
classified information.
But what actually happened to all of the toilet paper in the Soviet Union?
Or perhaps a better question might be: how do we even know the Soviets were using classified
documents as toilet paper in the first place?
Let’s start with the latter question.
The reason we know that Soviet soldiers were using classified documents as toilet paper
is thanks to Operation Tamarisk.
This series of classified missions began in December of 1979, and was conducted by British
intelligence agents.
Operation Tamarisk’s main objective: uncover Soviet secrets and intel by any means necessary.
And they really meant by any means necessary.
Apparently, toilet paper was not standard issue in the Soviet military, so soldiers
had to use whatever they could get their hands on to clean themselves.
This meant that at training sites across East Germany soldiers were using letters from home,
receipts for supplies, and even classified documents to wipe their butts.
And these weren’t just documents with basic orders.
They consisted of ciphers, intelligence briefings, morale levels, and troop deployments.
The recovery of these poop covered documents was part of Operation Tamarisk.
Now it is not entirely clear who the first British spy was to figure this out, maybe
it was by accident, or perhaps it was 007, we may never know.
But eventually it became common knowledge for British spies that the Soviets were not
destroying classified documents, but were using them as toilet paper instead.
Once the word spread through the spy community, the race was on to discover secrets that were
covered in Soviet poop.
British spies would wait until Soviet forces finished a training exercise and then sneak
around the area to locate any human excrement they could find.
They would sift through the poop searching for discarded documents that were used as
makeshift toilet paper.
On one particular mission spies waited until Soviet soldiers had abandoned a firing range
before searching for intel.
What they found were notebooks containing information on new materials and equipment
that had just arrived in the area.
In fact, once the pages were cleaned of poop, it was uncovered that they even contained
serial numbers and manufacturing details.
Operation Tamarisk was uncovering more information about the Soviet military than British intelligence
could have ever hoped for.
It was because of the lack of resources being devoted to everyday things like toilet paper
within the Soviet Union that soldiers weren’t issued basic hygienic supplies.
Therefore, they had to make due with what they had, even if what they were using contained
classified information.
On a different mission at an abandoned Soviet military encampment at Neustrelitz, British
spies found an entire military log covered in feces.
Once analyzed, it was discovered that the document contained information on the latest
Russian tanks.
More surprisingly, there was information on what the Soviet’s were working on as a successor
to the current tanks.
But the biggest shock of all, other than the poop of course, was that the documents contained
detailed information about the weaknesses of the tank.
This led to the British military developing a new program tasked with constructing an
anti-tank missile known as the ‘long-rod penetrator.’
This was in direct response to the threat that the new Soviet tanks posed, but also
exploited their weaknesses.
In fact, the missile is still used by the British Military today.
And it is all thanks to a poop covered document found by British spies.
However, nothing embodies Operation Tamarisk more than one mission conducted by Major Jim
Orr and Sergeant Tony Haw.
These two men were British spies in Soviet controlled territory in 1981.
They had located a Soviet paratrooper training ground that was being heavily used at the
time.
Based on the intel retrieved from previous Soviet documents that were used as toilet
paper, it seemed like a good bet that whatever the opposition were using to wipe their butts
at this training facility would contain useful intel.
Orr and Haw waited in the shadows along the paratrooper training site all night.
When the first rays of sunlight began to peak over the treeline they used it to search the
latrines.
The British spies needed to wait for the early morning sunshine so they could see what they
were digging through without tipping off the Soviets that they were there.
Flashlights would have been too obvious while they scraped away layer after layer of poop
looking for classified documents.
While sifting through the human excrement, Orr and Haw found information that would end
up being incredibly useful to intelligence officials.
They found messages with deployment orders and the tactics that Soviet paratroopers were
using.
They even uncovered information of a program being implemented to trick NATO forces into
thinking the Soviets had deployed large numbers of soldiers in areas that were not actually
of strategic importance.
It was these types of dirty missions that provided invaluable intel to NATO forces.
But this brings up an important point: if the Soviets had just provided toilet paper
to their soldiers, then they wouldn’t have had to use classified documents to wipe their
butts.
You may be wondering how British spies were even able to get into the Soviet Union in
the first place.
The answer is pretty crazy.
At this time during the Cold War an agreement was reached between NATO and the Soviet Union
who were occupying East and West Germany respectively.
Each side allowed military liaison missions into the area they controlled.
This was originally set up as a gesture of goodwill between the two sides, but eventually
it turned into an agreed upon way to send spies into the opposition’s territory.
Operation Tamarisk started with British spies waiting outside of Soviet hospitals until
the garbage was brought out for the night.
When the coast was clear, the spies would dive into the trash bins looking for anything
useful that may have been discarded by accident.
What they stumbled upon was incredibly surprising.
The Soviets were using military and classified documents as ways to clean up bodily fluids
in hospitals.
This got British intelligence officers thinking that maybe these types of documents were being
used for other hygienic purposes as well.
It may be surprising to us now how parts of the Soviet Union lacked basic supplies, but
during the Cold War the communist regime had a lot of people living in their empire.
This meant that it would take a lot of manpower and resources to provide Soviet citizens with
the products they needed.
But, like most governments during this time, massive amounts of money and resources were
being funneled into the military instead of to the average citizen.
At some point the British spies found out that it was not only the hospitals that were
reusing documents with sensitive information for hygienic purposes, but the soldiers in
the Soviet military were doing the same thing as well.
They just happened to be using them as toilet paper.
This is what led to the numerous missions of Operation Tamarisk to recover the classified
documents that the Soviets were using to wipe their butts.
So, what was the real reason that the Soviet Union didn’t provide their army, or their
people, with toilet paper?
During the Cold War massive amounts of money were being used to build up the Soviet Union’s
military, and to spread its influence around the world.
Toilet paper on the other hand was not seen as a top priority for the leaders of the Communist
Party.
It wasn’t that there was no toilet paper in the Soviet Union at all, but that it was
in short supply, and only accessible to the wealthy and powerful.
In fact, the first toilet paper factory was not constructed in the Soviet Union until
1969.
But even a decade later, toilet paper was not widespread amongst the populace or in
the military.
Other than this commodity not being top priority for the Communist Party, there are a few other
factors that led to toilet paper not being available to the general public or soldiers.
First and foremost was greed.
In a government system where everyone is supposed to be equal, there was, and still is, a large
disparity between the people in power and the common citizen.
This means that there was always toilet paper available to the wealthy and powerful, it
just was not disseminated to the average Soviet citizen or soldier.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of communism when you think about it.
When the government decided to finally ramp up production of toilet paper it could not
be created and distributed fast enough.
Lines of hundreds of people would wait outside stores trying to buy the hygienic product.
There were limits to how much they could buy, and the stock would run out fast.
One citizen reported seeing people walk out of the store with rolls of toilet paper tied
across their body like a sash.
This made people extremely jealous as they passed by.
It was greed, the refusal of the Communist Party to invest resources into toilet paper,
and the massive distances that the commodity needed to travel to reach soldiers that led
to the Soviet Army using classified documents as toilet paper.
And as luck would have it, British spies exploited this communist shortcoming during the Cold
War to gather intelligence for NATO.
Now watch “NATO vs Soviet Union - Who Would Win?
Military / Army Comparison.”
Or check out “How and Why Did The Soviet Union Collapse.”