Scraping Bottom - bizarre cold war trivia

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Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Scraping Bottom
19 Mar 2018

https://www.damninteresting.com/nugget/scraping-bottom/

When Germany was divided in two after the Second World War, military leaders recognized the need for liaison between the Soviet-occupied East Germany and the US/British occupied West Germany. To this end, the military governments agreed to exchange a fixed number of representatives who would have the freedom to live and move somewhat freely throughout the country. These representatives would serve to facilitate communication, as well as preventing possible hostilities. Naturally, enterprising spy agencies saw these individuals as vectors for intelligence-gathering.

The British liaison mission was known as British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany (BRIXMIS), and one of their favorite means of information-gathering was to “tamarisk,” a bit of British jargon referring to the practice of sifting through military trash for interesting documents. As the early days of the Cold War unfolded, BRIXMIS officials began to realize that the quantity of useful tamarisk discoveries was inversely correlated with the Soviets’ supply of toilet paper. Evidently, whenever East Germany’s sanitary supplies dwindled, Soviet soldiers tended to improvise by moving stacks of bureaucratic documents from the filing cabinets to the Wasserklosetts. The Soviets knew it would clog the drains to flush the used sheets, so they installed special bins to hold soiled manuals, tainted code sheets, redacted correspondence, and so on. These were periodically emptied into the general trash, their aromatic contents eventually making their way to British intelligence. Upon discovering the cause of these irregular intelligence windfalls, British and US spy agencies began making surreptitious efforts to disrupt East German supplies of toilet paper from time to time.

On the whole, Operation Tamarisk was among the most fruitful intelligence-gathering operations of the entire Cold War. Professor Richard Aldrich, a specialist in Cold War intelligence, said of the effort: “Those used pieces of Russian toilet paper were absolute gold dust in terms of the information they contained.”
 
I dunno my grandad was a tanker in Berlin during the divide. He commanded an M4 Easy Eight and said he was happy they never had to shoot Soviet tanks. He said it was a lot of form the line, hold the line, stare for hours, and chug beer when no one was Lookin'. He said they had drinkin' contests with soviet tankers and those guys would out drink them. He brought back all these wooden German clocks. Coo coo clocks that were hand carved with pop out birds.

Then he had these wild exaggerated stories of the tankers and aviators getting piss drunk at German bars and fighting. He had this vivid memory of a pilot knife edging a P-51 down a curved Berlin street about tank level, and from then on he hated pilots. He told me how the blockaded the runway with tanks and were threatened with court martial. Then some AirForce General got all red faced about the 51 flying Wrecklessly. They never had another plane buzz them so low again.
 
Not my text (I always italicize quoted text), but I didn't catch their pun. I wonder if they intended it. Gross trivia, but interesting because it was apparently so successful.
 
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