Have you ever heard that in the 1940s, Stalin's secret police would have created a special department to obtain feces from their spy targets? Probably not, because this was top secret. Its purpose was to get the excrement from foreign leaders, according to one of Russia's most popular newspapers, the Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The information about the secret program was passed on by former agent Igor Atamanenko, who had discovered it when he was doing a search in the archives of the Russian secret service. He also claimed that Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's trusted man, was put in charge of a secret laboratory in which the analysis of the material obtained was done.
"In those days the Soviets did not have the monitoring apparatus that the secret service has today", the former agent told the Russian press. He also explained what the research consisted of: "For example, if they detected high levels of amino acid tryptophan, they concluded that the person was calm and it was possible to approach him. But a lack of potassium in the stool was seen as a sign of nervous disposition and that the person had insomnia".
The documents also reported that Russian scientists dedicated to this kind of research would have been able to get samples to know Mao's wishes during a visit to Russia by the leader. In other words, Soviet spies used this system to evaluate the psychological inclinations of Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung in December 1949, when he visited Stalin in Moscow. They would have installed special toilets for Mao, connected to secret boxes, so the stool would not go into the sewer, being later collected for laboratory analysis. And Stalin would then only have signed an agreement with Mao after the various analyses of the Chinese leader's stool samples were favourable to him. Anyway, espionage was never a fair game, but this time they crossed the line...