The CIA spent millions trying to turn cats into spies during the Cold War

The purrfect spies?
Cold War times
Spent 20 million dollars
“Acoustic Kitty” project
A successful surgery
Trying to train the untrainable
Cats are their own boss
Ambient noises made it hard to hear the conversation
An Intelligence scheme that was left on the drawing board
CIA and military projects that were discarded
A bad agent
A hungry agent
Re-wiring the feline agent’s brain
Ethical concerns
The tragic ending of “acoustic kitty”
Military and Intelligence exploit animals
A cyborg beetle
The Russian beluga spy
The Chinese pigeon spy
II World War messenger pigeons
Technology over animals as spying gadgets?
The purrfect spies?

Sneaky, agile, aloof, clever… cats seem to have the characteristics of a great spy, or at least, this is what the CIA thought in the 1960s.

Cold War times

Amidst the Cold War, the CIA’s foremost goal was to extract valuable secret information from the Soviet Union.

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Spent 20 million dollars

So, in what sounds like a kid’s movie plot, the Central Intelligence Agency spent around 20 million dollars trying to turn a cat into a secret agent feline, according to History.com.

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“Acoustic Kitty” project

The project, called “Acoustic Kitty”consisted in rigging a poor cat with a radio antenna in its tail, a microphone hidden in its ears, and a transmitter installed at the base of its skull.

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A successful surgery

The implantation, groundbreaking animal surgery for the time, worked. The listening device was operational and the cat was okay.

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Trying to train the untrainable

The tricky part, however, was training the cat to go roaming around its targets, staying close to them so that the human agents could listen in on what the Russians were saying.

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Cats are their own boss

The problem? Cats cannot be trained. They do their own thing, regardless of what their “owners” might want.

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Ambient noises made it hard to hear the conversation
Moreover, the microphone picked up unavoidable noises, such as the chirping of birds or passing traffic, often obscuring the conversation the listening device was supposed to capture.
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An Intelligence scheme that was left on the drawing board

Vince Houghton, curator of the International Spy Museum of Washington, D.C. wrote about “Project Acoustic Kitty” in a book called ‘Nuking the Moon: And other Intelligence Schemes and Military plots left on the drawing board.’

CIA and military projects that were discarded

“For every plan as good as D-Day, there’s a scheme to strap bombs to bats or dig a spy tunnel underneath the Soviet embassy,” his book states, compiling tales of military and spy proposals that, for good reason, were never put into action.

A bad agent

“Several weeks of training proved frustrating. They just couldn’t get the cat to move consistently according to its mission,” Houghton wrote about this project.

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A hungry agent

He also states that the cat did whatever it felt like doing during the mission, like go looking for food instead of spying, which led to a re-wiring of the cat’s brain.

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Re-wiring the feline agent’s brain

“Obviously, the CIA couldn’t have its invention skipping away in the middle of a mission to look for some Meow Mix,” Houghton writes, “so the vets and techs went back in and rejiggered Acoustic Kitty’s wiring, turning off its natural instinct to seek sustenance.”

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Ethical concerns

This was rightly criticized by some agents, such as the late Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer in the 1950s and ’60s who later became a critic of the agency and who described the project as a “monstrosity.”

The tragic ending of “acoustic kitty”

Although not officially reported, it’s believed that the cat was ran over by a taxi when it wandered into a busy road, and thus was the tragic end of the failed “Acoustic Kitty” mission.

Military and Intelligence exploit animals

It was not the last time, however, that humans have attempted to use animals as spy gadgets...

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A cyborg beetle

In 2006, Berkeley scientists, hired by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, modified a beetle’s brain so that it could be controlled by a remote, according to Wired magazine.

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The Russian beluga spy

In 2019, a snowy white beluga whale, later nicknamed Hvaldimir, shot to international fame after it was spotted wearing a specially made harness with mounts for a camera, leading experts to suggest the whale may have been trained by the Russian military, CNN reported.

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The Chinese pigeon spy

More recently, in the summer of 2023, India reported capturing a pigeon with Chinese writing on its wings, leading to claims that the pigeon was a spy for Beijing.

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II World War messenger pigeons

Pigeons were also used by the British Intelligence during the Second World War as a means of communication, since their networks were shattered by the Germans.

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Technology over animals as spying gadgets?

Although today’s technologies like drones or phones are more likely to provide intelligence information than cats or pigeons, it looks like spies around the world still look at animals for help as they go unnoticed. But, do they make good spies and is it ethical to use them as gadgets?

Photo: Jason Blackeye/Unsplash

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