The CIA attempted to turn cats into a tool for listening to foreign diplomats in the 1960s.
In the 1960s, CIA officials wanted to find an efficient and secretive way to record the conversations of foreign officials in the United States, Scientific American reported. To realize this idea, the researchers thought of an animal close to humans. Among them, cats are the most suitable animal, since they can get close to people without attracting attention.
Victor Marchetti, a special assistant to the CIA deputy director in the 1960s, said the American dream of a spy cat quickly burned down when their pet project was supposed to be a taxi Pass… crush during the testing process.
The spy cat’s story has been pieced together by a series of declassified documents from the 1960s and other sources in the Cold War intelligence community.
Dubbed “Operation Acoustic Kitty”, the project involves the idea of implanting a microphone in a cat’s ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull.
Armed with these simple devices, the cat can be trained to sneak into Soviet embassies, or even the Kremlin, where it will record covert activity. Then send the information back to the CIA agents.
The CIA documents also explain how they experimented with techniques to control the spy cat with aural commands, effectively controlling the cat’s movements like a remote-controlled car.
“A lot of money was spent. They opened the cat, inserted the battery, wired it. The tail was used as an antenna. They created a monstrosity,” said Victor Marchetti, an assistant. .
Victor Marchetti has said that one of the first spy cats encountered an untimely death during his first real-world experience.
Marchetti is known to be an open critic of the US intelligence community. He is known to have come up with a number of controversial and unclear ideas, some of which are considered conspiracy theories.
Elsewhere, CIA documents show somewhat different stories from what Victor Marchetti was saying. In a re-edited report titled “The Trained Cat Perspective” shows that the project had some success, but in the end it did not help the CIA.
Millions of dollars were also said to have been spent, but the cat-machine spy dream was ultimately bankrupted completely.
