Training Feline Spies Was Like Herding Cats: The CIA’s $20 Million Acoustic Kitty Fiasco

In the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, the CIA launched one of its most bizarre and expensive projects ever – to turn a cat into a living spy recorder. Codenamed Acoustic Kitty, the aim was to surgically implant listening devices into cats so they could eavesdrop on Soviet officials.

The concept seemed plausible enough. Cats are small, furry, quiet creatures that could potentially wander unnoticed into secure locations. Veterinary surgeons were brought in to outfit the first feline recruit with an implanted microphone in its ear canal, a radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and an antenna discreetly woven into its fur.

To prep the cat for its first mission outside the Soviet embassy in Washington D.C., operatives even went so far as to perform a second surgery to address the cat’s hunger drives that could make it distractible. In total, the CIA poured some $20 million into Project Acoustic Kitty.

The big test came when the cyber-cat was released near a park with two Soviet officials having an outdoor meeting. But the mission was an immediate, tragic failure. The furry eavesdropper managed only a few steps before being struck by a taxi and killed.

However, in 2013, Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, disputed this, stating that the project was abandoned because training the cat to behave as needed proved too difficult, and “the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards”.

While one former CIA officer claimed the project continued for some time after, most historians agree Acoustic Kitty was quickly scrapped as totally impractical for real-world use. Environmental factors like traffic proved too uncontrollable, not to mention trying to choreograph a cat’s movements at all.

The absurd lengths taken, combined with the massive budget spent on a concept many saw as futile from the start, made Acoustic Kitty one of the most satirized of all Cold War intelligence initiatives. It joined the CIA’s ranks of bizarre brain-hatched schemes like the MKULTRA behavioral mind control experiments involving giving drugs like LSD and other substances to unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens to study their effects, or Project A119, a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4