Acoustic Kitty: The Cold War Cat-Cyborg

Many stories exist of the efforts by both sides during the Cold War concerning the more or less fanciful ideas to gain the upper hand in the conflict. At www.cia.gov, it is still possible to read about some of them.

At the height of the Cold War, the US Central Intelligence Agency was willing to try just about anything to gain an advantage over the Communists in general and Cuban leader Fidel Castro in particular. The agency considered using exploding cigars or other everyday items to remove the famed Comandante; they employed numerous secret agents whom they brought into Cuba in the most creative ways… but somehow, Fidel’s spies seemed always to be one step ahead. Firm action was needed if the communists were to be stopped.

This prompted one of the CIA’s most peculiar Cold War efforts: Operation Acoustic Kitty. In declassified documents from the CIA’s secret Science and Technology Directorate, it was revealed that some Cold-War-era cats were surgically altered to become advanced Cold War bugging devices. The idea was that the cats would listen in on Soviet and Cuban meetings from park benches, windowsills and garbage containers. The cat was meant to just walk up to the secret conversations, totally unnoticed. The spy-cat’s electronic internals would then record and transfer the conversations to CIA agents.

The project was approved and paid for before work began in 1961. Decades later, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recounted the horrifying story of the Acoustic Kitty:

“Machinery was carefully operated into a cat. The tail was made into an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that . Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, “Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else – not the birds, no cat or dog – just those two guys!”"

If the cat answered, it has not been recorded. After a lot of surgery and intensive training, the cyborg cat was ready for its first field test. The CIA drove the cat to the Soviet Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., and let him out of a van. The cat jumped onto the road, and was immediately struck by a passing taxi. A cat’s life, five years of effort and over $15 million in spending was lost in an instant. Shortly afterwards a CIA operative returned to the accident site to recover the cat’s remains to prevent any possible communists from getting their hands on the sensitive and expensive espionage devices.

Operation Acoustic Kitty was completely abandoned in 1967, and declared “an unadulterated failure”. Possibly due to the embarrassing nature of the project, the documents describing Acoustic Kitty remain partially censored even today. Sadly, no details of the pioneer cyborg-cat’s name are available, nor where he or she came from…
While the CIA-memo says that the use of trained cats is possible, it also says that “the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical.” Let’s hope the pain and suffering to the cat is also taken into account.

Further Reading:

National Security Archives

The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, John Ranelagh, rev. ed., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Sources

www.cia.gov

The George Washington University Archives

The Daily Telegraph

The Guardian

Wikipedia

Alien Hand Syndrome

Images by tr67 (feature image) & Jason Escapist