Imagine a cute and cuddly feline being a spy for a country’s intelligence agency. That sounds a little far-fetched, right?

This is the bizarre premise of Operation Acoustic Kitty, an American CIA initiative in the 1960s during the Cold War to turn domestic cats into portable spying devices. The idea stemmed from the observation that cats could move unnoticed near embassies and other public places, making them a suitable candidate for espionage.

In theory, the cats would be trained by CIA officers to sit near foreign officials, where they could transmit their private conversations to CIA operatives via microphones implanted into the cat’s ear, a radio transmitter and an antenna woven into the base of its skull and its fur. The process of integrating these equipment components would be done by a surgeon before the cat is dispatched for an assigned task.

Although the idea of using a domestic cat is ideal as it reduces reliance on human spies, which could arouse suspicion, the first official field test conducted in 1967 was a failure, as the cat assigned to capture a conversation between two men sitting on the bench instead wandered into the street and was hit by a taxi. Several accounts stated that the cat was killed, though a former CIA technical officer, Robert Wallace, disputed this in 2013, claiming that the cat was actually unharmed. Due to the difficulty of training cats to follow orders, the project was ultimately cancelled, thus ending a five-year $10-20 million venture to bring cats into the world of espionage and covert operations.

View at Medium.com

https://www.history.com/articles/cia-spy-cat-espionage-fail

https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2019/05/how-the-cia-tried-to-train-cats-to-spy-on-the-russians-the-strange-true-story-of-acoustic-kitty.html

Project Acoustic Kitty: The CIA’s Cold War Feline Secret Agent

https://vocal.media/humans/operation-acoustic-kitty-the-useless-cia-project