#10. Acoustic Kitty
Most people wouldn’t think of the common house cat as being a potential master of espionage, but the CIA sure did. In the 1960s, American intelligence is said to have spent over $20 million on “Acoustic Kitty,” a top-secret project that used cats as recording devices. The project took a group of specially trained cats and surgically implanted microphones, antennae and batteries into their tails, and then set them loose near the Russian embassy. The idea was that an unassuming cat would be able to stride right up to groups of communist officials and listen in on their conversation, which it could then beam back to agents with its sophisticated radio equipment. The plan was eventually put into action, but the first cat sent into the field was supposedly run over by a taxi before it could make a recording, and operation ‘Acoustic Kitty” was abandoned shortly thereafter.
The Blue Prints of Cat women
Operation Mockingbird == Faux News
Run over by a taxi. ROFL.
Really? You laugh about cats who are given unnecessary surgery and then get run over?
And I thought I had a twisted sense of humor.
Sheesh MS. I found it funny because they go to all this trouble cooking up a hair-brained scheme only to have the cat run over by a taxi on it first outing. The torture and death of the cat is regrettable but hardly the worst thing these psychos did.
MS I agree with Honeyman. I didn’t read it as though he was laughing at the cat’s demise.
I have five of them, all indoor cats and they are my punishment for not liking cats when I was younger. They never let me forget it either.
I felt bad for the dead cat but I thought the premise behind its death was hilarious and demonstrates some of the stupidity from the government.
Thanks for the link, we appreciate it. And, yes, the premise for the cat’s death is funny, but not the death. Oversensitivity reigns on the web.
nothing can compare to this cat operation
#3,4,
Ack.
And this is only PART of the ice berg..
Didn’t they find and tap an undersea phone cable
between Moscow and a military base on an island
off the east coast of the then Soviet Union.
Thank goodness today’s crop of nutball Republicans wasn’t in power then. They’re so far off the edge, I bet this sounds reasonable to them.
If you go to the CIA website, you will find a link to the Iraqi Rewards Program. They offer rewards for informationon WMD. It is available only in Arabic now. I archived the English original before they took it down. Their webmaster confirmed to me that visiots for misusing the page.
#9. run
#10
And who actually was in office then? Oh, that’s right, a Democrat.
Btw, the Bay of Pigs failure was an education in how to take a good plan and screw it up. Einsenhower helped devise the initial plans to invade Cuba and had they followed that plan, which called for landing at Trinidad, it probably would have been successful. However, pool party boy and his the CIA bozos decided they knew better and modified the plan to the end we all know.
I can understand trying the acoustic cat. I know that rats have also been tried. I can even understand “some” of the work with drugs. What I can’t get is the 20 years it took them to realize that remote viewing was bunch of BS. Seriously, 20 years? You’d think one double-blind study would have been enough.
A cat’s natural grace in motion is harmed when you attach anything to its body, like clothing or lengths of tape. I’ll bet that’s why it got hit by a car. We cat owners know this. They should have asked us.
Absolutely brilliant write up. Thanks for bringing all your brilliant thoughts together into one post. There’s quite a few that I hadn’t encountered before. Thank you !