Acoustic Kitty: the CIA’s most ludicrous attempt to spy on Russia
Roger Moore’s run as international super-spy James Bond was pilloried at the time for being “too silly”, and to be fair, critics, cinema audiences and presumably CIA agents of the time weren’t exactly wrong about that.
This was an era where Bond defused a nuclear bomb while dressed as a clown. He fought laser-gun battles in space. He swung on vines in the jungle with a full-throated Tarzan yell. He implanted cats with microphones to spy on the Kremlin. He defeated a short henchman by the name of Nick Nack by stuffing him into a suitcase. Clearly, all these acts were pure blockbuster hokum that had as much place in any part of the real world as Superman does, let alone the serious, dark and morally grey world of spying?
Well, you’d be surprised. The truth is that the Cold War made both sides incredibly desperate for any kind of advantage over the other. Sure, that did lead to some dark dealings and the occasional crime against humanity, but on the other hand, it did lead to some seriously silly dealings that were almost certainly discussed by very serious men in very serious boardrooms wearing very serious suits. Case in point, one of those Bond shenanigans listed up front isn’t from a Bond film at all, but real life.
While the idea of some John Le Carre type in a loincloth giving his best Johnny Weismuller yell is a very funny one, it’s not that. Any Bond fan worth their salt probably did a double-take at the implanting cats part because not only did it not happen in any 007 film, it would probably not make it into any script of a 007 joint due to animal cruelty. Such is the morality of a Bond flick. Corrective rape of Pussy Galore? Absolutely. Putting a microphone in some mogs? Absolutely not.
Might as well leave that to the professionals.
Wait, the CIA actually put microphones inside cats?!
Well, they tried. The project, called (I shit you not) Acoustic Kitty, was put forth by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s.
The idea was that they had “perfected” (a word doing some seriously heavy lifting here) a procedure where a veterinarian implanted a microphone into a cat’s ear, a small radio transmitter at the base of its spine and then connected the two with a thin wire under its fur. This would allow the CIA to send a cat over to a place they wanted to keep track of and eavesdrop on a conversation undetected. After all, cats are easy to control, right? Right?!
Yeah, despite the project costing over $20million in today’s money, they never took into account the fact that the simile “like herding cats” doesn’t mean that a group is easy to control. In true CIA fashion, they handwaved that part of it, assuming that once they got the tech right, the rest would just work itself out. It did not. The first time this $20m project was put into action was to eavesdrop on a conversation happening outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. The cat was put in the field, then the moment it began mosying over to its target, it was immediately hit by a passing cab and killed.
The project was called off after the second cat tapped up for the job couldn’t be trained to ignore its hunger cravings. Y’know, because it’s a cat. After a number of years and millions of dollars, the project was finally knocked on the head in 1967, with the CIA files released documenting the process in 2001, taking great care to mention that the second cat fitted with the Acoustic Kitty set-up had the equipment removed, was “re-sewn” and lived a long and happy life afterwards.
Considering the track record of CIA agents who leave the department, they were one of the lucky ones.