Acoustic Kitty

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions, intended to spy on the Kremlin, and Soviet embassies. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. This would allow the cats to innocously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation.^[1] Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over $20 million.

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Subsequent tests also failed.^[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.^[2] The project was cancelled in 1967.^[1]

In media

Although it is not entirely clear on whether he is the originator of the concept, British author Len Deighton prefigured the concept of Acoustic Kitty in his novel, Billion Dollar Brain, where the unnamed hero (Harry Palmer) notes that "Even the cats of East Berlin are wired..." for sound recording.

John Mann produced an album in 2002 entitled Acoustic Kitty.

The project is featured in a novel and in a children's book:

• Acoustic Kitty by Bob Rybarczyk, ISBN 978-1-60145-397-6
• A Horse in the House by Gail Ablow, ill. by Kathy Osborn, ISBN 978-0-7636-2838-3

Operation Acoustic Kitty was featured in a strip of Dinosaur Comics.^[3]

In Alpha Protocol, Steven Heck tells Michael Thorton about this in response to an unrelated question.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Donald, Graeme (2011). Loose Cannons: 101 Myths, Mishaps and Misadventurers of Military History. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 9781849086516. 
2. ^ Jeffrey T. Richelson, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 147-48. ISBN 0-8133-4059-4.
3. ^ http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1698

References

• "Top 5 Crazy Government Experiments", Robert Lamb, February 18, 2010, howstuffworks.com
• CIA recruited cat to bug Russians, Charlotte Edwardes, April 11, 2001, telegraph.co.uk.
• Edited CIA memo, dated March 1967 (PDF format).
• Project: Acoustic Kitty, Julian Borger, September 11, 2001, Guardian Unlimited.
• The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, John Ranelagh, rev. ed., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, at p. 208.
• The Living Dead, Adam Curtis, episode 2, 1995.

External links

• National Security Archive
• The Memory Palace podcast episode about Acoustic Kitty