The Acoustic Kitty project, or How the CIA trained a cat to follow the USSR

It's not just James Bond who can be a secret spy. It's about... a cat. Yes, yes, a simple cat! Trained and trained by the CIA in order to obtain information about the Soviet Union. How is this possible? Read in our material.

The project, codenamed "Acoustic Kitty", was developed in the 1960s with the aim of using cats in espionage missions. With the help of the tailed CIA specialists wanted to find out all the secrets that the embassy staff in Washington discussed.

Why cats? The CIA considered that these animals arouse the least suspicion, even when they walk right next to a person. And in general, kittens are very cute, these 20 gifs are perfect proof of that!

And yet back to our koto-spies. The development of the Acoustic Kitty project was carried out by the agency's specialists for about 5 years. To begin with, the surgeon implanted a special listening device into the cat's ear canal, installed a small radio transmitter at the base of the skull and hid a thin wire antenna under the fur.

Since technology was not sufficiently developed at that time, this process took quite a lot of time and required impressive financial investments. According to some reports, the costs of operations and further training of cats ranged from $ 15 to $ 25 million.

But even such huge sums did not allow solving the urgent problem: it was impossible to hang a battery on the cat that would "feed" the devices, so it could only spy for a limited amount of time.

According to the idea, there should have been several cat spies, but the CIA decided to start the experiment with one adult cat. For a long time she was trained, trained and prepared like a real James Bond! And, in the end, an undercover agent was sent on the first mission. The essence of it was that the cat needed to "eavesdrop" on the conversation of two men sitting outside the embassy, on a bench in a park on Wisconsin Avenue.

The CIA employees had an ideal plan of action, all the necessary equipment and an almost brilliant cat, but their experiment was destroyed in an instant by a completely unexpected factor. When they drove up to the park to drop off the cat not far from the men sitting on the bench, and released the animal, the "mustachioed agent" was hit by a passing car.

All subsequent CIA tests with new koto-spies also failed. Experts explained this by the fact that cats "do not have a deep desire to please their owners" and, moreover, are poorly trained. When the intelligence agency finally realized that nothing would work, the project was recognized as a failure and finally closed. It happened in 1967.

It's funny that the general public found out about "Acoustic Kitty" only after 34 years! In 2001, in accordance with the Law on Freedom of Speech in the United States, 40 documents were declassified, including the "Acoustic Kitty".