Acoustic Kitty was a
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...
(CIA) project launched by the
Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s, which was intended to use
cat
The cat (''Felis catus''), also referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species of the family Felidae. Advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the ...
s to spy on the
Kremlin
The Moscow Kremlin (also the Kremlin) is a fortified complex in Moscow, Russia. Located in the centre of the country's capital city, the Moscow Kremlin (fortification), Kremlin comprises five palaces, four cathedrals, and the enclosing Mosco ...
and
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
embassies.
[
In an hour-long procedure, a ]veterinary surgeon
Veterinary surgery is surgery performed on non-human animals by veterinarians, whereby the procedures fall into three broad categories: orthopaedics (bones, joints, muscles), soft tissue surgery (skin, body cavities, cardiovascular system, GI/u ...
implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal
The ear canal (external acoustic meatus, external auditory meatus, EAM) is a pathway running from the outer ear to the middle ear. The adult human ear canal extends from the auricle to the eardrum and is about in length and in diameter.
S ...
, a small radio transmitter
In electronics and telecommunications, a radio transmitter or just transmitter (often abbreviated as XMTR or TX in technical documents) is an electronic device which produces radio waves with an antenna with the purpose of signal transmissio ...
at the base of its skull, and a thin wire into its fur. This would allow the cat to innocuously 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.Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.[Curtis, Adam, "You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough", '' The Living Dead'', BBC television documentary, 1995, interview with Victor Marchetti at 28:10] However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards". Subsequent tests also failed.[ Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss. However, other accounts report more success for the project.
The project was cancelled in 1967.][ A closing memorandum said that the CIA researchers believed that they could train cats to move short distances, but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical." The project was disclosed in 2001, when some CIA documents were declassified.]
See also
* Birds Aren't Real
References
{{Reflist, 30em
Further reading
* ''The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA'', John Ranelagh, rev. ed., New York: Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...
, 1987, at p. 208.
External links
* '' The Memory Palace'' podcast episode about Acoustic Kitt
episode-16-secret-kitty
Declassified CIA document about project
Espionage projects
Central Intelligence Agency operations
Cold War intelligence operations
1960s in the United States
Military animals
Cats in the United States