Wonders of spying

Wonders of spying

Operation ‘Acoustic Kitty’

Spying has emerged at the dawn of civilization. Espionage and intelligence have been around since human beings first began organizing themselves into distinct societies, cities, states and nations.

PanARMENIAN.Net - Early Egyptian pharaohs employed agents of espionage to ferret-out disloyal subject and to locate tribes that could be conquered and enslaved.

The Roman Empire possessed a fondness for the practice of political espionage. Spies engaged in both foreign and domestic political operations, gauging the political climate of the Empire and surrounding lands by eavesdropping in the Forum or in public market spaces.

The United States government has, for centuries, found creative ways to spy on friends, enemies, and everyone in between. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was willing to try just about anything to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union.

The plan dubbed 'Acoustic Kitty' was to use a cat as a four-legged secret agent who would be able to discreetly eavesdrop on Soviet officials and record their private conversations simply by sitting nearby.

“They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up,” said Victor Marchetti, who was an executive assistant to the director of the CIA in the 1960s. “The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity.”

The CIA figured the Soviets would never suspect a cat to be a U.S. spy, so the animal, implanted with audio recording or transmitting devices, could get close to foreign operatives unhindered and eavesdrop on them.

The project took some five years to complete. No one seems to remember who first suggested spy cats, but once the Acoustic Kitty idea was fleshed out, it became a joint project between the CIA’s Office of Technical Services and Office of Research and Development.

The government poured up to $20 million into designing, operating on, and training the first Acoustic Kitty, according to sources.

The CIA built a 3/4-inch-long transmitter to embed at the base of the cat’s skull. Finding a place for the microphone was difficult at first, but the ear canal turned out to be prime, and seemingly obvious, real estate. The antenna was made from fine wire and woven, all the way to the tail, through the cat’s long fur to conceal it. The batteries also gave the specialists a little trouble, since the cats’ size limited them to using only the smallest batteries and restricted the amount of time the cat would be able to record.

Emily Anthes, a science journalist and author, wrote of the experiment: “The problem was that cats are not especially trainable--they don't have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do--and the agency's robo-cat didn't seem terribly interested in national security.”

For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi.

After the cat’s death, a CIA operative returned to the accident site and collected the spy’s remains. They didn't want the Soviets to get their hands on the audio equipment.

Project Acoustic Kitty was completely abandoned in 1967 and declared an utter failure.

Lusine Mkrtumova / PanARMENIAN.Net
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