The CIA's Spy Cat
1967
Of all the gadgets of the Cold War, few are as strange as the one the CIA's technical staff tried to build in the 1960s: a cat with a microphone and transmitter inside it, trained to stroll up to people and listen. The project is now known as Acoustic Kitty, and the main surviving document about it reads like a polite letter of rejection.
A bug with whiskers
Hiding a microphone near a conversation was one of the hardest problems in Cold War espionage. A cat, the reasoning went, could wander almost anywhere without anyone paying attention. According to the National Security Archive's Unredacted blog and Wikipedia, CIA technicians implanted listening equipment in a live cat and attempted to train it to approach and linger near targets.
What the memo says
The best evidence is a short, heavily redacted CIA memorandum from March 1967 titled 'Views on Trained Cats [redacted] for [redacted] Use', released through declassification and published by the National Security Archive. It says the agency's final examination of trained cats had convinced it that the program 'would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs'.
Oddly, the memo is full of praise. It calls the fact that cats could be trained to move short distances 'in itself a remarkable scientific achievement', and says the work 'reflects great credit' on the people who guided it, whose 'energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers'. But, it concludes, environmental and security factors in a real foreign situation meant it would not be practical.
The strangest details
The most vivid description comes from Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the CIA director, quoted on the Unredacted blog and on Wikipedia. In his telling, technicians slit the cat open, put batteries inside, and used its tail as an antenna; when it wandered off to find food, they added another wire to override its hunger. These details come from his recollection, not from any released document, so they should be read as one insider's account.
Myth versus reality: the taxi
The best-known part of the story is its ending. Marchetti claimed that on the first field test the cat was let out of a van near a park bench and was immediately run over by a taxi. Wikipedia notes that this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, who said the project was abandoned because the cat could not be trained to behave as required, and that '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'.
So the taxi ending may be the part of the story that never happened. The memo itself says nothing about a dead cat; it simply declares the idea impractical.
The price tag is also uncertain. Wikipedia cites Marchetti for a cost of about $20 million, while the Unredacted blog says the price was reported to be $15 million. No released budget figure confirms either.
Aftermath
Acoustic Kitty was shelved in 1967, and for years it was known mainly through Marchetti's account. The release of the 'trained cats' memo confirmed that the agency really had spent years on the idea and then given up on it. Today it is remembered as a symbol of Cold War gadgetry at its most ambitious, and of how hard it is to get a cat to do anything it does not want to do.
Further reading
- National Security Archive: 'Views on Trained Cats' memo (PDF)
- Unredacted: Document Friday, Acoustic Kitty