Acoustic Kitty: The CIA Spent $20 Million Turning a Cat Into a Spy

In the early 1960s, the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology developed a programme called Acoustic Kitty. The concept was straightforward, in the way that only Cold War intelligence operations can be straightforward: surgically implant a listening device and transmitter into a live cat, train the cat to approach specific targets, and use it to eavesdrop on Soviet officials in public spaces.

The surgery involved implanting a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and a thin wire antenna woven through its fur and along its tail. The operation took about an hour. The cat survived. The programme then spent several years attempting to train the animal to move towards specific targets on command — a task that, as anyone who has owned a cat will appreciate, proved considerably more difficult than anticipated.

The first operational test took place in a park near the Soviet embassy in Washington. The cat was released near a bench where two Soviet officials were sitting. It was immediately run over by a taxi.

The programme was subsequently terminated. The CIA's internal assessment, declassified in 2001, concluded that the programme had 'produced no practical results' and that 'the work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it' — a sentence that manages to be both technically accurate and entirely misleading.

The total cost of the Acoustic Kitty programme has been estimated at approximately $20 million in 1960s dollars. The declassified documents do not specify what happened to the cat after the taxi incident, which is perhaps the most unsettling detail in an already unsettling account.

Acoustic Kitty is often cited as an example of Cold War excess and institutional absurdity. It is also a reminder that the organisations responsible for national security were, during this period, willing to pursue almost any idea regardless of its plausibility — and that the declassified record of what they actually did is considerably stranger than most fiction.