In the 1960's, the CIA launched the Acoustic Kitty program, which was aimed at gathering intelligence from Soviet embassies and the Kremlin using cats that had been implanted with microphones and small radio transmitters that were drilled into their ears and the base of their skulls.



Anyone who has ever owned a cat or ever been around a cat knows they do not give two sh*ts about what you want from them. Cats only do three things, hunt, groom and sleep. So when the CIA spent roughly 20 million dollars trying to train them in the ways of spying, you'd think maybe just someone would say hey, "this is pretty stupid". 


In the 1960's, the CIA launched the Acoustic Kitty program, which was aimed at gathering intelligence from Soviet embassies and the Kremlin using cats that had been implanted with microphones and small radio transmitters that were drilled into their ears and the base of their skulls. 


The idea was to get the cats close enough to the CIA's targets so that they could covertly transmit conversations that would otherwise have been out of reach. 




The first issue they came across in their genius plan was controlling the cat's focus, go figure! So addressing the cat's hunger before a mission had to be addressed, as when let go, they would just begin wondering around looking for food, you know like cats do. 


The first believed mission given to these 20 million dollar spy cats was to spy on on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound in Washington DC. Allegedly, the cat they had chosen for the mission was run over by a car shortly after being released, although this has been disputed by the former Director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, Robert Wallace in 2013. 


The CIA tried and failed to turn cats into spies - acoustic kitty


Wallace did however admit that the project was disbanded after it was proven difficult in training the cats with the right behavior needed for covert operations. Wallaces was quoted saying this about the cat used for the mission, "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." 


Project acoustic kitty was seen as a total failure and an utter waste of time and was ultimately ended in 1967 after it was concluded 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." Ya think?