Operation Acoustic Kitty: When The CIA Tried To Train Cats As Spies
YouTubeAn illustration showing how Operation Acoustic Kitty might have worked.
In the 1960s, the CIA devised an outlandish — but possibly brilliant — idea. What if they could fit a cat with spying technology and train it to cozy up to Soviet officials? With that, Operation Acoustic Kitty was born.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the project took five years and $20 million dollars to get off the ground. CIA analysts had to build a 3/4-inch-long transmitter to place at the base of the cat’s skull, put a microphone in its ear, and wrap an antenna around its tail.
“They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up,” Victor Marchetti, a former assistant to the CIA director, said. “They made a monstrosity.”
CIAA redacted memo from Operation Acoustic Kitty outlining the possibility of training as spies.
But this government operation was far from a success. That cat in question was a largely unwilling subject, who exhibited the cat-like tendency of wandering off wherever it wanted to, whenever it wanted to. Still, the CIA was determined to test out their new technology.
Agents brought their feline spy to a park, where they hoped it would sit near two men on a bench and pick up their conversation. Instead, the cat dashed off, ran into the road, and was promptly hit and killed by a taxi. In 1967, the CIA officially ended Operation Acoustic Kitty.
“Our final examination of trained cats… convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs,” CIA analysts admitted in a heavily redacted memo about the covert operation, according to History.
However, perhaps hoping to justify a $20 million price tag, the memo also noted that Operation Acoustic Kitty had proved that: “cats can indeed be trained to move short distances… in itself a remarkable scientific achievement.”
Heart Attack Gun: The U.S. Government Operation To Assassinate World Leaders
Associated Press/The U.S. CapitolSenator Frank Church of Idaho and Senator John Tower of Texas exhibit a “heart attack” gun developed by the CIA at a Senate hearing in 1975.
On September 17, 1975, an extraordinary hearing took place in the U.S. Senate. Following the Watergate scandal and the erosion of trust in American institutions, many Americans demanded to know what the CIA had been up to. Idaho Senator Frank Church created a committee to find out.
Not only did the so-called Church Committee uncover evidence of covert operations like MK-Ultra, but it also pulled back the curtain on a different government operation called Project MKNAOMI. Analysts with Project MKNAOMI, it found, had been working on weapons, including a “heart attack gun.”
The gun had a simple but devious design. Using a frozen dart of shellfish toxin mixed with water as a bullet, it could swiftly and quietly kill someone from 100 meters away. Once the victim was shot, the dart would melt. And since shellfish toxin is an undetectable poison, the cause of death would always appear to any medical examiner as an ordinary heart attack.
YouTubeArizona Senator Barry Goldwater examines the so-called “heart attack gun” during the September 1975 hearing.
At the Sept. 17 hearing, Church and other senators handled the “heart attack gun,” a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism, and asked CIA Director William Colby questions about it.
“A special [gun] was developed which potentially would be able to enter the target without perception,” Colby admitted to members of the Church Committee. “There was no way of percieving that the target was hit.”
But after that hearing, the gun seemed to have vanished. And, to date, there’s no official record that the CIA assassinated anyone with a heart attack gun. What’s more, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order in 1976 explicitly forbidding government employees from “[engaging] in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
