The government has secret projects. I’m not sure when this started, but it was a long time ago. Governments do those things. They have some big ideas and feel the need to keep them under wraps. For whatever reason. Throughout history, some of the wildest secret government projects have included things from the proposed construction of a “bat bomb” to a plan to nuke the Moon. Seriously.
So yeah. This has always been going on. But all those covert government projects really started to ramp up in the mid-20th century, especially during World War II and the Cold War. This was mostly due to increasingly advanced technology.
With new technology came new ideas of how it could be used.
A lot of the focus has been on war and defending our country. In those years of the mid-20th century, war was deadlier than it had ever been before. And our government was looking for solutions to end war once and for all. Optimistically, this was the idea behind the Manhattan Project. Certainly. Our government wanted to create a super-weapon that would make America’s enemies cower and surrender.
Well. It worked, and it didn’t work. America’s use of atomic bombs against Japan did spell the end of World War II. But the end result made things worse overall. The bomb didn’t end war itself. It just made it deadlier on a massive scale.
But. The powers that be were not deterred. They were always looking for ways to get ahead of the enemy. Some of these secret government operations were horrifying — take MK-Ultra, for one. But other things they were doing were flat-out bizarre. Maybe even a little bit funny.
I know there are a lot of cat lovers out there. So that is why I will mention this one.
As you all know, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union devised countless methods of spying on each other. It was actually a very tense part of history. And sometimes, the government used some “creative” thinking.
One strange example was a U.S. plan to use cats to spy on the Soviets. I’m not kidding you. This was known as Acoustic Kitty.
That’s right. Acoustic Kitty.
This totally crazy project came about after CIA officers noticed an abundance of feral cats while trying to listen in on a Soviet official in the 1960s. Cats in the streets of America near Soviet Spies. So, the CIA guys figured that if cats could get in close without being noticed, then perhaps the agency could use them to their advantage.
But how could a cat possibly relay information back to the CIA? That would take a lot of cat-coaching.
Instead, that’s where a bit of 20th-century technology came into play.
The CIA figured that by outfitting cats with a small radio transmitter and a microphone, they could create an “acoustic kitty” that could spy, in real-time, on the Soviets. They even started to test this theory out, recruiting a veterinary surgeon to perform an hour-long procedure on a cat, implanting the devices in its body.
A former CIA officer Victor Marchetti later remembered: “They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up.”
That CIA of ours. I think they might try just about anything.
Unfortunately for the CIA, the project was a failure. But the cats sure were happy to be out of this mess.
It failed because of several things. Officers had to use small batteries, so recording time was severely limited. And. They also had to find a way to stop the cat from wandering off in search of food. And to seal the deal? When they were finally ready to put the project to the test? They released one of the cats into the street. Disaster struck in the form of a taxi.
Sadly. After the officers sent the “acoustic kitty” on its very first mission to spy on two men in a park in Washington, D.C., the small feline was almost immediately struck by a taxi cab, which killed it right on the spot.
The nine lives thing didn’t pan out in this case.
And neither did Acoustic Kitty.
Another great chapter in American History.
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“In war, truth is the first casualty.” – Aeschylus
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“Secrecy is the essence of power.” – Evan Thomas
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“Spying is like chess: sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win.” – John Rhys-Davies
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Turn up the volume, Kitty.
