Posted on 11/03/2001 3:26:28 PM PST by Pokey78
THE CIA tried to uncover the Kremlin's deepest secrets during the 1960s by turning cats into walking bugging devices, recently declassified documents show.
In one experiment during the Cold War a cat, dubbed Acoustic Kitty, was wired up for use as an eavesdropping platform. It was hoped that the animal - which was surgically altered to accommodate transmitting and control devices - could listen to secret conversations from window sills, park benches or dustbins.
Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, told The Telegraph that Project Acoustic Kitty was a gruesome creation. He said: "They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that."
Mr Marchetti said that the first live trial was an expensive disaster. The technology is thought to have cost more than £10 million. He said: "They took it out to a park and put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead."
The document, which was one of 40 to be declassified from the CIA's closely guarded Science and Technology Directorate - where spying techniques are refined - is still partly censored. This implies that the CIA was embarrassed about disclosing all the details of Acoustic Kitty, which took five years to design.
Dr Richelson, who is the a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, said of the document: "I'm not sure for how long after the operation the cat would have survived even if it hadn't been run over."
The memo ends by congratulating the team who worked on the Acoustic Kitty project for its hard work. It says: "The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it . . . whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers."
By coincidence, in 1966, a British film called Spy With a Cold Nose featured a dog wired up to eavesdrop on the Russians. It was the same year as the Acoustic Kitty was tested.
Now that we're starting to wake up to the fact that there really are bad guys out there, and maybe we might have to do a few bad things ourselves, this croaker from the 1960's appears out of nowhere. Who the Hell is behind this stuff? Why does a CIA-demonization story from the 1960's appear in a newspaper today? Are we going to be treated to a barrage of this stuff? Whoever writes this stuff can kiss my royal Irish ass. |
So sad.
Aliens and wired cats,yeah whatever.
"Who is there?"
"Kitty Gram for Mr. Ken Starr."
AT ME LATELY
I haven't had that many beers!
I wonder if an Arab was driving the taxi?
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Stuff like this could make me start wearing a tin foil hat. We listened to crap like this about the CIA for decades, and took it seriously, and dismantled our intelligence apparatus. So what happens? We lose 6,000 in a terrorist attack that we didn't see coming.