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.
Carrier pigeons have been used succesfully in military/ espionage operations for centuries. The USN has had varying degrees of succes using dolphins in mining/ demining/ and reconnaissance ops. On the counterintel/ security side, patrol dogs are obvious choices, and in Viet Nam, geese were noted for their use as sentries.
...I know the project was never brought to fruition, but I'm not sure how far along it got in the developmental stage before it was axed.
Pillow talk, when their guard is down...
They have less and less credibility and relevance by the day.
Oh yes, and the Guardian site locks up my browser, too, so I already put it into my HOSTS file..in case I accidently follow a link to it!
Let's stop posting anything from the UK trash press, huh?
And the Stateworshipers cry 'tinfoil'.......
Real science would create Project Silent Pussy.
A stealth technology, to be sure....
They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that."
I call Barbra Streisand. Just what sort of "wire" would stop a cat from being hungry, especially given mid-60s technology? This guy's a loon.
We already don't even need the bee. They're already able to make robot bees with little cameras built-in, that they can send off on spy missions. I saw a science report on TV about this around six months ago.
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice...
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