Obtaining timely, reliable intelligence is an important part of a nation's day-to-day job, regardless of the period, helping leaders make the most appropriate judgments and decisions. In the 1960s, the CIA launched a program called Acoustic Kitty to quietly eavesdrop on conversations from employees at targeted embassies.
The plan cost the CIA more than $10 million, but it was a completely failed and slightly hilarious project that was actually put into practice and solved what everyone did not expect to be destroyed by a taxi.
At that time, the CIA's Bureau of Science and Technology carried out technical developments, and this department was very impressive, and they participated in the development of many high-tech equipment, such as the U-2. According to their vision, by installing sound recording and transmission equipment on the cat, and then training the cat to learn to eavesdrop on some special person, and finally placing the cat near the embassy, so that the information can be obtained quietly.
A veterinarian was recruited into the CIA, he performed an operation on a test kitten, the operation took about 1 hour, he implanted a small radio transmitter in the cat's neck, put the microphone in the cat's ear, using the cat's ear itself natural noise filter structure, the cat spine and tail can be implanted in the antenna, the small battery is also put into the cat's body. Honestly, such surgeries are a bit cruel to cats, and even the archival researchers have pointed out that he is not sure how long the cat off the operating table will live.
This unique "spy cat" encountered an accident on the first mission, when the CIA agent hid in a humble van, and then quietly released the "spy cat", the cat did not live up to expectations from the park to the embassy, but the handsome not more than three seconds, a passing taxi directly knocked the cat dead and flew out 3 meters, directly declaring the mission a failure.
In fact, there are many problems in this way of implanting electronic devices for cats, first of all, the operation itself has certain risks, the cat may not be able to perform the task after getting off the operating table, and secondly, installing these devices in the small body must make the cat very uncomfortable, any accident in action is possible, the cat's daily life also needs to eat, the curiosity of the creature itself is very heavy, so it is impossible to honestly perform the task according to the training, the radio transmitter on the cat will have electronic signals, although it is very weak but inevitable.
The CIA officially terminated the Acoustic Kitty program in 1967, and while it was considered "imaginative," it was "impractical" to continue training cats to act as spies, and the cost of the project was not cheap.
The "Acoustic Kitty" project was kept secret for a long time and was only made public in 2001, and this history has attracted a lot of attention, but it is basically ironic, and it has to be said that this is indeed a story that makes people want to laugh when they hear it.
It's not a big deal for the CIA to modify and train cats, and the department has trained many animals, such as otters, pigs, and so on. There is another theory of the "Acoustic Kitty" project, that is, the cat was not actually hit by the car, so what about the follow-up? No follow-up...