{"id":7642,"date":"2015-08-26T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=7642"},"modified":"2015-08-26T12:00:31","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T17:00:31","slug":"acoustic-kitty-more-weird-cold-war-spy-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/08\/26\/acoustic-kitty-more-weird-cold-war-spy-gear\/","title":{"rendered":"Acoustic Kitty: More Weird Cold War Spy-Gear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kitty\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Luis A. Mercado<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Ever wished you could talk to animals to find out what they know? Well, so did the CIA. During the Cold War, when espionage was the stage for many of the ways the U.S. and the Soviets tried to one-up each other, the latest project of choice was, \u201cAcoustic Kitty\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAcoustic Kitty<\/em>\u201d is the name of a project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology<\/a>, which in 1960 intended to use cats to spy on theKremlin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The CIA used five<\/strong> years and more than $10 million<\/strong><\/a> attempting to train a cat, which normally is easier, but given the surgically implanted listening equipment, battery and tail-based antenna, it became tougher.<\/p>\n

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They had, normal cat problems:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That overriding didn\u2019t work as expected, though. During it\u2019s first mission (eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Ave. in Washington D.C., the cat darted under a taxicab and died during a field test<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After this, a second attempt was done but in the end they desisted and removed the equipment from the cat and had it live a happier life afterwards. Presumably, ignoring any human owners and free of surgically implanted spy equipment.<\/p>\n

The project was considered a failure, a total loss and officially cancelled in 1967 and the closing memorandum<\/a> stated that:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The project was disclosed to the public in 2001 when some CIA documents became declassified<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Original Source Article at Medium<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Luis A. Mercado Ever wished you could talk to animals to find out what they know? Well, so did the CIA. During the Cold War, when espionage was the stage for many of the ways the U.S. and the Soviets tried to one-up each other, the latest project of choice was, \u201cAcoustic Kitty\u201d. \u201cAcoustic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1725,1286,65],"tags":[2015,2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}