Acoustic Kitty

During the Cold War, the U.S. government threw money and manpower into the surveillance of Soviet diplomatic personnel stationed in Washington, D.C. They peered out at them from not-so-secret spy houses and even dug a failed listening tunnel under the embassy compound. But these efforts pale in comparison to the sheer outlandishness of the six-year-long CIA attempt to listen in on Soviet Embassy employees with microphone-carrying cats. 

If everything went according to plan, the cat would wander around the embassy grounds and pass by sensitive conversations, then later get scooped up and debriefed by a “handler.” The aptly named Project Acoustic Kitty cost upwards of $20 million and was quietly shuttered when the inaugural feline spy was run over by a car.

This bizarro-fascinating story first came to light thanks to the investigative FOIA-filing sleuths at the George Washington University National Security Archive, which obtained the heavily redacted “[BLANK] Views on Trained Cats [BLANK] for [BLANK] Use” in 1983. Additional details were revealed in recent years by GWU Senior Fellow Jeffrey Richelson and other historians of Cold War spycraft.

Project Acoustic Kitty was in operation from 1961 to 1966/7 as a collaboration between the CIA’s Office Of Research and Development and Office of Technical Services. First efforts to wire a cat for sound led to the development of an inner ear microphone, a battery pack implanted beneath the “pocket of flesh” at the base of the skull, and a thin wire “antenna” running down the tail. According to Richelson, the rig was more advanced than your standard microphone and used the cat’s cochlea to filter out background noise.

If former CIA staffer Victor Marchetti is to be believed, the surgery went far beyond wiring the feline for sound: “Wires would run up to its ear, to its cochlea, wires to its brain to determine when it was hungry or sexually aroused. And wires to override these urges.” (Marchetti was one-time special assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms, which seems credible, though he was known to dabble in conspiracy theories later in his life.)

The CIA’s “View on Trained Cats” memo optimistically concludes that, “we have satisfied ourselves it is indeed possible” and that, “this is indeed a remarkable scientific achievement.” Marchetti painted a very different conclusion for a BBC camera crew in 1995, recalling how the first-ever Acoustic Kitty was killed. “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.”

Numerous secondary sources estimate the hit-and-run must have occurred near the present day Embassy of the Russian Federation on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. Chances are better that the acoustic kitty met his demise on 16th Street, where the Russian diplomatic staff was headquartered until 1994.