Cold War Oddities · Ep. 1 · The CIA Tried to Turn a Cat Into a Spy
Plug in your Nintendo 64 and dust of Goldeneye. We’re headed back in time to where low-poly animation is king. Also, the Central Intelligence Agency will now attempt its most daring act: convincing a house cat to do what it is told. No net. No treats. Possibly no chance. Just a little surgery, some technology, and a dream.
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THE PITCH
The idea, as it has come down to us, was almost elegant. Nobody looks twice at a cat. A cat can wander into places a spy cannot. According to former CIA tech chief Robert Wallace and historian H. Keith Melton, the target was the meetings of “an Asian head of state,” where cats wandered in and out while the boss talked strategy. (Our park bench full of Soviet agents is a “what if,” built for the show.)
THE HARDWARE
Animal trainer Bob Bailey, whose firm worked with the agency, described the setup to Smithsonian: a microphone wired from the cat’s inner ear to a battery and instruments in its rib cage, with the cat steered by ultrasonic sound. Another ex-CIA officer, Victor Marchetti, said the tail served as the antenna. Our surgery scene is a schematic built from those later accounts, not a blueprint.
1960S The CIA works with animal trainers on a bugged cat
MARCH 1967 A redacted memo, “Views on Trained Cats,” calls it impractical
2001 The National Security Archive publishes the memo
THE ONE PROBLEM
Cats. The memo itself (heavily redacted, title included) congratulates everyone on proving that cats “can indeed be trained to move short distances,” calls that “a remarkable scientific achievement,” and then concludes the program “would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” In circus terms: the tightrope walker made it three steps and then lay down for a nap.
Disputed: Marchetti said the cat was hit by a taxi on its very first test. Robert Wallace, who ran the CIA’s Office of Technical Service in the 1990s, told Smithsonian, “The acoustic kitty was not killed by getting run over by a taxicab.” We tell both sides and let you pick your ending.
Not verified: price tags of $15 million or $20 million get repeated everywhere, but no document we found backs either figure. Same for the popular details about a park next to a Soviet compound and extra surgery to stop the cat getting hungry. They stay out of the show.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
This one trades our pixel look for late-90s console 3D: chunky low-poly characters, foggy distances and a soft, slightly blurry picture, all drawn in code. Narration is an ElevenLabs voice (Philip), the spy-surf music is from Suno (“Coastline Espionage”), and the script was rewritten by a human who wanted the cat to win.
SOURCES
- National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 54, “Science, Technology and the CIA” (2001)
- “Views on Trained Cats” memo, March 1967 (PDF)
- Smithsonian, “The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human” (2013)
- Smithsonian, “The CIA Experimented on Animals in the 1960s, Too. Just Ask ‘Acoustic Kitty’”
- National Security Archive blog, “Document Friday: Acoustic Kitty” (2010)
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