Full title: Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA spent about $15 million surgically implanting a microphone in a cat’s ear, a transmitter under its skin, and an antenna through its tail to spy on Soviet conversations

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      What I remember is they tried to do a test run of whether or not it could hear two people stting and talking at a park bench.

      So, they released, from the safe house on the other side of the road from the park, it started to go toward the bench, and BLAM, hit by a car.

      EDIT:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

      The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.[4] However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and “the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards”.[5] Subsequent tests also failed.[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.[6] However, other accounts report more success for the project.[7]

      … So… not exactly a high of certainty going on here.