The Acoustic Kitty and Other Crazy CIA Plots

Podcast Transcript

Since its creation, the Central Intelligence Agency has been tasked with gathering intelligence on foreign adversarial governments.

Exactly how they were to go about doing this was not exactly spelled out in advance.

This gave them an enormous amount of leeway and creativity in how to go about their mission. Some of their ideas were truly inspired, and others were, how shall we say, odd.

Learn more about the Acoustic Kitty and other crazy CIA plots on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Whenever you talk about the Central Intelligence Agency, you have to take everything with a grain of salt.

They are not wont to spill their secrets. If someone says something wrong about the CIA, they do not issue public corrections. They are more than happy to let people think what they want, especially if it leads the world to think that their capabilities are more than what they really are.

Some of the things I’ll be talking about in this episode have been declassified, and others have been pieced together from stories and other evidence.

So again, take everything regarding the CIA with a grain of salt because the truth is often messy and hidden in the shadows.

What we can say for certain is that certain elements of the CIA have shown, how shall I say, a great deal of creativity.

Your average CIA agent has a pretty straightforward and boring job. They work at a desk and are not involved in day-to-day cloak-and-dagger activities.

However, there are small units within the CIA that have carte blanche to come up with new ideas…..and they have come up with some doozies.

I’ll start with one of the oddest CIA programs and one that has been disputed in some circles: their promotion of modern art.

I’m not talking about modern art generally, but specifically the genre known as Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism—represented by artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning—was chaotic, emotional, and seemingly anti-establishment.

The movement grew to prominence in a shockingly short period of time. What began in the late forties was getting global attention in the early 50s. By 1957, a year after Jackson Pollock’s death, his painting Autumn Rhythm sold for $30,000, an unprecedented amount.

The CIA secretly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom or CCF, an organization that promoted Western intellectual and artistic movements. The CCF sponsored exhibits, publications, and even lectures that helped elevate Abstract Expressionism internationally.

The CIA funneled money through private foundations and figures like Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Rockefellers were major patrons of Abstract Expressionism, and MoMA played a key role in promoting it worldwide.

So, why would the CIA support this sort of art?

There were several reasons.

First, the CIA saw this as a perfect counterpoint to Soviet rigidity. Almost all Soviet art was of a type called Socialist Realism. It was a top-down artistic movement.

Abstract Expressionism symbolized artistic freedom, individuality, and the absence of government control. Even if people didn’t like the art, like President Harry Truman, who hated it, the CIA felt that it showed the world that you could do anything in the United States, including drip paint onto a canvas.

Second, culture was an important part of the Cold War. By promoting Abstract Expressionism painters, they helped move the center of the art world from Europe to the United States.

Finally, it might have had something to do with the artists themselves. The artists had no clue that any of this was going on behind the scenes. Almost all of them had leftist sympathies, with several of them being open anarchists.

One of the best ways to neutralize their political opinions was simply to make them rich.

The CIA didn’t create abstract expressionism, and none of the artists worked directly for the CIA or had any knowledge of the program, but the CIA did champion it behind the scenes.

The CIA was involved in many cultural and artistic programs, but the promotion of Abstract Expressionism was probably the oddest and most unexpected.

Today, abstract expressionism paintings have sold for over a hundred million dollars, and much of that can be directly attributed to the early promotion by the CIA.

Another odd program the CIA launched in the 1970s was the Stargate Project.

The Stargate Project was a top-secret program that investigated the use of psychic phenomena—specifically, remote viewing—for military and intelligence purposes.

Remote viewing was the idea that certain individuals could psychically “see” distant locations, objects, or events without any physical or electronic access. Essentially, the U.S. government was testing whether “psychic spies” could gather intelligence from the Soviet Union and other adversaries.

Subjects would sit in a controlled environment, attempting to describe secret Soviet bases, military installations, and hostage locations.

While some results were oddly specific, they weren’t reliable enough for military use. The program’s findings couldn’t be reproduced under controlled conditions.

Many officials viewed the project as pseudoscience and a waste of money. The total amount spent on the project over the years was over $20 million dollars.

Another CIA project that sounds stranger than it actually was, was the Jack-in-the-Box project.

The Jack-in-the-Box Project was a covert CIA escape tactic developed during the Cold War to help spies evade surveillance, particularly in Moscow and other Soviet-controlled areas.

The way it worked is that a CIA agent under surveillance would enter a car, often with a driver. As soon as the car turned a corner or entered a momentarily concealed area, the agent would slip out of the vehicle unnoticed.

At the same time, an inflatable mannequin dressed to resemble the agent would pop up in their place—making it look like they were still inside.

The KGB (Soviet intelligence) tailing the vehicle would continue following the car, unaware that the real spy had escaped.

The deception didn’t have to work very long, just for a few minutes to confuse the tail.

The system reportedly worked in multiple instances, allowing CIA agents to meet with informants or defectors without detection.

What puts it into the odd category is that the prototype jack-in-the-box dummies were made from inflatable pleasure dolls purchased at adult stores.

Another program, which again isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds, was an attempt to use pigeons.

During the Cold War, the CIA developed a secret program using pigeons equipped with tiny cameras to spy on Soviet military installations. This was part of a broader effort to gather intelligence without being detected by radar or human observers.

In theory, a pigeon with a camera could take higher-resolution images than a spy plane.

The plan was straightforward. Pigeons were trained to fly specific routes over Soviet military bases, shipyards, and missile sites.

A miniature camera was strapped to the pigeon’s chest using a small harness.

The camera was automated to take photographs at set intervals as the pigeon flew over the target.

The pigeon would then return to its handler, allowing the CIA to retrieve the camera and analyze the photos.

The program did have limited success, and pigeons were able to capture useful images of Soviet facilities.

However, it was difficult to control where pigeons flew, and bad weather or predators (like hawks) could interfere with missions.

As satellite imagery and high-altitude reconnaissance planes, like the U-2 spy plane, improved, the pigeon program became less necessary.

There were a host of bizarre CIA plans with regard to Fidel Castro. In fact, there were so many truly strange plans that the CIA had conjured up, that while researching this episode, I realized that it would probably be best if I devoted an entire episode to the topic of the CIA and Castro.

The last CIA Project I want to bring up, and the one that is this episode’s title, is Project Acoustic Kitty.

Acoustic Kitty was a program that did have a small kernel of a good idea at its core. Unfortunately, it was 5% good idea and 95% bad idea.

Operation Acoustic Kitty was an attempt to turn a cat into a covert listening device. For those of you who have ever had a cat, you probably know how this will turn out.

The idea behind the project was simple in theory but nearly impossible in execution: implant a microphone and transmitter into a cat so it could discreetly eavesdrop on Soviet conversations. The program was launched in the 1960s as part of broader efforts to develop new methods of surveillance against America’s Cold War adversaries.

The CIA theorized that since cats were already common in parks and around embassies, they could be used as undetectable mobile surveillance devices. Unlike human spies, who could be recognized and followed, or electronic bugs, which could be discovered and dismantled, a wandering cat was unlikely to attract suspicion.

This is the part of the plan which is not a totally crazy idea.

The agency hoped that a specially trained feline, implanted with sophisticated listening equipment, could be released near Soviet officials and relay valuable intelligence.

To bring this idea to life, CIA scientists undertook an elaborate surgical procedure to implant a microphone inside a cat’s ear canal, a small radio transmitter in its ribcage, and a fine wire antenna along its tail.

This setup would theoretically allow the cat to pick up and transmit nearby conversations to CIA operatives stationed at a distance. The surgical team faced several challenges, particularly in ensuring that the cat would survive the procedure and function normally despite having an array of electronic components inside its body. The operation was highly invasive and required extensive adjustments to the cat’s physiology to accommodate the spy gear.

Remember, this was in the 1960s when electronics weren’t as miniaturized as they are today.

Once the prototype was created, the CIA had to train the cat to perform its new role. This proved to be another major hurdle.

Unlike dogs, which can be trained to follow precise commands, cats are notoriously independent and unpredictable. The agency spent months attempting to condition the cat to follow specific paths and remain still in designated locations to pick up conversations.

The challenge was not just in getting the cat to behave predictably but also in ensuring it would approach and stay near the intended targets—Soviet diplomats. The agency even experimented with modifying the cat’s feeding schedule, hoping that hunger might drive it toward people in search of food.

Despite these efforts, the cat consistently failed to follow commands in any reliable way……because, it’s a cat.

Despite the training difficulties, the CIA eventually decided to test Acoustic Kitty in a real-world espionage scenario. The first field test took place near the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The plan was to release the cat and have it wander toward a group of Soviet officials engaged in conversation, allowing CIA operatives to listen in on their discussions.

However, the mission was an instant and catastrophic failure. As soon as the cat was released, it wandered into a street and was struck by a taxi.

It was killed immediately.

Following this disastrous test, Operation Acoustic Kitty was abandoned. The CIA had spent an estimated $10–20 million on the project before concluding that controlling a cat for espionage purposes was simply not feasible.

By 1967, the CIA shut down the project entirely, shifting its focus toward more reliable surveillance methods, such as electronic eavesdropping, satellites, and human operatives.

The program was finally declassified in 2001.

These programs I’ve covered highlight the CIA’s willingness to explore even the most unconventional ideas in its efforts to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union. Decades later, details of the operation were declassified, revealing to the world just how desperate—and sometimes absurd—the intelligence agencies could be in their pursuit of Cold War espionage.