I have a question. Who looked at a cat and thought, yes, excellent intelligence asset? Not a pigeon. Not a dog. A cat.
An animal that will ignore you for six hours, knock something off a table just to establish a principle, and abandon a military operation because it saw a bird.
The CIA really did investigate this. The project was called Acoustic Kitty, and it involved a trained cat, a concealed microphone, a transmitter and an antenna woven into the animal’s fur. The Cold War was a strange time. People were building nuclear weapons, sending satellites into space and apparently asking whether a cat could sit near two men and listen to them without developing unrelated plans.
And then there is the story everybody knows. The cat is released near the target. The cat crosses the street. A taxi appears. National security loses a whiskered employee.
That story is spectacular. It may also be the least secure part of the evidence.
So today we’re asking a very narrow question, because narrow questions are how you stop yourself from wandering into a six-month investigation about an accounting error. Was Acoustic Kitty a real CIA project? Yes. Did the equipment work? Apparently, at least technically. Was the cat a reliable field operative? No. And did a taxi kill it? Maybe. That’s the irritating answer.
I’m Sam Davis. This is The Outsider. Let’s investigate the most independent contractor in Cold War history.
In this episode:
• The idea was absurd, which did not stop anyone from funding it
• The equipment worked. The animal had other priorities.
• The taxi story may be the best part, which is exactly why we have to be careful
• The real conspiracy is not that the cat was secretly successful
