Operation Acoustic Kitty

rockville writes: "Remember the Cold War, when intelligence agencies had no oversight and a blank check? Now that those days are back, here's a good object lesson: the Chicago Sun-Times has details about Operation Acoustic Kitty, a CIA program to wire a cat to spy on the Soviet Union. Feel free to be either shocked at the depravity or shocked at the stupidity. The first prototype is also a nominee for Worst Presentation Ever." Hmmm. Last time I posted a story about cats, I got angry email from cat-lovers. Let's see what happens this time.

Comments

Declassified documents on Acoustic Kitty

[Black Acid]

Guardian Unlimited has an article, Project: Acoustic Kitty, which says:

A fresh batch of newly declassified CIA documents, however, provides a more nuanced picture of the CIA's directorate of science and technology. The documents - requested under the Freedom of Information Act by Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the national security archive in Washington - chart the development of the extraordinary US spy satellites as well as the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. But they also record some of the gaffes and wrong turns along the way, which reveal the CIA's boffins to be as accident-prone as any government institution.

The "Acoustic Kitty" is one of the CIA's many failures. You can download the declassified documents at George Washington University. Most relevent is Document 27: Views on Trained Cat Use. Interesting read straight from the horse's mouth.

Not that easy.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite what you may think, it's not that easy to control a cockroach.

How do I know, you ask?

I'm a neuroscience graduate student who works in a lab that studies cockroach neurophysiology and movement control:

http://www.life.uiuc.edu/delcomyn/

Yes, we can GUIDE the motions, by stimulating parts of the CPG (central pattern generators) in cockroach motor control - each pair of legs in cockroaches have internal movement pattern generators, as well as connections to other legs as well as the higher CNS ganglia. This still doesn't mean we have total control, or even relatively FINE control - something that would be required for this kind of fantasy "bug" intelligence work. It's really not that practical, and I doubt it will ever be - a lot more can be acheived by remote sensing technology, or possibly MEMS-type sensors.

Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
Neuroscience Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
crispiewm@hotmail.com

This was on TV years ago...

[thesurfaces.net]

There was a BBC documentary about 4 or 5 years ago with this story in it; the main subject was the MKULTRA project, and it was entitled "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate" (or something like that), but this "Acoustic Kitty" thing came up as an anecdote from some ex-intelligence guy they interviewed. Unfortunately, Google turns absolutely nothing up, and the BBC themselves apparently don't know a thing about it!

Wrong title...

[thesurfaces.net]

I got the title confused with this, which is a good read on MKULTRA, but the program definitely had "Manchurian Candidate" in the title!

more CIA operations

[diarmuid_c]

For instance Operation Mongoose where among other things America civilians would be shot, planes hijacked and ships sunk which would then be blamed on the Cubans, giving the US an excuse to invade.

It's is suspected that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was actually based on the above operation.

If you havent read it already check out Body of Secrets , a recent history of the NSA, and proof that the land of the free is far from that