The most famous kitty in spy history is probably the white Persian of James Bond flicks. The image of a faceless villain stroking the cat in the early 1960s films is now a meme. Lesser known is the cat the CIA attempted to turn into a spy. “Operation Acoustic Kitty” was a secret plan to turn cats into portable spying devices. A surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear, a radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and wove an antenna into the cat’s fur. CIA operatives hoped they could train the cat to sit near foreign officials. That way, the cat could secretly transmit their private conversations to CIA operatives. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi — not the outcome they were expecting. The CIA concluded: “Our final examination of trained cats convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”
