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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 conversatio… (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by time2lose@lemmy.world to c/interestingasfuck@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] Axiochus@lemmy.world 53 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Wasn't the cat immediately hit by a car or something?

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 49 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes.

Honestly though, this smells like embezzlement or moving funds to some clandestine project.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah, the money went to Katianna the cleaning lady at the embassy and the story about the $15m spy cat was to cover up how they got the information.

[–] Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'd be okay with that if true

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

The cleaning lady was actually a soviet honeypot named Nickloi who only slept with his targets with the lights off.

[–] MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Where the cat? Oh, um, it got run over by a car.

[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

One was. What they don't know is that the taxi was being driven by a cat who had been assigned the mission to preserve the secrecy of their own clandestine meetings.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's the story. Which has to be at least partially bullshit.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.