Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

According to Bob, the CIA’s scientists and technicians understood from the get-go that this project firmly fell into the “high risk” category. Inserting electronics into a living organism was not as routine as it is today (this is several years before the first heart transplant). Living bodies are not welcoming spaces for electronics. They are hot and they are wet. They have natural defense systems, which fight against foreign intruders. Through millions of years of evolution, the cat has been designed to specification. Cats are streamlined fur machines. Everything inside a cat is there for an important biological reason. There’s not a whole lot of extra room for implants, wires, and batteries. It wouldn’t do the CIA much good if the cat listening device worked to perfection, but it blew its cover—or damaged its equipment—by constantly clawing or licking at itself, or if it couldn’t walk straight because it was laden with the extra weight of the CIA’s electronics package.

With this in mind, the CIA did all it could to maximize the ethical and medical standards necessary to ensure the humane treatment (relatively speaking, of course) of the test cat, a gray-and-white female of undocumented breed. A professional veterinarian, working in a clean, sterile operating environment within an animal hospital, conducted the procedure. A three-quarter-inch audio transmitter, developed by TSD and an outside contractor, was embedded at the base of the cat’s skull. You know the loose skin just below the head of a cat, where you (or its mother) can pick it up and carry it around without causing it any pain? The perfect place for the audio transmitter. The small, wirelike microphone was—of course—placed in the ear canal, to allow for easy and fluid conduction of sound.

The antenna, made of very fine wire, needed to extend beyond the insulated inside of the cat for it to work effectively. But it couldn’t just stick straight up into the air. To ensure it remained hidden, it was woven into the cat’s fur, down along her spine.

After the operation, Acoustic Kitty was placed inside a recovery area, as the CIA techs anxiously waited for the anesthesia to wear off. Once back on its feet, the cat was put through a series of tests. To the scientists’ and technicians’ satisfaction, the microphone worked as advertised, and provided a usable signal. However, there were other issues. Despite their best efforts at training the cat to move consistently according to mission, results in this area were “inconsistent” and the operational utility of Acoustic Kitty was “questionable,” even after several weeks of exercises and tests. For some reason (obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a cat), the CIA was having trouble training a cat to behave. Because the results failed to improve, and CIA was hesitant to deploy its new robocat in an operational environment without a guarantee of some level of practical control, the project was ultimately scrapped.

Ambitious, yet sensible. Pushing the outside of the envelope, but not taking things too far. Walking the line, but not falling over. If this was the only version of the story, it wouldn’t be in this book.

But it isn’t.

Version two of the Acoustic Kitty story comes from Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms in the mid- to late 1960s, and coauthor of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence . As his book title suggests, Marchetti became disillusioned with the Agency, and perhaps this attitude influenced the version of Acoustic Kitty he provides. So take this with a grain, or a pound, of salt. It might be utter nonsense. But it’s one hell of a story.

According to Marchetti, Acoustic Kitty can be summed up in a single word: a “monstrosity.” However, Marchetti’s and Bob’s versions of the creation of our wired cat hero don’t really diverge all that much, excepting the fact that Marchetti says Acoustic Kitty’s tail was used as the audio antenna (I’m assuming he meant they strung the wire through, or on top of, its tail, but he isn’t specific), and that it was a male cat, and not a female. The real differences in the stories come when we turn our attention to the training, testing, and—according to Marchetti—a real-world operational dry run in an actual living, breathing urban environment.

The testing and training process was slow, but ultimately fruitful. Acoustic Kitty would follow commands, negotiate obstacles put in its way by the scientists, and accomplish the short missions (walk from here to there, stop on command, sit over there, and so on) that would progressively get harder and more complicated. The only hiccup was something they probably should have seen coming: Cats, from time to time, need to eat. Acoustic Kitty would be plugging along during testing, but then get hungry and wander off in search of food. And that’s where the MKULTRA experiments with electrical brain stimulation in animals come into play. Obviously, the CIA couldn’t have its invention skipping away in the middle of a mission to look for some Meow Mix, so the vets and techs went back in and rejiggered Acoustic Kitty’s wiring, turning off its natural instinct to seek sustenance. After a successful second surgery, and equally successfully follow-on testing, Acoustic Kitty was now ready for its full-scale field test.

Marchetti never provided a detailed, minute-by-minute account of the first (and only) CIA field test of Acoustic Kitty. He told us the ending, but that’s all. So welcome back inside my head.

As I imagine it, the field test takes place on a sleepy street somewhere in Northwest Washington, DC. The CIA techs parallel park their spy van along the street, directly across from one of the many public parks scattered throughout the city. Maybe their van is just plain and white. Maybe it has “Bob’s Plumbing” or “Phil’s Handyman” or “Flowers by Irene” painted on the sides in an effort to establish a plausible cover. Inside the van, the two CIA techs are surrounded by 1960s-era technology: blinking lights, knobs, switches, buttons. An oscilloscope is in the corner oscilloscoping. Monitors that project the feed from a handful of clandestine cameras line the top of the interior. These will allow for the CIA to watch the test from every angle. As one of the techs takes Acoustic Kitty out of its cage and makes sure everything is where it’s supposed to be, the other turns the knobs, flicks the switches, and pushes the buttons that activate the Agency’s newest top secret listening device. The cat is placed on the asphalt, and the tech points to two men, deep in conversation, sitting on a bench in the park.

To the surprised satisfaction of the CIA techs, Acoustic Kitty goes straight for the men on the bench—no hesitancy, no deviation, no stopping to search for food. A beeline to the target. It’s not hard to imagine what might have been going through the techs’ heads: This is going to make my career. I’m going to be promoted, get a raise. Maybe I can take that vacation at the beach this year. Maybe buy a boat. Or a motorcycle! If I get a Harley, the covert ops guys might think I’m cool. The sky’s the limit. And as they watch our feline heroine cross the double-painted line in the street, pride swells up in them. This is fifty small steps for a cat, but one giant leap for mankind.

But here’s what we do know from Marchetti’s version of the story. Only feet away from the safety of the curb, Acoustic Kitty was run over by a taxi.

No promotion. No raise. No boat. No Harley. Just the indignity of having to scrape the still-sparking Acoustic Kitty off the pavement, before the Soviets—or worse, the Washington Post— find out what the CIA was up to.

No matter whichversion of this story we believe—or which version we really, really want to believe—we are fairly confident we know the ultimate outcome of the project. The CIA left a paper trail. In a heavily redacted document, entitled “[Redacted] Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use,” the CIA gave its verdict. Although the report acknowledges the “remarkable scientific achievement” in training cats to move short distances, and that the work done on this project over the years “reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it, particularly [Redacted] whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers,” the CIA decided the program was not practical, and Acoustic Kitty was scrapped for good.