Project Acoustic Kitty went about as well as you’d expect.
Here’s the scene: A man wearing a trench coat and a fedora sits on a park bench, looking up frequently from his newspaper to cast furtive glances at passersby. A stray cat wanders by. It rubs itself against the man’s legs. He pets it absently and continues to look anxiously at his surroundings.
Eventually, another man arrives, carrying a briefcase. He sits down next to the man with the newspaper. They exchange a few words in Russian, and then the second man departs, leaving the briefcase behind. The first man sits a moment longer, then collects the briefcase and leaves in the opposite direction.
We’ll never know what nefarious plans these two were cooking up…or will we? Could that adorable feline actually have collected any pertinent information?
Well, no. Despite the CIA’s best efforts during the Cold War, using cats as spies became, unsurprisingly, a disaster.
Herding cats for national security
The 1960s were a wild time for the CIA. When they weren’t dosing each other with acid or trying to use exploding cigars to kill Fidel Castro, the Agency’s staff were exploring other novel approaches to espionage, like Project Acoustic Kitty.
The mission was to use that most famously cooperative, obedient and not even slightly contrary of beasts, the domestic cat, to try and collect information from the Soviet Embassy.
Why are cats so hard to train?
Anyone reading about this project could sympathize with cats not caring in the least about our highly specialized needs. But still: why are cats so disinclined to do anything we want? After all, dogs are desperate to please. Why are cats so…difficult?
Stephen Quandt, a professional cat behaviorist based in New York City, tells Popular Science that there’s a key difference between man’s best friend and the humble domestic cat: “Dogs have been bred to want to please us. Retrieving a ball feels good to them, but it also feels good that we’re asking them to retrieve it, and that they’re able to do it.”
https://www.popsci.com/environment/the-cia-once-trained-cats-to-be-cold-war-spies/