Finally, this week’s #tbt document pick – and recently picked up by Reddit’s TIL feed – is a March 1967 CIA report entitled “Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use,” more popularly known as the CIA’s “acoustic kitty” project. In what the CIA described as a “remarkable scientific achievement,” though later conceding it was not a “practical eavesdropping device,” the CIA stuffed a live cat with electronic spying equipment and attempted to train it to become a Cold War spy. After the cat had batteries and wires placed inside of it and an antenna inserted into its tail, several CIA agents took it outside to a park to see if it would, well, work. The cat was promptly hit by a taxi instead. The project cost 15$ million.
