An Unsung Feline Hero

More news on how your tax dollars work! I had heard about some of these plots employed during the Cold War,the one most people have heard of is sending exploding cigars to Cuban leader Fidel Castro,but that is far from the craziest of the schemes. They also used psychics to attempt remote viewing of Russian military secrets. The most barbaric of these schemes was named Operation Acoustic Kitty. The CIA Science and Technology directorate documents revealed that some Cold War era cats were surgically altered to become bugging devices. The idea was the cats would be used to eavesdrop on Soviet conversations from park benches,windowsills and garbage cans,they figured the cats could just stroll up to sensitive conversations unnoticed. I have to interject here,what the hell were they thinking? They had obviously never spent much time around cats to think this was a workable plan. Cats have their own agendas,it's not that they aren't trainable so much as they aren't dependable to do what they are trained to do.
The project was funded and work began in 1961. They slit the cat open,put batteries in him,and his tail was to be used as an antenna. During tests they found he would walk off the job when he got hungry,so they put in another wire to override the hunger. The first field test was in Washington,D.C. they let the cat out of a van across the street from a Soviet compound. The cat strolled into the road and was struck by a taxi. Five years and over $15 million was instantly reduced to roadkill. The operation was abandoned in 1967.