The CIA spent millions surgically turning a cat into a listening device
This one sounds like an urban legend. It is not. A declassified 1967 CIA memo, titled "Views on Trained Cats," confirms the agency's Office of Research and Development spent roughly five years and, according to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, as much as twenty million dollars implanting a live cat with a radio transmitter, a microphone in its ear canal, and a wire antenna woven through its fur, intending to use the animal to eavesdrop on conversations near the Soviet embassy. The documents were declassified by the National Security Archive in 2001, heavily redacted but real, and the CIA's own website confirms the project actually happened.
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Get the dossier: $5 instant download →The agency recruited a veterinary surgeon to perform an hour-long procedure implanting a small transmitter in the loose flesh at the back of the cat's neck, a microphone in its ear canal, and a fine wire connecting them woven through the animal's fur, with the tail itself used as the antenna. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, who worked as special assistant to the director in the 1960s, described the result bluntly: they slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up, and made a monstrosity. Training took years, partly because the cat would abandon its task whenever it got hungry, requiring engineers to add an additional device just to override that instinct.
Accounts of the cat's fate diverge. Marchetti and others claim the cat was released near a park to listen in on two men and was struck and killed by a taxi within moments of beginning its mission. Former CIA technical officer Robert Wallace disputed this account in 2013, stating the cat was not harmed and that the program was instead abandoned due to the practical difficulty of reliably training cats to follow directions in the field. The declassified memo itself is more measured than either dramatic account, concluding the work reflected genuine technical achievement while acknowledging that environmental and security factors made the technique impractical for real intelligence use.
This establishes that the CIA formally funded and executed a multi-year program to surgically modify a live animal into a covert listening device, that the program was real, expensive, and ultimately abandoned as impractical, and that this account comes directly from the agency's own declassified internal memo, not secondhand rumor. This is confirmed by the National Security Archive's 2001 FOIA release and the CIA's own public acknowledgment of the project.
What this does not establish with certainty is the cat's exact fate during the field test, or the precise total cost of the program. The taxicab story is widely repeated but relies primarily on Victor Marchetti's account, disputed by at least one other former CIA officer who worked more directly on the technical side of the project.
Document: "Views on Trained Cats," CIA Office of Research and Development memo, March 1967. Declassified 2001.
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