The development of corporate surveillance and security systems is somewhat long, elaborate and filled with rather unusual technological advances developed by teams of ambitious, innovative thinkers.
For example, the first security camera and one of the most successful audio bugs ever were both developed by the man who made the first electronic musical instrument.
The first home security system was made by Marie Van Brittan Brown, a nurse from Jamaica, Queens, New York who developed the system along with her engineer husband to help keep her safe at night and changed the world in the process.
This led to the rather unusual surveillance project that planned to use cats to listen in on conversations. It went about as well as anyone could have expected.
Project Acoustic Kitty
In the early 1960s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency was looking into potential avenues to listen in on conversations made in or around embassies, particularly those operated by the Soviet Union.
Given that there had already been multiple international incidents regarding spying between the USSR and the USA, including spy planes that kept being shot down, including one incident in 1960 and one in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly led to a full-scale nuclear war, the CIA wanted to try a far less obvious approach.
The idea they had, known as Project Acoustic Kitty, was to implant listening and transmission
equipment into the heads of cats that would be trained to stay around persons of interest and record their conversations.
Ideally, this would provide important information in a way that would never get caught, and to the credit of Acoustic Kitty, he was not ever caught spying the same way the U-2 plane or the US seal was.
Whilst such a concept could be done far easier now with tiny microphones and transmitters installed in the same way a pet microchip is today, at the time the process of getting the spy cat ready involved an hour-long operation where a microphone was implanted into the cat’s ear along with a radio transmitter near the neck and wire into the fur to connect it all together.
The cat was then trained to follow human voices and get close to the target in question, which would theoretically make them perfect for surveillance.
However, the operation went badly wrong. According to Victor Marchetti, a former officer at the CIA, the operation cost $20m to undertake and ended within minutes when the cat was hit by a taxi and killed, meaning that all of the money went to waste.
This part of the story has been disputed, and a former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service said that the project was simply abandoned, the implants were removed and the cat lived a long life afterwards.
Other accounts suggest there was more success than claimed, but the details of this have since been destroyed.
Regardless of the details, the idea of using a cat to undertake surveillance was cancelled entirely by 1967, with the concept described as not practical in an actual surveillance situation.
It was a unique approach to surveillance, however, one that might have had better success with smaller recording technologies available today.