The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies popsci com environment the-cia-once-trained-cats-to-be-cold-war-spies Tom Hawking March 13 2026 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 dramatic music Well no Despite the CIA’s best efforts during the Cold War using cats as spies became unsurprisingly a disaster 1 5 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 Under a huge portrait of Russian dictator Josef Stalin Washington party-goers gather at a Russian Embassy reception celebrating the Russian Revolution on November 8 1950 Directly under Stalin’s portrait can be seen the singer Paul Robeson Image Bettmann Contributor Getty Images Bettmann Using animals to spy on the Embassy may or may not have been a viable idea but the CIA made things awfully difficult for themselves with their choice of animal for the job Unsurprisingly the Acoustic Kitty program was a failure largely because—in news that will shock cat owners to their collective cores—the cat chosen for the mission refused to do what it was supposed to do   2 5 “We never found an animal we could not train” It’s unclear exactly what went wrong largely because of conflicting accounts from the two primary sources about the project The first of these is former CIA agent Victor Marchetti who discussed the program in an interview with British documentarian Adam Curtis in the latter’s film You Have Used Me As a Fish Long Enough The second is animal trainer Bob Bailey who spoke to the Smithsonian magazine about the program in 2013   Both Marchetti and Bailey agree on the fact that the cat was basically turned into a walking radio with a transmitter implanted in its abdomen   Marchetti claims that on its first mission the poor cat was hit by a car before it got anywhere near its targets   Bailey contradicts this and maintains that despite sounding absurd—and frankly cruel—the project wasn’t a complete failure “We never found an animal we could not train ” he said “We found that we could condition the cat to listen to voices… we found that the cat would listen to people’s voices more and more and listen less to other things ” Acoustic Kitty he maintained was “a serious project ” The only other source we have on the project is a CIA document entitled “Views on Trained Cats ” which is accessible—in heavily redacted form—via the National Security Archive at George Washington University   The document declares that “it is indeed possible… ” but the rest of the sentence is redacted The next sentence proclaims that the thing that is indeed possible whatever it may be is also “a remarkable scientific achievement ” and that “the work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it ” The personnel are not named Ultimately though the document concludes that while “cats can indeed be trained to move short distances ” the whole thing is a dead end “The program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs ”  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 ” 3 5 Cats by contrast don’t particularly care whether what they do makes us happy so long as it makes them happy “Cats want to do exactly what they enjoy without respect to whether we want them to do it or not ” This may well have something to do with how cats and dogs became domesticated While there are competing theories about exactly how the domestication of animals played out cats are widely held to have self-domesticated They came into contact with humans when they started to hunt the vermin that lived in our granaries and we let them stick around because killing those vermin was also helpful to us   Dogs by contrast were bred deliberately for a wide variety of purposes from herding sheep to retrieving birds and helping the blind Training dogs to handle these jobs requires extensive interaction Cats meanwhile only had one job—killing vermin—and it was something they did with gusto anyway How to train a cat to become a Cold War spy With all this in mind it’s not surprising that the cat chosen for Acoustic Kitty showed very little interest in spying on anyone Soviet diplomats or otherwise Thankfully the days of cloak-anddagger cat operatives are most likely behind us—these days it’d be just as easy to use a tiny drone or something But still if Quandt had to train a cat to go and eavesdrop on a Soviet spy how would he go about doing so “I would probably try to find a really friendly cat ” he laughs He explains that ideally the cat would be familiarized with the people in question Given that doing so would be impossible in this scenario he’d fall back on the universal motivator food “If the spies were outside maybe they would sometimes have a picnic So I would try to make sure the cat was hungry ” What’s the best way to train a cat More generally though he says there’s a common method for training cats that act in films perform in circuses etc and it involves a device called a clicker “If you give a cat a treat right when they do the thing you want them to do their walnut-sized brain makes the connection and they go ‘Oh treat ’”  If you accompany the treat with a sound the cat begins to associate the sound with the treat This classic Pavlovian scenario is called “click-and-treat ” As Quandt explains “The click becomes a predictor of a reward and eventually it becomes a temporary reward itself The cat knows the treat is coming ” Once the cat associates the clicker with a reward it becomes reasonably straightforward to build an association between that reward and a desired behavior Scratch the scratching pole instead of the couch Click Refrain from attacking your friend while he’s peeing Click Surreptitiously 4 5 retrieve the nuclear codes from the man in a trench coat reading an upside down newspaper Click This is how we end up with cats like internet-favorite Owlkitty whose appearances in parodies of big-budget feature films are the stuff of YouTube legend Was it also used in the training of Acoustic Kitty We’ll never know—and hopefully we’ll never again have any reason to find out In That Time When Popular Science tells the weirdest surprising and little-known stories that shaped science engineering and innovation     Tom Hawking is a writer based in New York City He writes about culture politics science and everything in between His work has appeared in the New York Times the Guardian Rolling Stone and many other publications You can subscribe to his Substack here 5 5