Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Volgobom here.

A little bit of a warning on this one.

It's the story of Cold War experimentation on a cat that did not wind up going well for

the cat.

We don't get graphic, but I wanted to give you a heads up.

Okay?

Okay.

The Cold War made people do some pretty wild things.

The United States government was so desperate to defeat communism that it threw money at

pretty much any half-baked scheme that might give Americans an advantage over the Soviet

menace.

Today, we're talking about Project Acoustic Kitty, a top secret central intelligence agency

research program that tested whether house cats could be used to spy on Soviet operatives.

If that sounds like the plot of a bad movie from 1966, well, it was, just with a dog

instead of a cat.

It might also remind you a bit of the 1970s TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man, in which

a badly injured test pilot was rebuilt with mechanical parts and transformed into a

cyborg superhero.

But Project Acoustic Kitty was a real thing that really happened, and we have the heavily

redacted CIA documents to prove it.

Back in the 1960s, the CIA wanted to create a cyborg super spy out of a cat.

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