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Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA spent about $15 million surgically implanting a microphone in a cat's ear, a transmitter under its skin, and an antenna through its tail to spy on Soviet conversatio… (europe.pub)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/interestingasfuck@lemmy.world
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Full title: Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA spent about $15 million surgically implanting a microphone in a cat's ear, a transmitter under its skin, and an antenna through its tail to spy on Soviet conversations

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[–] 54 points 1 month ago (14 children)

Wasn't the cat immediately hit by a car or something?

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  • [–] 53 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    Yes.

    Honestly though, this smells like embezzlement or moving funds to some clandestine project.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    In view of recent events, I find it difficult to believe ANYTHING our government says.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    I don't even think this was the government lying to the public. I think it was a CIA department lying to their superiors. Same with those CIA remote viewing experiments. Come up with a cover story that's so embarrassing, the higher ups will bury it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Do you really believe that the CIA "superiors" didn't know about the cover up stories and their necessity to chaff the signals up and dilute all of the coups, human trafficking, narcotics empire building, and more realistic ineptitude based fuck ups with wacky zany stories about staring at goats?

    If so, their use of silly is working.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    No, because I think every layer of the CIA thinks they know what's best and that they shouldn't have to answer to anyone, including their own boss.

    No, because I think secrets can stay safer the fewer people who know about them. The boss may have a general idea of what's going on, but the less they know, the less chance there could be a leak from a Man In The Middle attack. The bosses probably have a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. They probably knew the cat story and remote viewing story were nonsense, but knew it was dangerous to know what's actually going on and left it be.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Yeah, the money went to Katianna the cleaning lady at the embassy and the story about the $15m spy cat was to cover up how they got the information.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That's the story. Which has to be at least partially bullshit.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago*

    What I remember is they tried to do a test run of whether or not it could hear two people stting and talking at a park bench.

    So, they released, from the safe house on the other side of the road from the park, it started to go toward the bench, and BLAM, hit by a car.

    EDIT:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

    The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.[4] However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards".[5] Subsequent tests also failed.[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.[6] However, other accounts report more success for the project.[7]

    ... So... not exactly a high of certainty going on here.

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