I spotted this link as part of a comment on my friends blog and I just had to write my own piece about it.
From having followed the link it appears that the CIA scientists spent more than 5 years and $15 million dollars ( from the years 1961 to 1967 ) trying to create a cyborg cat as a spy listening device.
As I read it, I could see that despite its absurdity, it was just as likely to be true as false. And thus I decided to write my own account of how it was likely to have initially occurred.
This is loosely based upon the meagre crumbs of credible evidence I came across and also heavily laced with sarcasm and my own flavour of artistic licence.
---
Operation Acoustic Kitty ( a.k.a. My cats got no nose, how does it smell? ... terrible!!! )
Back in the early 1960's a couple of long haired Uni grad students were chilling in their dorm room, smoking a bit too much of the old wacky backy and listening to their Elvis EP's.
In the news they had just heard about the Commies shooting down a U2 spy plane and in their drug fueled state of mind began to kicking round a few ideas for alternative methods of spying.
Neither of the two lads, Dan and Wez {for surely they were both male and had typical names}, had any real goals in life and their only objectives seemed to be booze, drugs, chasing campus chicks and dodging real work.
Among the ideas that floated round their dorm room ceiling that fateful night was 'ways to disguise spy devices as cobwebs', 'what colour are sheep in your dreams?' and 'why can't you buy mouse flavoured cat food? '.
Then all of a sudden the idea struck Wez like a bolt from blue. Flipping back through an old history book he comes across the piece of text he had been thinking about, to wit "Russians train dogs to carry explosives into battle ".
Despite the Commies unsuccessful efforts, Wez feels sure that, if done properly, the use of domestic animals as spy devices is still a great idea. Sadly their Uni prohibits dogs on campus grounds, so instead to test his theory Wez turns his hazy attention onto his own pet pussy.
With Dan stroking him furiously to occupy him, Wez began to blow smoke into 'Frees'' poor face, for that was his cats name. Thus is was that Free, for that was the cats name became their first volunteer cat test subect. Once they were sure that Free was suitably intoxicated, Wez ordered Free to go across the room and listen to their other roommates sleep talking mumbles.
In response to having smoke blown into his face, Free carefully jumps down off his owners lap and crosses the room to where the air was slightly less thick with fumes.
"Eureka" cries Dan, "We got ourselves a walking spy carrying device. Now all we got to do is to fit a recorder to him and were all set."
A few months later ... after much trial and error, Dan and Wez feel that they have got enough of an idea to get some proper government funding to finish their project. Not only will the project allow them to finish their Thesis, but if they can somehow drag it out long enough, they can also probably bum around and escape doing any real work for the next couple of years at the very least to boot.
Enter onto the scene, a complete loon of an CIA officer, one Victor Marchetti.
Now Victor was not the sharpest tool in the work box so to speak, but he knew enough about inner-politics, and when he heard about a few Uni kids with an idea for making a spy-moggie he thought that this could be his ticket up the ladder of espionage success.
On the upside, if it worked then he can claim full responsibility and thus all the credit and benefits attached with coming up with a new technique to get one over the Ruskies, especially as they were about to beat the US into getting the first man into Space.
On the downside, if it all went tits-up he could deny all knowledge and be sure that he could bury his involvement and the corresponding paperwork for the next 50 years, and be fully retired before anyone further up the chain of command became any the wiser.
Plus finally, the best bit of all, was that it wasn't even his money that he was playing with, for as usual it would fall to the good-old US tax-payer to foot the bill.
So Victor went to see Wez and Dan and gave them a grant, plus their own private lab sealed off from the rest of civilisation, in exchange for exclusive rights on the spycat.
For their part, it was the best day in Dan and Wez's lives, a real bumper payday, and whenever Victor grew impatient or curious to see where the fruits of his belief were, all they really had to do was produce a few meaningless graphs and baffle him with some semi-plausible sci-fi-mumbo-jumbo until his eyes glazed over and decided that it must be proceeding nicely and then go back to stuffing themselves with pretzels and cappuccinos.
Thus it came to pass that Dan and Wez succeeded in reaching their ideal positions of finding as many different ways to pass the time of day as possible, without ever doing much anything, and all in the name of helping the country.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and even for a patient man like Victor, 5 years is as long as he could fiddle the numbers before he had to shelve the idea. Luckily for him he was also 5 years closer to retirement and had already found another golden goose to go after.
