The Cat That Wasn’t: Operation Acoustic Kitty

In the 1960s, the CIA tried to turn a housecat into a living surveillance device. The mission cost millions—and ended with a car.

This episode of Unsettled: The Hidden Record dives into the bizarre Cold War experiment known as Operation Acoustic Kitty. The plan? Surgically implant a microphone, transmitter, and battery inside a cat, then train it to eavesdrop on Soviet targets by wandering near them.

According to declassified documents, the project’s first test run was cut short when the cat was struck and killed by a taxi moments after deployment. But some believe that version of the story is just another cover.

Was it real? Was it ever functional? Or was it always just a strange footnote in the vast ledger of Cold War absurdity?

This is the story of espionage so strange, it sounds like satire—but wasn’t.