Issue 5 | 5th September, 2022 | 6-9 minutes read
Heyo, trivia nerds. Here’s your latest issue of Multitudes, coming to you from a Shantanu still reeling from a rather uncomfortable 33-hour train journey to Delhi.
It’s been almost a year since my move to Bangalore and, oh, what a crazy year it’s been. Jobs and people and sanity have all come and gone. The only constant has been the never-ending supply of cheap masala dosas the city has to offer; they have been satisfying saviours in occasionally unkind times, and I am forever grateful to them.
The chaos of the last year got me thinking about the ways that humans respond to adversity in general. Existential threats provoke ever-creative survival tactics. For countries, these threats usually come in the form of wars (or more recently, pandemics), leading them to push the boundaries of science and technology for solutions. That’s at least been the playbook for the last century or so.
The last century’s also been dominated by the USA, and its actions on and in preparation for the battlefield have spilt over into the civilian sphere. A lot of the equipment they created to decimate their opponents has found its way into our everyday lives - as I wrote previously, the technology, design, and delivery of the smartphone were largely a product of US Cold War efforts.
But since the Cold War didn’t involve much direct combat, many of the developments of this era focused on espionage, not destruction. The US government was committed to knowing other people’s business with a fervour matched only by nosy Indian relatives. Heavy investment and a lot of creativity were devoted to these goals, with researchers even enlisting animals in their spy games.
Declassified (but heavily redacted) memos from 2019 shed some light on this. A cat sitting next to a target, they reasoned, would provoke less suspicion than a human. If it could be trained and turned into a listening device, gathering intel would become less risky. To test this theory, they spent about $10 million on Project Acoustic Kittyin the 1960s.
They operated on a trained cat, implanting a microphone, radio transmitter and antenna in its body. These Frankenstein-esque experiments took place at a time when computers filled entire rooms, so fitting devices in the limited space of a cat’s body wasn’t easy. Still, they were adept at the science of things and solved this part of the problem.
Success in the lab didn’t guarantee it would work in the real world, though. Their goal, as I mentioned, was for cats to covertly listen in on conversations; this proved far more challenging than the surgery.
I’ve read conflicting accounts of their first (and from what I can tell, last) field trials. One version has the cat spying on two people on a park bench, another says it was deployed to infiltrate the Soviet embassy in Washington D.C. Either way, it seems to have been an ill-fated maiden voyage. After being released from a van and crossing a road to reach its target, the cat was hit almost immediately by a taxi.
The accident proved fatal for the cat and the project, though details on Acoustic Kitty’s demise are a little vague. According to one declassified memo, though it was “a remarkable scientific achievement…that cats can indeed be trained to move short distances…however, the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our [word redacted] purposes, it would not be practical.”
Cats weren’t the only animals unwillingly enlisted in American espionage. A Smithsonian article that interviewed Bob Bailey, an official working on these programmes, quoted him as saying, “We never found an animal we couldn’t train.” For similar eavesdropping purposes, for example, they also used ravens. They skipped surgical enhancement here, training them to drop microphones at specific locations instead.
While cats and ravens were used to operate over land and in the air, dolphins were chosen for underwater activities. In the 1960s, as part of Project OXYGAS, bottlenose dolphins were taught to deposit explosives on enemy ships, the first of many envisioned uses. According to a Popular Mechanics article,
The CIA was so impressed with OXYGAS that it envisioned plenty of other covert missions for dolphins. Those included "attacks on a variety of ship types," "harbour and coastal reconnaissance through photographic means," specialized electronic intelligence gathering, and the placement of "sonar, acoustic, and seismic buoys." The agency even imagined dolphins deploying weapons-of-mass-destruction sensors including "rocket detection buoys," biological warfare and chemical warfare sensors, and trace element sensors meant to detect radioactive elements released into the atmosphere by a nuclear explosion.
These ambitions, as with Acoustic Kitty, were eventually tempered by the reality that animals were hard to train and difficult to guide outside controlled environments. To quote the Smithsonian piece again,
Robert Wallace, who headed the CIA’s Office of Technical Services in the 1990s, says the use of animals in intelligence has a long history. “Animals can go places people can’t. Animals are unalerting,” he told me. “The other side of the coin is that although animals can be trained, they have to be constantly trained. The upkeep, care and maintenance is significant.”
Patience and funding for these creative endeavours eventually dried up in the late 1970s. Their exact end isn’t known – not all files were declassified and those that were had details heavily redacted.
Animal espionage didn’t go completely out of vague, admittedly. The US has been at it again recently, but using a different approach. Instead of recruiting aquatic creatures to be active agents, security agencies are studying aquatic activity in response to human disturbances. According to a BBC article on this,
"We want to understand if it is possible to distinguish the response of the organisms to natural versus manmade disturbances, or perhaps even certain types of manmade objects," says Vern Boyle, vice president of advanced programs, emerging capabilities at project participant Northrop Grumman.
"We'll be using advanced processing techniques, including machine learning, to analyse the signals and identify distinguishing features."
Basically, they’re trying to see if and how underwater creatures would respond, for example, to an enemy submarine. Far more tame and acceptable than creating Frankenstein cats or killer dolphins, I suppose.
Though not animal-related, while reading up for this I discovered that the experiments conducted on Eleven’s mother in Stranger Things weren’t completely fictional. In Project MK Ultra, launched in the 1950s, the CIA searched for a “mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.” Many people were unwittingly subject to a range of ‘treatments’ that ranged from electrical shocks to high doses of LSD. You can learn more about this here.
That’s it for this issue. Next time, inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent death, we look at his legacy as a…promoter of Pizza Hut? That, plus the Soviet Union’s conflicted relationship with American fast food.
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Till next time,
Shantanu