What was Project Acoustic Kitty?

During the 1960s, a time of Cold War one-upmanship and paranoia when American and Soviet rockets and spies vied for supremacy, it seemed to each side that there was no such thing as a bad idea - if it would help them gain an advantage. Case in point: in the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched a project to hardwire and train a cat for espionage.

- Jonny Wilkes, freelance writer

The research programme, dubbed Project Acoustic Kitty, involved surgically installing listening and recording equipment into a living cat, then sending the unfortunate feline out into the field to linger around enemy agents and pick up their conversations.