Cats, dolphins and raven: The CIA’s secret animal spies

In early 1974, Do Da was top in espionage class, on the way to becoming a high-flying CIA agent: he handled himself better in the rough, carried heavier loads, and could brush off attackers.

But on his toughest-yet spy school test, he disappeared—done in by some of his own kind: ravens. The bird was a central figure in a decade-long US Central Intelligence Agency program to train animals as agents, helping Washington fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

On Thursday, the CIA released dozens of files from its tests on cats, dogs, dolphins and on birds from pigeons to some of the smartest: ravens and crows. It studied cats as possible loose-roaming listening devices—“audio surveillance vehicles”—and put electrical implants in dogs’ brains to see if they could be remotely controlled.

Neither of those programs went very far. More effort was put into training dolphins as potential saboteurs and helping spy on the Soviet Union’s development of a nuclear submarine fleet, perhaps the most potent challenge to US power in the mid-1960s.

Projects Oxygas and Chirilogy sought to see if dolphins could be trained to replace human divers and place explosives on moored or moving vessels, sneak into Soviet harbors and leave in place acoustic buoys and rocket detection units, or swim alongside submarines to collect their acoustic signatures.

Those programs, too, were given up, left to the US Navy which to this day makes use of dolphins and seals. But what also grabbed the US spy chiefs’ imagination in the Cold War days was birds—pigeons, hawks, owls, crows and ravens, and even flocks of wild migratory birds.

For the latter, the agency enlisted ornithologists to try to determine which birds regularly spent part of the year in the area of Shikhany in the Volga River Basin southeast of Moscow, where the Soviets operated a chemical weapons facility. The CIA saw the migratory birds as “living sensors” which, based on their feeding, would reveal what kinds of substances the Russians were testing, in their flesh.

 

Cats, dolphins and raven: The CIAs secret animal spies

In early 1974, Do Da was top in espionage class, on the way to becoming a high-flying CIA agent: he handled himself better in the rough, carried heavier loads, and could brush off attackers. But on his toughest-yet spy school test, he disappeareddone in by some of his own kind: ravens. The bird was a central figure in a decade-long US Central Intelligence Agency program to train animals as agents, helping Washington fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. On Thursday, the CIA released dozens of files from its tests on cats, dogs, dolphins and on birds from pigeons to some of the smartest: ravens and crows. It studied cats as possible loose-roaming listening devicesaudio surveillance vehiclesand put electrical implants in dogs brains to see if they could be remotely controlled. Neither of those programs went very far. More effort was put into training dolphins as potential saboteurs and helping spy on the Soviet Unions development of a nuclear submarine fleet, perhaps the most potent challenge to US power in the mid-1960s. Projects Oxygas and Chirilogy sought to see if dolphins could be trained to replace human divers and place explosives on moored or moving vessels, sneak into Soviet harbors and leave in place acoustic buoys and rocket detection units, or swim alongside submarines to collect their acoustic signatures. Those programs, too, were given up, left to the US Navy which to this day makes use of dolphins and seals. But what also grabbed the US spy chiefs imagination in the Cold War days was birdspigeons, hawks, owls, crows and ravens, and even flocks of wild migratory birds. For the latter, the agency enlisted ornithologists to try to determine which birds regularly spent part of the year in the area of Shikhany in the Volga River Basin southeast of Moscow, where the Soviets operated a chemical weapons facility. The CIA saw the migratory birds as living sensors which, based on their feeding, would reveal what kinds of substances the Russians were testing, in their flesh.