CIA animal surveillance experiments are the Cold-War efforts to turn animals into covert listening platforms that John Kiriakou describes as failures. Asked about the program that surgically implanted microphones in live cats, Kiriakou continued that the agency also mounted microphones and cameras on pigeons and tried to train them to land on the window sills of the Soviet embassy in Washington. The experiments failed: the birds and cats could be gotten over to the Soviet compound, but “they couldn’t pick anything up that was meaningful.”[1][2] Kiriakou contrasts these with his own “very conventional” bugging — breaking into a house only three or four times in his career to plant a device in an ashtray or under a flower pot.[3] He has repeated both the pigeon-and-cat account and his own conventional-bugging record in near-identical terms in a later appearance on the same show.[4][5]
CIA animal surveillance experiments
Cold-War CIA efforts to turn animals into listening devices, which John Kiriakou describes as failures — including microphones and cameras mounted on pigeons trained to land on the Soviet embassy, which could reach the compound but never captured anything meaningful.
References
- ↑ Jack Neel, 2026-06-07 — 00:00 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Jack Neel, 2026-06-07 — 00:31 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Jack Neel, 2026-06-07 — 01:35 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Jack Neel, 2026-07-02 — 00:00 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Jack Neel, 2026-07-02 — 01:33 on YouTube · Transcript
Categories: Operations