Most of us don’t know much about what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actually does. Without some degree of mystery, after all, it can’t carry out its purpose to covertly collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals for American policymakers. So when we do learn anything about a specific CIA program, it’s usually after the fact, and usually because it was a big enough failure to garner media attention. With the understanding that all details about the agency’s dealings are sketchy, unconfirmed, and, well, secret, here are four of the twentieth century’s biggest CIA flops.
1. Operation Acoustic Kitty
The Cold War era of the 1960s was the CIA’s heyday. Americans were so worried about what the Communists were doing and whether they had nuclear weapons that we would have done just about anything to find out. And the secret agents, glorified in spy novels and movies, who did get the dirt on the Reds were our heroes. The CIA’s carte blanche in chasing Communists led to rumors of some pretty bizarre ideas, like Operation Acoustic Kitty, which supposedly ran from 1961 to 1967, and involved the CIA’s surgically implanting cats with audio equipment to use them as bugging devices.
Though the basic idea for the plot—that a cat would go unnoticed and could easily eavesdrop on Soviet conversations—was certainly innovative, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recalls many problems with Acoustic Kitty:
“They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, ‘Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else—not the birds, no cat or dog—just those two guys!’”
According to lore about the program, the first cat that CIA operatives used, who underwent several surgeries and intensive training, was hit by a car, turning five years and more than $15 million into road kill. The CIA abandoned the project shortly thereafter. Perhaps because of its embarrassing failure, or for some other reason, the documents related to Operation Acoustic Kitty remain only partially declassified today. The best we’ve got is a memo from the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate saying that “the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”
2. Operation Mongoose
Not only did the Soviets pose a Communist threat, so did the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. According to Harvard historian Jorge Dominguez, a prime focus of the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s was removing Castro from power. The CIA’s strategy for doing so was the Cuban Project, or Operation Mongoose.
Few recognize the name “Operation Mongoose,” but more will probably recall the alleged plot to take advantage of Castro’s main passion by slipping him an exploding cigar. Other rumored attempts at Castro’s life include poisoned cigars, exploding seashells, and multiple attempts at exposure to lethal chemical agents and bacteria. Whether any or all of these stories about assassination schemes are true or not, no one can really know, but according to Fabian Esclante, a former bodyguard of Castro’s, there have been 638 separate CIA attempts on the former Cuban president’s life.
Castro weathered all of these near-death experiences, true or false, until 2008, when he resigned the presidency of Cuba to his brother, Raul Castro. As far as we know, there are no current operations in effect against Cuba, and Operation Mongoose, like Acoustic Kitty, ranks among the CIA’s failures.
3. Project MK-ULTRA
This was allegedly the CIA’s code name for several mind control and chemical interrogation subprograms under the Office of Scientific Intelligence. (MK indicates the project’s sponsorship by the CIA’s Technical Services Division and ULTRA refers to the highest level of classification.)
In a series of experiments that spanned almost two decades beginning in the early 1950s, CIA operatives, under the leadership of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, supposedly tested drugs (especially LSD) and other mind-altering techniques on subjects without their knowledge or consent.
At least one of these experiments allegedly led to death. In 1953, a U.S. Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher named Frank Olson jumped out of a tenth-story window in a severe psychotic episode. His death was deemed a suicide, but his son claims that Olson’s psychosis was caused by a CIA-administered dose of LSD after he threatened to divulge his knowledge of the MK-ULTRA subproject ARTICHOKE, a project that researched interrogation methods. But a CIA internal investigation revealed not that Gottlieb had conducted the experiment without Olson’s knowledge, only that he had failed to take into account Olson’s suicidal tendencies and therefore deserved a reprimand.
The New York Times published a story revealing Project MK-ULTRA to the public in December 1974, prompting investigation by the Congressional Church Committee and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. Those probes had to rely on sworn testimonies of direct participants and the relatively few declassified documents that remained, however, since then-CIA director Richard Helms had ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973.
4. The Stargate Project
The Stargate Project was part of the U.S. government’s effort to investigate the reality and potential military applications of psychic phenomena, specifically “remote viewing,” the purported ability to psychically “see” events, places, or information from a great distance.
The project began with studies at The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and The American Society for Psychical Research in the early 1970s. The CIA and military intelligence decided that, despite their misgivings on the subject, they should learn as much about psychic phenomena as possible. If remote viewing did end up being real, they thought, they might even be able to use psychics to “read” classified Soviet documents or “see” secret Communist locations. They worked together to form the Stargate Project and apply protocols to the realm of clairvoyance to make it as scientific as possible.
But citing a lack of documented evidence that the program would ever work, the CIA terminated Stargate in 1995. The twenty-five-year program ended up costing the government a total of $20 million dollars, and joined the list of twentieth century CIA failed operations.
Not-So Intelligence
So, the CIA’s had a few misses over the last century; it’s done some great things, too. Every day, the agency is probably saving our butts with some cool strategic mission. (I assume. I don’t know. Again, that’s the point of a secret operation.) But if the CIA has screwed up this badly in the past, it makes me wonder what it’s up to now.