That was my mother’s response when I asked her why on earth she had chosen to marry my stepfather, who not only sexually abused me, but also dragged us into a poverty so profound that we wound up living in a tent. I’ll never forget that conversation. Right then and there I vowed to myself that I’d never have occasion to respond in that manner to anyone as long as I lived.
What can I say? I was young. I now realize that, if asked the right question, that would have to be my response regarding quite a few choices throughout my life. Why did I choose that worthless major in college? Why did I get into a relationship with that particular boyfriend? Why did I make that disasterous investment? Why did I assume that relative loved me despite all evidence to the contrary? And those are only the milder questions.
What a surprise. I’m flawed, to a sometimes self-destructive degree. I’m really kind of amazed that I’ve managed to not only land on my feet, but also land in a pretty good location. Go figure.
But I’ll comfort myself with the fact that our government can say, “It seemed like a good idea at the time” all day long, every day, about some of the stupid ideas it has come up with. Eugenics. The Tuskegee Experiment. Trump offering to buy Greenland. Trump, in general. (Heaven help us. Please vote.)
Right up there with all those horrifying examples is one that I only learned about recently: Operation Acoustic Kitty. For some reason, the CIA decided that a cat would make a perfect spy. Because cats are easy to train? Because they’re cooperative? Because they’re eager to please? It was a less than “purrfect” scheme. (Sorry. I had to.)
I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that operation’s pitch to upper management. It’s so blatantly obvious that this was never going to work that it boggles the mind. And yet the project was signed off on, to the tune of 20 million 1967 dollars, which works out to about $198,292,121.00 today. Your tax dollars at work. This is a prime example of what happens when you get a bunch of out-of-touch white men with entirely too much power in a room, and get them to brainstorm.
But I really shouldn’t joke about this operation, because it was rather grisly for the cat. They slit the cat open, put batteries in it, implanted a microphone in its ear, a radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and then wove an antenna, which stretched the length of its body, into its fur. They thought they’d be able to train the cat to approach cold war enemies and sit casually near them while they chatted about state secrets, allowing CIA operatives to listen from afar.
But after all that research and cat torture, their test run with cat zero was a disaster. Instead of wandering up to the designated people and sitting down to inconspicuously groom itself while they talked, the cat decided to act like a cat. It got bored, ran into the street, and it encountered a taxi acting like a taxi. Kitty was squashed flat.
Did the CIA learn its lesson and stop acting so idiotic after that? God, no. Well, they did scrub that particular project, but I’d hazard a guess that as more documents become declassified in the future, we will discover just how low humans can sink.
Other sources:
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