A world of conspiracies
What the CIA's failed spy cat project says about our need for conspiracy theories
The story I’m about to tell you is true. You can look it up — the CIA’s “Acoustic Kitty” project. If you have 5 minutes, though, I highly recommend listening to this story on Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace podcast:
In the 1960’s, the CIA wanted to better spy on the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. But the Soviets knew that their offices were thoroughly bugged, so if they needed to have a conversation about something they really didn’t want the Americans to get their hands on, they would go for a walk in the park across the street.
In the tech of the 60’s, this presented a problem: there was no way to adequately bug a park, and no equipment that could pick up what the Russians were saying from a distance. If someone passed them, they’d stop talking till they were out of earshot, so eavesdropping was out of the question.
So the CIA came up with a solution: they’d send in a cat wearing a wire. It was perfect — the commies would never suspect a cat was a spy. But cats aren’t particularly trainable, so the CIA pumped $15 million dollars into a solution: they implanted the cat with electrodes on each side. Zap it on one side, the cat would go in the opposite direction. Now you could more or less steer it. Under the skin of its tail, they implanted an antenna, and near its head, a microphone. They tested it, and it seemed to work.
They took the cat to the Soviet Spy Park1, let it out of their van, and it was immediately hit and killed by a cab.
“The world is rudderless”
One of the reasons I’ve never become a conspiracy theorist is that I’ve never believed that the government is competent enough to be so deftly pulling our strings. I’m not saying they aren’t evil enough: George W. Bush was absolutely a bad enough person to have orchestrated 9/11. But smart enough? Absolutely not. You’re telling me he could run a whole black flag operation to take down the two towers a mere 9 months into his administration, but for the next 8 years he could never plant a single piece of enriched uranium in an Iraqi power plant, thus justifying his murderous boondoggle of a war?
I mean, come on.
A couple years back, I read Tim Weiner’s massive history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes2. It quickly becomes obvious: the CIA that we so often hear about in conspiracy theories, the shadowy organization that controls everything and everyone, whose malicious fingers is on every terrible thing that happens in the world, simply never existed.
The CIA, in short, is an embarrassingly incompetent organization. It relied heavily on British and Israeli intelligence to penetrate the USSR, it never successfully put a spy in North Korea, and while it should’ve seen 9/11 coming from absolute miles away, it didn’t, and bungled the whole plot. The CIA had notoriously bad intelligence (an early director estimated that fully half of their intelligence was false), and was leaky as a slotted spoon. They were regularly compromised by competing intelligence agencies.
What they did have was an insane amount of money. And with this money, which was by-and-large administered with little to no civilian oversight, they pumped money into local fascist movements all over the world, and bankrolled murderous dictators who were amenable to American bribes. With this money, they occasionally managed a real coup — as in the case of Guatemala, which was their biggest real success (and which radicalized a young Che Guevara), and Iran, which was mostly run by the British, and which obviously never blew back up in their faces.
“On September 20 [1949], the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another 4 years.
Three days later, Truman told the world that Stalin had the bomb.”
-Legacy of Ashes
But mostly, they just lined the pockets of corrupt politicians and con artists.
Alan Moore, as usual, put it best:
“Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.”
We fall for conspiracies because they rhyme with stuff we know to be true. The Pizzagate conspiracy — in which the Democratic Party is covering up a massive pedophilia ring out of a DC pizza joint — is not true, but well… do I have to say it?
The Catholic Church was effectively covering up a global pedophilia ring for centuries.
And while chemtrails and fluoride mind control might not be a thing, we do know that the CIA (unsuccessfully) tried to use drugs and psychological torture to brainwash civilians in Project MK Ultra.
The problem isn’t that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s that we mistake small conspiracies for The Big Conspiracy, in which we are all just the puppets of a malevolent Order. For many people, the Government or the Illuminati or the Deep State is simply a stand-in for a nonexistent god. Which is, in a way, perversely comforting.
Moore again:
“The truth is more frightening: Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
Embracing chaos
The good news is that this chaos cuts both ways — if no one’s in control, if we’re all just atoms smashing into each other, then our future is not in anyone in particular’s hands, save perhaps our own. Sure, it would be terrible if Vladimir Putin or George Soros or Rupert Murdoch were totally in control, but they aren’t. History has shown us that powerful structures always ossify and then crumble and fall. Things that aren’t sustainable, well: it’s in the name. They don’t sustain.
One of the things you learn reading about revolutions and massive, seismic changes, is just how quickly things progress. The Arab Spring of 2011 eventually deposed four heads of state and led to seismic shifts across North Africa and the Middle East, but the whole event was started by a single man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire in protest of economic stagnation, and whose story became the catalyst for the uprisings.
But while the match that (in that case, literally) lit the flame came suddenly and unexpectedly, it relied on people laying the groundwork for years, even decades before those authoritarian regimes could be toppled. In those years before Bouazizi, anyone fighting for democracy in the Arab world could conceivably have said “this is going to be the way it always is,” and given up.
Some people who fight for a certain world never lived to see it. Some people are destroyed by shadowy, conspiratorial forces. But Deep State boogeymen don’t control the future. And neither do we. But we can work now to shape it in the right direction.
Which is an amusement park I would absolutely visit.
If you want highlights, I did a bunch of IG stories on it and saved them here, with part 2 here.