Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 46

Pre-George A. Romero era, pretty much each and every scenario involving zombies revolved around not the literal dead, but mind-controlled individuals behaving in a distinctly undead, emotionless state. Such movies as I Walked with a Zombie and White Zombie make that abundantly clear, as does Wade Davis’ book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. It may very well be the case that none other than the CIA took deep note of some of those old black and white zombie movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Such a theory is born out by the fact that in the 1960s, scientists of the CIA tried to create an army of loyal and obedient zombie cats.

It was an operation that covertly received funding, not in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in the millions. The idea was to transform regular, everyday cats into something hideous, something akin to the Terminator or Robocop. CIA boffins came up with the ingeniously odd idea of implanting transmitting devices and listening gadgets into the bodies (and even the tails) of cats, and then have them wander around the grounds and—if the CIA got really lucky—the interior of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. Anything the cats might have picked up, conversation-wise, was deemed that it could have had a major bearing on national security.

Believe it or not, the CIA was also involved in a plan to create zombie cats that were obedient to commands. The result was, to say the least, unsuccessful.

Demonstrating that the CIA’s finest knew more than a bit about how to place a cat into a zombified condition, not only did they slice the poor animals open and fill them with wires and metal: they also tinkered with the brains of the cats. Doing so placed the cats into a kind of lobotomized, subservient state, one in which their natural instincts and wild urges were reigned-in, thus allowing the CIA to keep their zombie-spies under control at all times. Unfortunately for those involved in the operation, and particularly so the first cat that was designated for zombification, it didn’t work out so well. And that’s putting it mildly.

One of those that had an awareness of the program (which went by the amusing, but admittedly appropriate title of Acoustic Kitty), was Victor L. Marchetti, Jr., formerly a special assistant to the Deputy Director. Marchetti says that when the controlled cat in question was ready for its very first mission, CIA agents carefully released it close to the Soviet Embassy and prompted the animal to make its way to the building, where, hopefully, it would pick up a few juicy nuggets of information. What the 007-like zombie cat actually did was to get squashed under the wheels of a speeding taxi. The undead cat was now well and truly dead.

The CIA, having decided that the program was not going to work as well in the real world as it did on paper, quickly closed it down and gave it the proverbial bullet to the head. So far as we know, the project has never since been reanimated—so to speak.