Nothing Ever Adds Up to Exploding Dogs

For a long time I've been interested in the Cold War (or really, anything that ends in "War") and the lengths the Russians and our own people went to to try and destroy each other. Besides the dozens of proxy wars the two sides fought, there's of course the seventy or so years between the establishment of the Cheka and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. There's a rich history there, stuff you could read about forever.

Or write about.

There's hundreds of brilliant ideas to come out of both sides in that time. There's the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico with an ice pick, there's the infamous ricin tablet gun concealed in an umbrella, there's training the South Vietnamese army with our Green Berets, or filling the CIA, FBI, and NSA so full of Soviet double-agents that we couldn't do shit without them knowing for a good twenty years after WWII ended.

Good times, though.

There's also been more than a number of utter failures on both sides. In 1979, the Soviet government invaded Afghanistan on the pretense of supporting the communist regime that had taken power there. Of course the communist government was not the entirety of Afghanistan and a mix of cultural intolerance and rampant brutality that led to the mujahadin eventually wresting control of the country away from anyone sane. Our role in that was a rather ingenious one, though. We bled the Soviets dry by keeping the rebels well armed and well fed, the same thing they (and the Chinese) did in Vietnam. The only difference there is we didn't stack up the chairs and turn out the lights two years after we left Saigon.

And that's just the serious side. We've got MK ULTRA to explain and the Soviets have to explain the fact that they killed off most of their officers in the dawn of the second world war (in addition to spies that warned about Hitler invading the Soviet Union, good call there), among other things.

It's kind of funny that for all of the moles and foresight the Soviet intelligence organizations had, they still didn't see their collapse on the horizon. Then again, I don't suppose anyone does. Though, just to keep this in perspective, the Soviets were also the ones who came up with the idea of remote controlled exploding dogs and half-man/half-ape slave soldiers.

But never have I heard of a twenty-million dollar spy cat. Because a twenty-million dollar spy cat is just plain stupid. That is a dumb idea.

So of course it got made.

Besides the multi-million dollar espionage kitten, there was other bright ideas the intelligence community dredged up like the even dumber (but much cheaper) microphone hidden in dog poop (because who would bother to pick it up and throw it away) and the actually quite brilliant idea of mixing microphones into the concrete that would be used to build an embassy.

But a multi-million dollar spy cat, really?

That's just plain silly.