The Spy Agency’s Decades-Long Quest to Turn Animals into Surveillance Machines

In the 1970s, the CIA’s Office of Research and Development decided the future of espionage lay in building robot animals. Their first creation was the Insectothopter, a mechanical dragonfly weighing just one gram, hand-painted to look exactly like the real insect. Built by a watchmaker, it used a miniature gas-powered engine to flap its wings and was guided by an invisible laser beam that heated metal strips to control its flight. The project worked perfectly in laboratory conditions, achieving 60-second flights over distances of 650 feet. But the moment they took it outside, the tiniest breeze sent the mechanical spy tumbling through the air. Despite years of development, the Insectothopter never flew a single operational mission.

Twenty years later, undeterred by failure, the CIA tried again with Charlie, a 61-centimeter robotic catfish designed to secretly collect water samples near suspected weapons facilities. Charlie contained a pressure hull, ballast system, and tail propulsion that mimicked real fish swimming. Unlike the doomed dragonfly, Charlie could be controlled via radio and might have actually worked, but the CIA has kept all operational details classified to this day. These projects represent peak Cold War optimism: the belief that with enough money and engineering, the CIA could improve on millions of years of evolution. They couldn’t, but the fact that they got a mechanical dragonfly to fly at all, even if only indoors, stands as testimony to an era when American intelligence genuinely believed robot animals were the future of spying.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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