Washington: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified details of its secret Cold War spy-pigeon missions, revealing how pigeons were trained for clandestine operations photographing sensitive sites inside the Soviet Union and dolphins for underwater missions, the media reported.
According to the BBC, the files also reveal how ravens were used to drop bugging devices on window sills. The report says that the CIA believed animals could fulfil “unique” tasks for the agency’s clandestine operations.
The newly-released files show that the 1970s’ operation was codenamed Tacana and explored the use of pigeons with tiny cameras to automatically take photos.
It took advantage of the fact that the humble pigeon is possessed of an amazing ability - almost a superpower. They can be dropped somewhere they have never been before and still find their way hundreds of miles back home.
The use of pigeons for communications dates back thousands of years but it was in World War I that they began to be used for intelligence gathering, the BBC reported citing the files.
In World War II, a little known branch of British intelligence - MI14(d) - ran a Secret Pigeon Service which dropped birds in a container with a parachute over Occupied Europe. A questionnaire was attached. More than 1,000 pigeons returned with messages including details of V1 rocket launch sites and German radar stations, reveal the files.
One message from a resistance group called Leopold Vindictive produced a 12-page intelligence report sent directly to former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill. After the war, a special “Pigeon Sub-Committee” of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee looked at options for the Cold War.
But while British operations were largely shut down, the CIA took over in exploiting pigeon power.
The files reveal that later the CIA trained a raven to deliver and retrieve small objects of up to 40g from the window sill of inaccessible buildings. A flashing red laser beam was used to mark the target and a special lamp was used to draw the bird back.
