Now I Know More (12 page)

In May 1957, a Finnish man named Reino Häyhänen walked into the United States embassy in Paris. He was there to surrender himself and, ultimately, request amnesty. He was on his way to Moscow but did not want to go there. He claimed he was a Soviet spy and that he was being recalled to the Soviet Union—but he wanted to go back to America, where he had worked as a KGB agent for the previous five years. After U.S. authorities spent a few days checking into his story, he was sent back to the United States. On May 10, 1957, he arrived in New York where he underwent an intense examination by the FBI.

After verifying Häyhänen's identity, the FBI looked to him to solve a puzzle that had been befuddling the agency for four years. According to the Bureau's website (which has a collection of “famous cases and criminals”), one day a newspaper delivery boy discovered a strange-feeling nickel during the course of his daily business. When he dropped it on the ground, the nickel split open. It was hollow. Inside it was a tiny photograph of a list of five-digit numbers. The paperboy, suspecting something fishy (this was the height of the Cold War, after all), brought the coin to the Feds.

The Bureau was baffled. Hollow coins were commonly used by illusionists, but this one was different from anything the FBI or novelty shop owners had seen before. The coin was made from opposite sides of two real coins, somehow connected together. There was a pin-sized hole in front, which the intended recipient could use to pop the halves apart, but the hole was designed to avoid detection and would not have allowed an illusionist easy access to the item held within. Besides, one novelty store shopkeeper told agents, the hollowed-out area was too small for any magic trick. This seemed to be an encoded message, and the intended recipient wasn't the paperboy.

The good news for the FBI? The Bureau, with information given to them by Häyhänen, was able to decode the message. Unfortunately, it wasn't very helpful. It was a letter from the KGB to a Soviet spy who was placed in New York, welcoming him to the United States and explaining some early details of his mission, including where he could get some money to start a new life in America. But it did not help the FBI identify who wrote the note nor its intended recipient.

As it turned out, the G-men didn't have to. Upon further investigation, the FBI declared that it not only knew who the intended recipient was, but it also knew exactly where to find him. In a strange coincidence, the note was intended for Häyhänen himself.

With Häyhänen's continued assistance, the FBI identified a Soviet spy named Rudolf Ivanovich Abel still living in the States. Abel was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison and was ultimately shipped back to Russia in 1962, in exchange for an American pilot who was being held as a prisoner of war.

For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union were leading adversaries in the political and military struggle known as the Cold War. Neither side wanted to overlook a potential advance in technology or espionage, and in the 1960s the CIA found a marriage of the two that could have been a potential game-changer.

That innovation? A bionic spy cat named the Acoustic Kitty.

According to former CIA agent turned author Victor Marchetti, the CIA had developed a way to, literally, wire a cat so that it could be used in espionage missions. The CIA surgically implanted a power supply into the cat, as well as inserting wires going into its brain and its ears. A microphone was layered into its ears and an antenna through its tail. The implanted device was able to determine when the cat was aroused or hungry and suppress those urges, allowing it to carry out its mission—cuddle up to some Soviet officials and listen to their conversations. The entire operation, from start until its end, cost the government somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million and took about five years to develop.

To test Acoustic Kitty, a surveillance van drove up to the test subjects and released the cat, which, again according to Marchetti, made its way across the street unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, by an oncoming taxi cab, which struck the cat, killing it immediately.

Soon thereafter the CIA decided to drop the spy cat program.

Cats and dogs are popular house pets in the United States. Roughly 35–45 percent of U.S. households own at least one dog (data from several sources varies), and a similar range of households own at least one cat. There are probably well more than 100 million Americans who have a Whiskers or Fido (with hopefully more interesting names) living in their homes, providing affection and companionship.

And an omnipresent source of danger.

When you live with these types of pets, your floors aren't entirely your domain. There's always a chance that your puppy will run through your legs on her way to fetch a ball, that your cat will curl up in the middle of the floor and take a nap, that either will leave a toy or food bowl somewhere other than where it is supposed to be. Foreign objects or four-legged friends hanging out by your feet can lead to stumbles, trips, and in some cases, bad falls.

That's an obvious risk—but how much of one? It may be worse than you'd think.

In the mid-2000s, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control realized that while these pets were “always underfoot,” in the words of the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Stevens, no one had tried to quantify the associated dangers. Dr. Stevens and team looked at emergency-room reports from 2001 to 2006. They found that, over the course of that five-year period, more than 86,000 ER visits were due to pets or pet-related causes. That's two visits every hour, twenty-four hours a day, over five years. This number doesn't include less serious injuries that do not require outside medical assistance, at least not immediately, suggesting that the number of everyday, commonplace incidents is significantly higher.

To make matters worse, a disproportionately high number of severe injuries befell the elderly. Most of the injuries were abrasions, contusions, or fractures, but factures were the most severe, constituting nearly 80 percent of the ER visits that resulted in subsequent hospitalization. The highest fracture rates were seen among people aged seventy-five and up. This gave pause to Dr. Harold Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University (and a cat owner) who explores the psychological and emotional benefits of pet ownership. He told the
New York Times
“If we were giving a drug that had such a serious side effect, we'd consider taking that drug off the market.”

Of course, the CDC didn't recommend anything that drastic. It did, however, suggest increasing public awareness of the dangers—who knew that this book was doing a public service?—and the situations that most likely lead to harm. Because dogs were responsible for 88 percent of the injuries, the CDC further recommended that owners make sure their canine companions receive obedience training as recommended by the American Veterinary Medical Association. The CDC did not go so far as to recommend you should get a cat instead.

You walk into a fancy restaurant and order the pork liver pâté, a high-priced appetizer option at perhaps as much as $10 to $15 for a few forkfuls. It tastes a little funny, perhaps, but you really aren't sure—it's not as if you dine on pâté often enough for your palate to recognize its taste and texture so readily. You enjoy it, though, and rave about the meal to your friends later on.

Even though, for all you know, it may have actually been dog food.

No, there aren't any reports of restaurants making a killing by serving an eighty-eight-cent tin of meat meant for Fido and calling it pâté. But according to a 2009 study published by the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE), they probably could get away with it.

The three researchers—John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein, and Alexis Herschkowitsch—wanted to see if consumers could recognize the difference between the high-priced stuff one eats at fancy restaurants and the much cheaper stuff you scoop into a dog bowl. To test, they recruited a team of eighteen eaters. Each was informed that they were going to eat dog food. (Yes, they still agreed to participate.) The researchers “assured subjects that the experience would not be disgusting” before they ate the meat samples.

To test, the trio took some Newman's Own Dog Food—it sells for about $2 to $3 per pound—and ran it through a blender to give it the same consistency as pork liver pâté, Spam, liverwurst, and duck liver mousse. The test subjects were asked to sample the five dishes and report on two things:

1. Whether they liked each of the five mystery meats
   
2. Their guess as to which one was the dog food
   

The good news: Very few people liked the dog food. Of the eighteen test subjects, thirteen thought it tasted poorly, ranking it last among the options. So there's actually a pretty good reason why restaurants don't serve it, at least to humans—no chef wants to get a reputation for serving poor-tasting pâté.

Then there's the bad news. Only three of the eighteen were able to identify which of the gelatinous gloops on their plates was, in fact, meant for their puppies. One of the eighteen believed the high-priced pâté was the obviously-not-as-expensive dog chow.

As CBS reported, the researchers concluded that “although human beings do not enjoy eating dog food, [we] are also not able to distinguish its flavor profile from other meat-based products that are intended for human consumption.”