Tom Vanderbilt explores Cold War-era CIA practices that relied on nonhuman operatives:
It is striking that even as the television program “Flipper” was making dolphins popular with American children, the creatures were becoming embroiled in the cold war arms race. As a partially declassified 1976 CIA document on naval dolphin training notes, the Soviets were “also assessing and replicating U.S. systems while possibly developing countermeasures to certain U.S. systems.” …
Even bugs—the kind with legs—were considered by the military establishment. “The Use of Arthropods as Personnel Detectors,” a 1972 report by the Army’s Limited Warfare Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, summarizes research on the possibility of exploiting the “sensory capabilities of insects”—bedbugs, mosquitoes and ticks among them—“for the detection of people.” Scientists ruled out lice (“in a preliminary test they simply crawled about at random”) but saw “feasible” promise in the mosquito Anopheles quadrimaculatus, which “is normally at rest and will fly at the approach of a host,” and so might be used “to detect the approach of people during darkness.”
The Dish 