The same methods that lay behind Priscilla the Fastidious Pig or the Educated Hen informed projects such as training ravens to deposit and retrieve objects, pigeons to warn of enemy ambushes, or even cats to eavesdrop on human conversations. But wars make strange bedfellows, and in one of the most curious, if little-known, stories of the cold war, the people involved in making poultry dance or getting cows to play bingo were also involved in training animals, under government contract, for defense and intelligence work. Two scenes, seemingly disjointed: the John le Carré shadows against the bright midway lights of county-fair Americana. But chances are that if an animal had been trained to do something whimsically human, the animal-or the technique-came from Hot Springs. You would find much the same in any number of mom-and-pop theme parks or on television variety shows of the era. With their vacationing parents inca tow, children would squeal as they watched chickens play baseball, macaws ride bicycles, ducks drumming and pigs pawing at pianos.

Zoo, one of the touristic palaces that dotted the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1960s. Half a world away from the murk of the cold war, it would be a typical day at the I.Q. The raven that transported it to the ledge was no random city bird, but a U.S.-trained intelligence asset. In a small cavity at the slate’s center was an electronic transmitter powerful enough to pick up their conversation. Those in the apartment might be dismayed to learn, however, that the slate had come not from the roof but from a technical laboratory at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Nor would anything seem amiss in the jagged piece of gray slate resting on the ledge, seemingly jetsam from the roof of an old and unloved building. In an apartment on the other side of the window, no one would shift his attention from the briefing papers or the chilled vodka set out on a table. The bird would pace across the ledge a few times but quickly depart. There would be a rustle of oily black feathers as a raven settled on the window ledge of a once-grand apartment building in some Eastern European capital.

Strange brigade trainer