Compound Eyes are Watching You, Watching Your Every Move

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

Evidence of flight-testing of a long-rumoured robotic insect-like surveillance micro unmanned air vehicle (UAV) developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been demonstrated exclusively to Flight.
 
Developed during the 1970s, the CIA has displayed a mock-up of the micro UAV in its museum at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia since 2003. However until now no media organisation has been given access to the material that proved that the artificial dragonfly had been flight tested.

When the Central Intelligence Agency's gadget makers invented a listening device for the Asian jungles, they disguised it so the enemy would not be tempted to pick it up and examine it: The device looked like tiger droppings.

The guise worked. The fist-size, brown transmitter detected troop movements along the trails during fighting in Vietnam, a quiet success for a little-known group of researchers inside the C.I.A.