Can You Spy the Answers to This Quiz on the CIA?

William J. Donovan was a World War I hero who was nicknamed “Wild Bill” by younger officers under his command. Later, during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt put “Wild Bill” in charge of the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS coordinated espionage and gathered intelligence during the war, and under Donovan’s leadership, laid the foundation for much of what the CIA would become.

After the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman’s administration went through several separate attempts to create an intelligence agency that operated independently from Congress and the executive branch. In 1945, the government established the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), which was folded into the newer, more independent Central Intelligence Group (CIG) the next year. Finally, President Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency by signing the National Security Act of 1947.

Operation Acoustic Kitty may sound like a song by Weird Al, but it was actually a very real (failed) CIA operation. A surgeon implanted a microphone into a cat’s ear, and a radio transmitter at the base of its skull. The CIA’s actual plan was to train the cat to sit near foreign officials to spy on them. The one problem: Cats do what they want. The spy kitty failed its trial run after it ran off on its own, and that was the end of Operation Acoustic Kitty.

The receipts say “Store Number 1” at what the CIA personnel at Langley have nicknamed the “Stealthy Starbucks.” At this special Starbucks, there’s no chance of the barista getting your name wrong — because, for privacy reasons, it is the only Starbucks in America where employees are instructed to avoid asking anyone’s name. Employees at Store Number 1 go through rigorous background checks and interviews before they are hired at what Starbucks says is one of its busiest locations in the country.

After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy’s adviser and brother, Robert Kennedy, began work on a plan to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. The plan, called “Operation Mongoose,” included the controversial option of assassinating Castro. According to “The New York Times,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover learned that the CIA was in contact with the mafia, however there was no indication the Kennedy administration knew about the reported assassination plan. Like the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose ended ineffectively, and Castro remained in power.

In 2007, former CIA officer Robert Wallace revealed declassified documents that showed the CIA literally tried to incorporate “magic” into agents’ skill sets in the 1950s, enlisting the help of U.S. magician and author John Mulholland. The skills Mulholland detailed in his manuals for the CIA included sleight-of-hand techniques and covert signaling. The file was titled “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.”

The CIA was so concerned with George Orwell’s novels “Animal Farm” and “1984,” it bought the rights to both books so it could change the endings for the film versions. In “Animal Farm,” the original ending found both the pigs (representing Communists) and humans ( capitalists) equally villainous, but the CIA-produced animated version made the story more anti-Communist by showing only the pigs as corrupt. In “1984,” the book ends with the protagonist, Winston, submitting to Big Brother. In the film, he dies heroically yelling “down with Big Brother!”

The CIA’s original home was in a Navy Hill complex in Washington, D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, but after the agency’s rapid growth throughout the 1950s, it moved to a new, bigger home. The town of Langley, Virginia, was chosen in part because it was far enough away from the big city to be made secure and private more easily. President Dwight D. Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the Langley office in 1955, and John F. Kennedy dedicated the building in 1961.

The CIA was officially established in 1947, and two years later President Harry S. Truman signed the official Central Intelligence Agency Act. The legislation gave the CIA authority to secretly fund intelligence operations, and opened the door for the agency to operate outside normal approved U.S. government practices.

In documents that were declassified in 2013, the CIA confirmed the existence of Area 51 as an official government facility, and placed its location about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada (there is even a map). The facility, created in 1955, has long been a rumored location for UFO research, and the declassified documents do specifically reference unidentified flying objects.