So, during the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans vied with each other in every field they could. If one side made an improvement in something—anything—the other side would escalate and try to outdo it.
One of the less-well-funded, but still energetically pursued fields was that of animal training for military and espionage purposes. For example, in the mid 70's, the Soviet bomb-sniffing bears were answered with American mine-defusing dolphins. And Soviet trench-undermining hedgehogs, with American river-infiltrating beavers.
And as chronically-underfunded veterinary researchers exhausted the niches of special-interest grant programs, they were forced to become both more inventive and more optimistic in their grant-writing, and they found themselves turning to smaller animals, which were cheaper to maintain. Famously, a special Ukrainian unit of the KGB worked with parakeets, which they would give as gifts to American diplomats. Unbeknownst to the Americans, they had trained them to repeat, in response to Ukrainian trigger words, phrases they had overheard, which the KGB hoped would include bits of juicy embassy conversations. It is unknown how much actual intelligence was gathered by the program, but one of the parakeets became well-known in American diplomatic circles for helping its owner, a Department of State bureaucrat who spoke some Ukrainian, cheat at Bridge.
The KGB's American counterparts, equally under-funded yet zealous, began combining grants from the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency. They ended up mixing endangered species captive breeding programs with classified training (slogan: "make love and war"), hoping that they would, as a happy side effect, increase military sympathy for threatened animals.
It was discovered that President Carter, an environmental enthusiast, was keeping a rare Maryland Spotted Woodpecker, named Peter, as a pet. He had been found injured, at a private construction site, and was rescued by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Humane Society. The Baltimore Zoo bird department, which was conducting a combined EPA/DOD project, asked President Carter if he would mind if Peter participated. Since the bird was male, he was only needed occasionally for the captive breeding program. And since he was a favorite pet in the Carter White House, he was chosen to be both trained and deployed there.
Now, along with lesser-known research and development programs, the superpowers also had more obscure, low-budget, and low-key spying programs. In particular, the Kremlin would send groups of "tourists" who were especially adept at "getting lost", cameras in hand, while on tour in D. C. To give themselves an excuse for getting lost, they were notorious for indulging in late-night vodka-drinking binges before "innocently" wandering the halls of government.
Meanwhile, Peter the woodpecker was discovered to have a relatively sensitive sense of smell for rotting wood, which translated, at least in the relatively sterile confines of the White House, into a sensitivity to the smell of alcohol. His handlers, when they suspected that a gaggle of spying tourists was in the building, would "accidentally" let him escape from his cage. He was trained to follow the smell of alcohol and, when he was close to the source, peck on a wall. In response, he would be given a tasty grub or two. The more intense the smell, the faster he would peck. To everybody's astonishment, the program was actually relatively effective.
One day, when a particularly smelly group had escaped its tour guide with the cunning of Siberian foxes, Peter was set to the chase. He flew around the White House for about ten minutes before staffers heard the sound of pecking in a second basement on the north side. Peter's handlers were called, and they set off to recover him, with Secret Service agents in tow, disguised as zoo volunteers.
When they found him, he was pecking madly away at a scratched-up wooden post. They searched and searched for lost "tourists", and even though they could smell stale vodka even with their puny human noses, they could find absolutely no other sign of the suspicious Russian group.
But because Peter had been so reliable in the past, they suspected that the spies were present but had found some place to hide. So they called in an FBI search team. And the question for the FBI was, if Peter Pecker pecked to pick a pack of pickled peepers, where's the pack of pickled peepers Peter Pecker picked?
