Original Air Date: November 5, 1967
Starring: Peter Graves, Greg Morris, Barbara Bain, Martin Landau
Also Starring: Rusty
Directed by: Alexander Singer

Cat Out of the Bag Alert!  This review contains some spoilers for this episode!

Synopsis: The assigment the team chooses to accept this time is to retrieve a jade seal from a wealthy industrialist named Taggart (Darren McGavin) so the government can return it to an Asian government to keep that country’s diplomatic relations with the U.S. stable.  The challenge: how to remove the seal from Taggart’s closely guarded vault and from under his nose?

Cinema Cat: Joining the team in this mission is Rusty, a trained orange tabby who specializes in “fetching” rare artifacts from unusual places.  Barney Collier (Greg Morris) smuggles Rusty into the building and they set up an elaborate walkway to allow him to walk to the glass case where the jade seal is kept.  It’s fortunate that the glass case happens to have a door on it which the cat can open once going across the makeshift walkway (cats may be talented but we weren’t sure how Rusty would have managed using a glass cutter.)

Rusty takes his sweet time bringing the seal back to Barney and James (Peter Graves) . . . it would have been a good time for him to negotiate just how many fish he was going to get for his part in the caper.  In the end everything works out okay and Rusty helps bring this mission to a successful close.  According the IMDb there were as many as twelve different cats used during the filming, each one with a different talent.  Some sources credit Orangey as playing the part of Rusty in this episode and that may well be true but we cannot confirm it at this time.

Final Mewsings: No mission is impossible for a cat!

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