Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
If a Russian spy-whale defecting to Norway sounds weird, try harder.
It’s not even the fourth weirdest incident in the long and bizarre history of marine mammal espionage. Hell, it’s not even the first incident involving a cetacean defector. The story of how dolphins and whales became clandestine operatives for human navies involves an acid-dropping scientist fond of dosing his marine mammal charges; a pioneering stuntwoman who went from a bit role in a movie about fishman love to top secret program manager; and a cast of allegedly knife-wielding and hunger-striking patriotic dolphin captives.
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The dolphin gap: The Soviets (and now Russians) first conscripted marine mammals into their navy after reports about the U.S. Navy’s own program spooked them into fears about a dolphin gap, according to a declassified CIA study from the 1970s. Agency analysts surveyed Soviet open source literature on marine mammals and concluded that the Soviets had translated copies of a book by scientist John C. Lily, Man and Dolphin.
Lily was an eccentric, New Age buzzword-spewing scientist who had spent the 1960s experimenting with LSD and floating in "solitude isolation tanks" and had written a densely weird memoir of his acid trips and thoughts about human consciousness, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space. Lily was fascinated by dolphins and combined his passion for acid and marine mammals once by dosing six dolphins with LSD (“They all had wonderful trips,” he told an interviewer).
The Soviets, unaware of Lily’s countercultural tendencies, focused more on the fact that the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research had funded his research on dolphins. When he wrote that the animals could be “helpful in hunting and retrieving nose cones, satellites, missiles, and similar things that men insist on dropping into the ocean,” Soviet analysts concluded that the U.S. Navy had already done it.
Learned it from watching you, Dad: Despite that dubious analytical tradecraft, it turned out the Soviets were on to something: The U.S. Navy was the first superpower to have a military marine mammal program. The Navy started studying dolphins in the early 1960s in the hopes of building a better torpedo based off its unique hydrodynamic shape. The program morphed into training marine mammals to perform simple tasks, and Navy personnel trained a dolphin named Tuffy to pass objects between two submerged divers. Those skills allowed the Navy to deploy dolphins for swimmer defense, using the mammals to find and mark potential enemy swimmers, vehicles, and mines lurking around U.S. vessels.
Why dolphins? Why use dolphins for these tasks when humans are smarter? Dolphins and other marine mammals are faster in the water, can stay underwater longer, and can dive deeper than their human counterparts. Some of the missions envisioned for naval dolphins could also be fairly dangerous for humans. According to the historian Christopher Andrew, the British foreign intelligence service MI6 sent diver Lionel “Buster” Crabb to snoop on the Soviet ship Ordzhonikidze when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sailed into British waters in 1956; his body turned up later without a head or hands.
In the era before unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), marine mammals were the next best thing to robots.
Circus act: Soviet literature showed that officials there were spooked enough by the possibility that Yankee dolphins could sneak up on their submarines and attach a magnetic tracker—or worse, an explosive charge—to start their own program. They chose Galina Shurepova, the first woman to serve as a diver in the Soviet navy, to head a top secret marine mammal effort based in Ukraine’s Black Sea coast around Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula.
Shurepova was an accomplished diver who had a bit role as a stuntwoman in the 1962 Soviet movie Amphibian Man, a Shape of Water-like film about a man with gills who falls in love with a pearl fisher’s daughter. Despite her athletic and cinematic pedigree, neither she nor the enlisted conscripts assigned to her knew much about capturing, caring for, or training bottlenose dolphins, and it showed. Of 47 dolphins the Soviet navy caught at one point in the early 1970s, all but two died.
After Shurepova, the Soviet navy brought in Anna Durova to run its program. Durova was born into a circus dynasty in Russia that dated back to the 19th century. Her father, Vladimir Durov, had come up with a plan to train sea lions for the Tsarist Russian navy shortly before the October revolution.
Dolphins into ploughshares: In the mid-’70s, the CIA assessed that the Soviet spy mammal program would largely mirror the progress of America’s effort: moving from diver assistance to “sophisticated tasks such as placement of packages on ships and ship protection.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine gained its independence and the formerly top secret navy dolphins lost a job. Officials leased out space near the dolphin pens to shipping companies so they could afford to keep feeding the animals and tried to pitch oil companies on the idea of dolphins as private military contractors for tankers, but the idea didn’t take. In 1997, The New York Times caught up with a dolphin trainer in Sevastopol who had repurposed the military porpoises for more peaceful ends: therapy animals for autistic children.
In 2011, there were rumors that Ukraine planned to revive its military marine mammal program with 10 new dolphins in the training pipeline. Russian state news quoted an anonymous source making the outlandish claim the animals would be “trained to attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.”
Who gets the family dolphin? Knife-wielding dolphins or not, the next front in the marine mammals wars wasn’t between East and West but Russia and its former territory Ukraine. The Soviet Union based its dolphin program on the Black Sea coast of Crimea, the same place Russian troops invaded in 2014.
When Russia annexed the peninsula, it took control of everything in it, including the Ukrainian navy’s dolphins. Russian state news boasted that the animals would be “preserved and redirected towards the interests of the Russian navy” and given “new instruments for new applications to boost the operational efficiency of the dolphins underwater.”
Despite those boasts, it doesn’t appear much came of the claims. Most of the annexed dolphins died. Ukrainian officials offered the less than convincing claim that the animals had staged a hunger strike and died in a fit of patriotic pique.
Baby beluga: The allegiances of the most recent apparent member of the marine mammal spy club are similarly in question. Norwegian authorities told The Washington Post that the beluga whale found fitted with a St. Petersburg-marked harness in the waters of Hammerfest is now accepting pats on the nose from nearby sailors and refusing to leave. If the whale does plan to defect, Norway may want to consider granting it asylum in a hurry given Russia’s recent unforgiving attitude towards those who betray its armed services.
