Writer Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, or the Whale, which documents our societal fascination with whales, has long hoped to substantiate one claim that the United States used cetaceans during the Vietnam war as underwater assassins. The story which has been “widely circulated”, he says, is that they were employed to “assassinate Viet Cong divers”. “They were actually using CO2 canisters fixed with a hypodermic needle to their snout which were used to inject Vietcong divers with a fatal dose of carbon dioxide.”
Hoare studied whales on Cape Cod in the 1980s. At the time, a lone orca used to frequent the harbour. “My landlady used to go out swimming with it. This orca was clearly habituated to human beings. It’s likely he was an escapee from a military training camp. A US military training camp.
“If you see a single dolphin or killer whale there is something weird because these are entirely social animals. They’ve been taken out of their pods for some reason and that was probably why. […] Belugas are similar.”
The US military has used cetaceans to detect mines, he explains. “Sort of the way you train a pig to snuffle out truffles. They very quickly catch on what they’re being asked to do,” says Hoare.
They were also used in the Gulf War, he says, and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq “to locate mines in the harbour”.
It was during the Vietnam War, he adds, that it’s likely they started to be used for espionage. “Later on in the Sixties is probably when the Russians started using trained belugas, dolphins, orca. It’s very difficult to tell what was happening there, but they definitely were. It was a kind of space race with cetaceans.”
Whaledimir is, says Hoare, “very clear evidence of what the Russians have been doing”. Could he have been a spy? Impossible to know for sure, but he has “definitely been trained to use a camera”. “So it’s not going to be for an oceanarium. I think it’s probably military use, yes.”
A conspicuously bright, ivory coloured animal which lacks the killer instinct of an orca might seem an odd choice for espionage. But experts say a beluga could make a perfect recruit for the right mission. Their ability to “navigate the murk” makes them helpful spies, says Tom Foreman, a natural history television researcher who has spent years filming the animals in waters off northern Norway. “Their echolocation is one of the things that’s attractive for using them because they can navigate through muddy waters, being more of a coastal animal,” he says.
“They’re not particularly deep divers and they are an ice whale.”
In Norway, people found it “rather entertaining”, says Foreman that “this supposed Russian spy was quite so friendly and useless”. Whaledimir’s friendliness could give some clue to his history, says Foreman. “They’re definitely social creatures, which could be why this one was seeking out people rather than other pods. If he was caught young and became used to people it could be he didn’t quite recognise or wasn’t able to communicate with other pods to join them or didn’t have good wild hunting skills.”