Out to Sea

One morning in the spring of 2019 a beluga whale swam up beside a red fishing boat off the far north coast of Norway. Eleven feet long and gleaming white, the animal drew close, tugging the ship’s ropes, rubbing against its hull, and opening his mouth as if expecting food.

Joar Hesten watched the whale from the boat’s deck. It was unusual to see a beluga so far south at that time of year. The animal’s behavior, too, was unusual; whales didn’t tend to pay much attention to fishing boats. A thick nylon strap encircled the whale’s head just behind his shiny black eyes. A second strap was cinched tightly under his flippers.

Hesten reported the animal, and the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries investigated. When the Directorate failed to free him, they enlisted Hesten’s help. A bearded, ruddy-cheeked 26-year-old, he jumped into the frigid water in a survival suit and unfastened the harness. Hesten was photographed afterward on the deck of the Directorate’s boat clutching the thick straps, a smile of modest victory on his lips.

The straps appeared to have been used to hold a Go-Pro-style camera, although there was some speculation they could have been used as a mount for a weapon. Norway’s domestic intelligence agency confirmed that the whale had most likely escaped from one of several holding pens inside a Russian military base 800 miles to the east, in Murmansk.

The story made international headlines. But while the public reacted with astonishment at the discovery of a Russian whale “spy,” the beluga was hardly the first wild animal to be drafted for military service. The Soviet and US navies, in particular, have long exploited marine mammals for military advantage. During the Cold War, both countries sponsored the capture and training of whales, dolphins and their marine mammal relatives in a race to discover how their streamlined bodies and complex biology — highly sophisticated systems refined by nature over millennia — could be put to work to spy on enemies and win wars.

By the early 1960s, naval engineers in the US were examining dolphins especially closely. Their sleek shape inspired new hydrodynamic designs for submarines and torpedoes, but that work was quickly overshadowed as scientists delved into cetacean biosonar. In Navy laboratories, dolphins demonstrated an uncanny ability to “see” their underwater world. In milliseconds, they adjusted the direction and width of the signals they sent into the water, shifting the form and frequency of their sonar as humans use their vision to read and respond to a landscape. They identified tiny objects from great distances and easily located even targets buried under the sea floor. Scientists were delighted to see that the animals could be trained to make fine distinctions among objects, distinguishing between, for example, a bullet and a kernel of