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 corn.
No laws were yet in place to protect marine mammals, and all of the work was classified, so whales and dolphins were captured freely on the open ocean and hauled back to the lab. The scientists carved out, dissected, and experimented with countless jawbones, inner ears and cortexes. The creatures’ powerful physiological systems worked so flawlessly. Surely, the men thought, the technology could be replicated.
After Hesten freed the beluga from his harness, Norway celebrated. The animal was christened Hvaldimir — a fusing of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, with Vladimir, for Vladimir Putin, in homage to the nation from which the animal had escaped. Around the world, the public was fascinated with this strange window into the Russian military machine, delighting in the Norwegians’ benevolence in the face of those who would weaponize a wild animal.
For a while the young whale seemed content in the confines of Tufjord harbor. He entertained locals and tourists alike, following boats as they traveled in and out of the waters. Then, less than a week after Hesten first spotted him, Hvaldimir swam out to sea, trailing a small sailboat on a five-hour cruise southwest to Hammerfest. For reasons no human understands, he decided to remain there, in the town’s harbor.
After more than a decade studying cetaceans, in the early 1970s the US Navy sent five dolphins from its new, top-secret Marine Mammal Program to Vietnam. The dolphins were shipped across the Pacific Ocean and released into Cam Rahn Bay, where they guarded American ships from enemy divers. The highly trained animals patrolled the waters, surfacing to alert handlers when they detected someone or something unexpected beneath the surface.
Meanwhile, at home, Americans were growing increasingly concerned about a better-understood and far more visible marine mammal issue: bycatch. Dolphins, whales and other cetaceans were being ensnared by commercial fishing nets and killed by the thousands. In 1972, President Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The new law sought to protect marine mammals by forbidding anyone to harass, hunt, capture, or kill them in US waters.
The law anticipated exceptions for certain “takings,” though. These included provisions for a reduced number of incidental killings by commercial fishing companies, subsistence fishing by Native Alaskans, and captures and killings associated with certain kinds of scientific research. Also included in the exemptions were injuries or deaths of marine mammals deemed necessary for reasons of national security.
While the MMPA was a watershed in environmental legislation, members of a new activist-oriented animal rights movement found the new law woefully insufficient. A young Australian philosopher named Peter Singer was then drafting what would become a seminal text of the movement. In Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, he argued that animals should be recognized as equal to humans, and that their plight should receive the same attention as the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Among the new generation of animal rights champions was Ric O’Barry, a dolphin trainer-turned-activist who fought for the release of all captive dolphins and for an end to laws permitting humans to own dolphins.
Not long after the publication of Singer’s book, two 26-year-old researchers working at a University of Hawaii marine laboratory — one of whom spent two years living alongside research dolphins — began to complain to the lab’s senior researchers about the conditions there. When their complaints went unheeded, the two men hatched a plan. Early one morning in the spring of 1977, they removed two 350-pound female Atlantic bottlenose dolphins from their tanks, slipping them into the back of a van. They then drove some 50 miles to Yokahama Bay. There, as dawn was breaking, they released the animals into the surf.
The dolphins had been subjects of Navy-funded research into cetacean language and communication. Talking to the press after their arrest, the men explained that they objected to the dolphins’ living conditions. At the lab, the dolphins were housed alone in small tanks — analogous, the men said, to imprisoning a human in a 10-by-10-foot room with only an elephant for company.
On trial, the researchers asserted that it was unethical to deprive the dolphins — wild creatures wholly unable to communicate their wishes to their captors — of the freedom to choose where and how they lived. After much research and soul-searching, they said, they had determined the dolphins to be as human as they were. As such, they said, they were no man’s property.
Whales and dolphins have held an exalted place in humans’ hearts for millennia. In the second century, the Greek scholar Aelian wrote On the Characteristics of Animals, cataloguing the mysterious characteristics and fantastic tales of a host of creatures, including ants, snakes, beavers, bees, mice, ibises, and parrots. Aelian’s words reflect the notion of human superiority to animals. But the beauty of the work, which spans 17 volumes, lies in its depictions of the fierce intelligence, admirable selflessness, and even godlike qualities abundant in the animal kingdom.
Aelian notes that humans and cetaceans share biological traits, chief among them our common experience of growing and nourishing our offspring inside our bodies and then giving birth to live young. But female dolphins, he writes, surpass human mothers’ devotion. They possess a “mysterious instinct” so powerful as to move a mother dolphin to approach a fisherman who has caught one of her calves. Though it may endanger her life, and it does the calf no good, Aelian writes, the mother dolphin will refuse to desert her doomed, bleeding baby, often sacrificing herself to remain at its side.
Among other stories Aelian recounts is that of a young dolphin who lived in the harbor at the island of Poroselene. The dolphin, Aelian writes, treated the island’s people like friends. A couple came to know the dolphin and gave him food. They treated him as their own child, naming him and raising him as a brother to their son. Over time the dolphin learned to feed himself, and he brought food back to his human family whenever he hunted in the deep sea off the island. When the boy grew older, he would stand at the shore and call to his animal brother, who would return to the boy “with all speed,” rushing through the water to greet him and joining him to play in the surf. The family gained attention far and wide, Aelian wrote, “and those who sailed thither reckoned them among the excellent sights which the city had to show.”
In another story, a dolphin pod rescues a calf held captive by a group of humans, spiriting it away as a human family might a stolen child. Aelian writes, too, of dolphins’ appreciation of music, and of dolphins who fall deeply in love with men and boys. He writes of the animals’ capacity for devotion to people, the deep and even erotic feelings they have for their human companions, and of bereft dolphins who strand themselves when their beloved people do not return to their regular meeting place by the shore.
Five hundred years before Aelian wrote his tales, the poet Arion was said to have traveled aboard a ship returning him home to Lesbos. Arion had won a musical competition in Sicily, and his pockets were stuffed with gold. Pirates approached him, threatening to seize his winnings. Desperate, he distracted the attackers by singing and playing his lyre. When his song was through, he leapt into the sea, expecting to die. But a dolphin had appeared to hear the music. It rushed to Arion’s rescue, lifting him out of the water on its back. Enchanted by his playing, the dolphin carried the poet safely home.
As the days warmed, tourists began gathering at the pier in Hammerfest to see the famous beluga whale. They fed Hvaldimir fish cakes and tossed balls for him to fetch. To the delight of one visitor, the playful whale retrieved a lost iPhone. Pleasure boats followed him, idling their motors and leaning over the rails to pet his cool, wet head.
The Directorate posted a sign at Hammerfest warning tourists not to feed Hvaldimir, and not to get too close. He was playful, but at 11 feet long and more than 1,000 pounds, he was powerful, too. Whales never hunt humans, but belugas are predators. If Hvladimir mistook a person for prey or suddenly became frightened, the whale could turn deadly. He’d been observed behaving aggressively with divers, and no one could say where the line might be between playing and hunting for Hvaldimir.
The reverse was also true. Visitors liked to feed him, chase him, and throw things at him in the hopes of an interaction or a photograph with the friendly whale. Humans, too, could be unpredictable and dangerous. The signs reminded everyone who came to see the whale that despite his charming behavior and endearing name, Hvaldimir remained a wild animal.
In the 1980s, mass strandings of whales were reported around the world, including along the coasts of Chile and the UK and on the shores of the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa. The Canary Islands strandings were of beaked whales, a rarely-seen species that lives and breeds in small, tight-knit pods deep inside underwater canyons. The beaked whales that live there enjoy one of the richest and most diverse cetacean habitats in the world, sharing the warm waters with 27 other species, all of them feeding, breeding and tending to their young. Though reclusive — breaking the ocean’s surface just long enough to draw breath — beaked whales are sometimes mistaken for dolphins.
The Canary Islands strandings coincided with a rise in NATO and other navy exercises on the open seas, in which powerful sonar was used. Several of the strandings were tied directly to those exercises; necropsies revealed that the whales’ bodies were riddled with signs of decompression sickness, as would strike a human diver forced to surface too quickly. Whales are capable of far faster ascents than humans, and so the hemorrhaged brains and kidneys, the bleeding from the ears, indicated an unusually rapid surfacing that could only have been triggered by panic: in response to the invasion of their canyons, the whales had abandoned their homes and tried, as best they could, to save themselves.
During that same decade, the US Navy flew six of its dolphins to the Persian Gulf to help in its efforts to defend Iran after the Iraqi invasion. The dolphins used their biosonar to find and tag Iranian land mines, helping clear the way for oil tankers and aid ships. The details of these assignments were classified.
Meanwhile, the Navy was exploring other uses for its “advanced marine biological systems,” as the animals were called in military documents. Plans were underway to bring 16 dolphins to Puget Sound. Their task would be to patrol the waters around Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base, protecting the largest single arsenal of nuclear weapons on the planet by using their biosonar to detect swimmers and other potential intruders in the waters surrounding the base.
Animal rights groups sued. The waters were too cold, they said. They cited a case in which a dolphin taken from Hawaii died of heart failure after being forced to work in the waters there. The courts agreed, twice blocking the Navy’s plan.
The Navy set out to prove the animals would be safe. They flew a group of dolphins, all natives of the Gulf of Mexico, to the coasts of Maine, Alaska, and Scandinavia. There, trainers and scientists worked with the animals in the icy waters, testing the limits of their metabolic capacity, seeing how much they could take.
Unlike nearly all of their dolphin cousins, belugas spend their entire lives in arctic waters. With a layer of blubber that can make up 40 percent of their body mass and a highly evolved system of regulating blood flow to vital organs, they are, as the Russian military well knows, highly adapted to frigid temperatures. Their gathering places in Earth’s coldest oceans include the waters of the White Sea that surround Russia’s Solovetsky Islands. Situated a few hundred miles south of Murmansk just outside the Arctic Circle, the archipelago is home to a 15th century Russian Orthodox monastery. The sprawling grounds sit on the main island among lush forests and frozen lakes, its onion domes shimmering from behind high stone walls.
For thousands of years, belugas have gathered in the waters around the monastery. On calm days during the summer months, they raise their slick white heads out of the water vertically, as if standing on their tails. There, they perform their songs, the vocalizations that earned them the whalers’ nickname “sea canary.” The airborne chirps and whistles, mere slivers of the animals’ vast and complex undersea language, have been compared to the sound of children playing.
According to legend, when the monastery was being built, a white horse was sent from the mainland to deliver its cornerstone. As it galloped across the frozen ocean, the ice under its hooves gave way. The horse was dragged underwater, the stone lost. The distraught monks prayed for the cornerstone to be found. Their prayers were answered when the archangel Michael recovered the stone from the depths and placed it at the church site. Then Michael transformed the horse, bringing it back to life as the first beluga whale.
One Wednesday morning in March of 2000, 14 beaked whales swam into the shallows of the northern Bahama Islands and stranded themselves. The incident was one of the largest mass strandings ever recorded.
Five years later, a fleet of pilot whales rushed into the shallows and onto a beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Twenty-four were found dead. Another seven had to be euthanized. One injured whale was guided by rescuers back into the water only to swim in a circle and re-strand itself. In all, 37 whales are known to have died that weekend.
Similar mass strandings occurred that decade in Japan, Greece, Brazil, California, and the US Virgin Islands. In the Bahamas stranding, scientists in the area living there were suspicious that the whales’ distress was caused by US Navy sonar, so they rushed to gather tissue samples from the dead animals. Necropsies showed bleeding in the whales’ inner ears, evidence of exposure to deafeningly loud noises. The animals also suffered brain hemorrhaging, bruised larynxes, heart lesions and cranial injuries. It was clear that in addition to the physical damage, the whales had experienced severe psychological distress. It seems a deafening noise alarmed and confused the animals, and they fled.
More than 20 years earlier, at the trial of the men who freed the two captive dolphins in Hawaii, a former laboratory employee testified in their defense. He said the dolphins had been used by the Navy as weapons carriers. Some were trained, he said, to shuttle bombs and attack Russian ships. He testified that the US military was selling dolphins to Latin American countries as weapons. Several former Navy officers corroborated the researcher’s statements.
Today as then, the Navy denies all of this. Well aware of the dangers public objections can pose to their program, the military’s communications office instead emphasizes the exceptional care lavished on the animals it keeps. Dolphins receive thorough annual physical exams, including blood tests, ultrasounds, visual tests, and endoscopies. Each is fed a diet calibrated to its nutritional needs, and each meal is inspected by a military veterinarian. Naval personnel describe the cuisine they feed the animals as “restaurant quality.”
Among the problems the captive animals have suffered are toxic shock, anaphylaxis, traumatic brain injury, respiratory problems, kidney stones, bacterial infections, and problems with normal growth and development. Older dolphins are especially susceptible to pneumonia; others develop diabetes and kidney disease. Some are kept alive long after they would have perished in the wild in order for scientists to study the progress of their disease. “Unusual deaths” are occasionally reported due to head injuries, spinal fractures, and electrolyte imbalances, among a host of other causes. Despite repeated requests, necropsies detailing the circumstances of these deaths are hidden from the public’s view. The Marine Mammal Program remains classified, allowing the Navy to treat the details of the lives of its captive animals the same way it does the operation of mine warfare equipment or nuclear security maneuvers. Occasionally, otherwise healthy animals drown themselves, which dolphins can do by deciding not to breathe and allowing their bodies to sink into the nets that line the bottom of their pens.
After spending the summer of 2019 in Hammerfest, Hvaldimir left the harbor’s relative safety for the arctic waters off Finnmark. Over the winter months he was seen in several locations near there. One ship’s crew played ball with him. A kayaker filming Hvaldimir had his Go-Pro snatched away by the playful whale, and for a few brief moments he filmed the sea floor before gently returning the gadget to its owner, opening his mouth delightedly at his stunt.
The next summer, more than a year after Hesten encountered him, Hvaldimir was seen with a large gash across his side. It was clear that human activity of some kind was to blame, whether a boat propeller strike or a run-in with fishing equipment or some other clash brought on by the whale’s enduring attraction to humans. This tendency, undoubtedly acquired during months or even years of training, puts him in grave danger, and makes other, more serious injuries all but inevitable.
Hvaldimir seems to travel alone. This isn’t unusual for a male beluga of his age, as the animals do sometimes move from pod to pod. Observers worry, though, that Hvaldimir is by himself because he lacks the social skills to become a member of a group, as belugas must in order to thrive in the wild. Orcas present another danger to Hvaldimir’s survival; a lone adult beluga like him would make an attractive target for a hungry pod.
As long as he remains in Norwegian waters, the country’s substantial animal protection laws will guard Hvaldimir from capture or intentional injury. But he is permitted to travel wherever he likes. Lately he’s been spotted among the fjords of northern Norway, where fish farms make food abundant and easy to obtain. Some activists argue he should be provided permanent sanctuary in a fjord, where he would be largely protected from harm by boats and predators; others believe that, despite the risks posed by a life of freedom, he should be left alone.
“We are all responsible,” reads the Norwegian Orca Survey’s website, the blue letters superimposed on a video loop of Hvaldimir alone in the sea, his pale body turning and drifting like a ghost.
After 9/11 the federal government rushed to increase funding for security at its military sites, and in 2006 the Navy again proposed to boost security in Puget Sound. In 2008, it published an environmental impact statement on the issue. The report outlined several alternatives to using dolphins to protect the store of nuclear weapons, including building underwater detection robots and employing human divers equipped with handheld sonar devices. But the document also made clear that dolphins and sea lions remained the superior technology and the safest, most economical choice.
Animal rights groups protested again. Activists knitted mittens for the dolphins’ flippers. One marine biologist argued that dolphins were unfit for the role of securing the nations’ nuclear warheads. If the United States deserved the best in defense, surely dolphins weren’t it, she said, given their ability to become distracted and their inability to understand the gravity of their task.
In 2009 the Navy finally won approval to use dolphins and sea lions to protect the weapons, and sixteen captive dolphins arrived in Puget Sound to guard the weapons that, with little more than the press of a button, could poison their habitat forever. Today the animals there live in pens. When not on patrol, the dolphins “rest” in water heated to temperatures appropriate for their bodies.
In the Hawaii case, the court quickly dismissed the researchers’ argument that the dolphins’ intelligence made it impossible for them to be considered property. That logic dissolved in the face of centuries-old American laws, which hold that captive wild animals are by definition private property. The dolphins were indisputably owned by the state. The men were convicted of grand larceny, a felony. One was ordered to reimburse the state for the cost of the dolphins, though what their lives were worth in US dollars was unknown.
Well before that verdict was reached, the dolphins the men set free had been replaced by a new pair. The successors, two females who were not yet two years old, were captured near Gulfport, Mississippi. The animals were shipped west to Hawaii, where research resumed.
In a magazine article published before the men released the research dolphins, one of the lab’s head researchers described the communication he developed with dolphins over nearly a decade as groundbreaking from an animal research standpoint. He added, though, that his conversations with dolphins were strictly “elementary” by human standards. “We’re not going to talk philosophy,” he said.
Thanks to billions of federal dollars of investment over many decades, humans have largely achieved their goal of harnessing cetaceans’ sonar capabilities. While there is still much that we don’t understand about biosonar, and that machines cannot replicate, today nearly every navy in the world blasts sound waves into earth’s already noisy oceans in the name of national security.
The US Navy initially denied it was using sonar near the Bahamas at the time of the mass stranding in 2000. Soon, though, records revealed that three submarines and seven battleships were operating close by at the time of the whales’ deaths. The ships were emitting a sound level that could easily have caused the animals to perceive grave danger, become seriously disoriented, and flee with deadly speed from their home in the undersea canyons.
The Navy continues to hold roughly 100 marine mammals in San Diego. About 70 are dolphins, and the rest, according to the Navy, are sea lions. They live in pens alongside 50 warships inside a sprawling $4 billion base. According to government literature, the animals can be mobilized within 72 hours to serve in any location in the world.
Usually the animals are hidden from the public’s view. But a few years ago, during renovations, the Navy moved its dolphins to holding pens visible from a footbridge over the waters of San Diego Bay. Animal activists used hidden video cameras to record the dolphins as they were monitored by trainers and veterinarians. Among the scores of animals held in two rows of small pens, the footage shows two elderly dolphins buoyed by flotation devices, evidently to prevent them from drowning. In the activists’ videos, they were fed through a tube, had blood drawn, and received fluids through an IV.
The videos were handed off to a local news station, and a Navy spokesperson responded. He identified one of the sick dolphins as an Iraqi war veteran named Makai. In 2003, Makai had “served” in Iraq’s Umm Qasr Port, where he and another dolphin used their sonar to find underwater mines. Now Makai was suffering from a spinal disease brought on by old age. As was fitting for an “American hero,” the spokesperson said, Makai was being attended to with the expert supervision of Navy veterinarians. When he was finally euthanized, the Navy withheld Makai’s death report for reasons of national security. The Navy’s dolphins have since been removed from public view.
The US and Russia continue to use marine mammals to guard their military machinery, their personnel, and their borders, tasking them with operations deemed too dangerous for humans. The US Navy has announced many times that it anticipates replacing its captive animals with robots, but the animals’ biology continues to trump the world’s most sophisticated military machine. Meanwhile, navies around the globe continue to subject their helpers’ wild cousins to dangers their forebears unwittingly helped create, to monstrous recreations of their own finely tuned biology.
In the hundreds of photographs and videos of Hvaldimir posted online, his expression conveys a curious, joyful creature. Yet his round, coal-black eyes set low on his face; the dot in an exclamation point that begins at the smooth black line of his mouth; and his massive, bulbous forehead housing a brain larger than any human’s suggest an otherworldliness and unfathomability, a creature all the science in the world cannot explain.
In a recent publicity photograph, another beluga whale, this one held by the US Navy, marks a target on the ocean floor. The animal is taking part in a training exercise, which she will do in exchange for food. She carries a large, horseshoe-shaped metal tool in her mouth, and appears to be attaching a marker to a pipe on the ocean floor. The pipe is a replica of a land mine, but the beluga has no idea of the risk such a thing poses — her military training is limited to doing what she’s told in order to be fed. The animal looks similar to Hvaldimir, though her expression lacks his playfulness, the line of her mouth turned down as she works to complete her assignment.
When the session is over, the whale will return to a nearby tank to rest until the next one begins. In the photograph, under the whale’s flippers, a harness is cinched tightly against her gleaming white skin. The straps look identical to the ones that bound Hvaldimir’s body, and which Joar Hesten clutched victoriously as the whale, finally free and forever imperiled, swam away.
