The curious death of Whaledimir the Russian spy whale

Fisherman Joar Hesten developed a close relationship with Whaledimir, who didn't seem covert enough to be a fully fledged Russian spy.

When a lone beluga whale began rubbing up against Norwegian fishing boats in April 2019, a few alarm bells should have started ringing — not only for conservationists, but among the suits on the top floor at the headquarters of the Norwegian Intelligence Service in Lutvann.

First, the whale didn’t seem to have a pod. Toothed whales — which include beluga, dolphins and orca among other species — are not naturally solitary. They don’t roam the high seas alone. They are pack animals — social mammals that move in pods and can sense how another member of their group is feeling, not only physically but emotionally, through echolocation. Spot one alone and that should be your first indication something is up. Second, pod or not, he was a good deal further south of the high arctic than he should have been. Third, he appeared to be wearing a harness, which was causing him some distress — enough that he seemed to be approaching boats that would ordinarily scare belugas (white whales have a bloody history of being hunted) to try to get the harness off.

By the time fisherman Joar Hesten donned a survival suit, jumped into the ocean and freed the whale from its harness, further questions had arisen. The harness was fitted with a camera mount. An inscription on the clip gave the first clue as to what the beluga might have been doing. “Equipment St Petersburg”, it read. And so began the world’s fixation with Whaledimir, the so-called Russian spy whale.

Norway’s domestic intelligence agency launched an investigation, later telling the BBC the whale was “likely to have been part of a Russian research programme”.

A month after the animal was spotted, the Barents Observer, a Norwegian newspaper, reported satellite images had identified pens thought to house cetaceans at three locations near Russian naval bases. Such creatures have long been used by Moscow, along with the United States and others, for military purposes. Five years later, on Saturday, a headline on their website reads: “Whaledimir is dead.”

“We have taken him out of the water now,” Frederik Skarbovik, a maritime co-ordinator for Stavanger told Norwegian tabloid VG. “I can confirm he is dead, unfortunately. Right now he is lying in a truck.”

Whaledimir — or Hvaldimir as the Norwegians called him in a nod to the Norwegian word for whale, hval, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin — had been found floating in the harbour at Risavika, a busy southwest port. He had no visible injuries. “It’s not immediately clear what the cause of death is,” said Sebastian Strand, a marine biologist who has been monitoring the creature for non-profit organisation Marine Mind for the past three years. Strand said he was devastated by Whaledimir’s death. “It’s absolutely horrible,” he said. “He was apparently in good condition as of [Friday], so we just have to figure out what might have happened here.” A necropsy may well reveal the cause to be entirely natural, but until then, the sudden death of a whale the world had dubbed a kind of useless but lovable James Bond has been met with speculation he may have been assassinated.

Could Whaledimir have been punished for being a turncoat who escaped his Russian captors in favour of charming the tourists along the Norwegian fiords? Foolish to rule it out, perhaps, though if he ever truly was a spy whale, it has generally been agreed he was a pretty poor recruit.

Local celebrity

Soon after he appeared in 2019, Whaledimir settled into the harbour of a small town called Hammerfest. He struggled to feed himself, approaching boats for food. He seemed to like playing fetch and being scratched around the blowhole. When a young woman who had come to see him dropped her phone in the water at the dock, Whaledimir fetched it and brought it back to her. You’d have been hard-pressed to describe him as enigmatic, let alone covert.

The Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries urged people not to feed him. Belugas are more docile than orcas, but he was still a wild animal — there were fears he might become at worst aggressive, at the very least dependent on humans for food. Relocating him to a sanctuary in Iceland was debated. Eventually, it was decided he would be fed and monitored in Norway, and from the summer of 2019 the Norwegian Orca Survey deemed him a “free-swimming” whale, making his way from fiord to fiord, becoming a local celebrity every time he appeared. He made it as far as the west coast of Sweden before returning to Norway, where he died last week.

Russia has never confirmed where Whaledimir came from, though a retired Russian colonel, Viktor Baranets, retorted when asked if they had been using him for spying: “Do you think we would attach a mobile phone number with the message ‘please call this number’?” He also said scientists in northern Russia had been “using beluga whales for tasks of civil information gathering, rather than military tasks”. “Civil information gathering”. That does have a ring of espionage about it, even if Putin hasn’t strictly been deploying whales as highly trained marine weapons.

If he was, he wouldn’t be the first. There is a storied history of whales, dolphins and even sea lions being put to service, used as mine hunters during the Cold War and, in recent years, to protect Russian naval bases from Ukrainian assaults.

Writer Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, or the Whale, which documents our societal fascination with whales, has long hoped to substantiate a 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 Viet Cong 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.”

Space race with cetaceans

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 60s 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 that 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.”

If Whaledimir was captured when he was young and deployed by the Russian military, he was simply the latest marine recruit of his kind. During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the US used dolphins to detect mines. The Soviet Navy operated its dolphin programme until the early 1990s, using them to defend ships against divers, find submarines, locate mines and attach homing devices to targets. A Soviet beluga whale called Tichka escaped twice, in 1991 and 1992, crossing the Black Sea and ending up in Turkey.

The dolphin programme was passed to the Ukrainian Navy after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2000, the BBC reported it had been relocated to Iran, which bought the animals. But two years later, there were reports Russia had deployed trained military dolphins at its main naval base in the Black Sea, with satellite analysis suggesting they may have been used to protect its fleet stationed at the port of Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea, from underwater attacks.

The US, meanwhile, has reportedly spent millions of dollars maintaining its marine troops of dolphins and sea lions. About the time Whaledimir was captured in 2019, the US had about 70 trainable dolphins and 30 sea lions at its naval base in California.

Of greater use to Russia than a sea lion or a dolphin, arguably, is a beluga whale. “They’re used to cold water,” says Hoare. “That far north you don’t get dolphins, so they can be used in colder waters, especially arctic waters. That’s why the Russians would use them.”

Unlike an orca, it also has an unusual skill — a quirk of its anatomy that might make it useful to anyone wanting to shoot underwater footage of a stretch of coastline. “The thing about a beluga whale is it can really articulate its head at a right angle. So it can look straight at you.” A beluga can twist and turn in the water almost as if it were human. “When you see them, they almost seem like mermaids,” says Hoare. “They have this astonishing division in their lower belly which almost makes it look as if they have their legs together.”

When Whaledimir’s lifeless body was spotted, one onlooker reported sadly: “I thought it was sleeping at first.” Sleeping with the fishes. A fitting ending for a “spy whale”.