A Gulf Dolphin in blue waters by Qeshm Island, the Strait of Hormuz, Iran. Photo / Getty Images
At first, it sounded like a joke. General Dan Caine, the United States’ most senior military figure, was asked by a journalist whether Iran is using “kamikaze dolphins”.
Caine, habitually grim-faced during press briefings on the US’ war against Iran, cracked a rare smile. “I haven’t heard the kamikaze dolphin thing – it’s like sharks with laser beams, right?” he said on May 5, referring to Austin Powers.
It might seem more suited to the outlandish spy series than real life, but there was more than a grain of truth to the exchange.
Iran might not have a team of dolphins ready to deploy for military operations, but the US does.
The secretive unit was formed during the Cold War when scientists, who had been studying dolphins’ sonar abilities, realised they could identify objects underwater with high accuracy.
Not quite “kamikaze” as the rumour suggests, the dolphins were taught to hunt down mines and alert humans to safely remove them – rather than the creatures detonating them themselves.
Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, dolphins are still undergoing training off the coast of San Diego, the US Navy confirmed to the Telegraph.
The animals have been deployed to the Middle East once and could be crucial to unblocking the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran still controls and has scattered with mines.
The dolphin training initiative, known as the Marine Mammal Programme, is thought to have begun in the early 1960s.
It was shrouded in secrecy until 1989, when German TV journalists secretly filmed the Navy’s dolphin operations near Key West in Florida and at a Trident submarine base in Washington state.
Dolphins were reportedly strapped onto stretchers hidden inside tents on “small, fast boats”. Many of the operational details of the programme remain classified.
However, officials stress the dolphins are not used as “kamikaze” weapons and are trained to detect and mark underwater objects, rather than detonating mines themselves or attacking enemy boats.
While the German documentary was critical of the treatment of the creatures, the programme would quietly prove its value in combat.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Navy deployed a team of nine bottlenose dolphins to help clear underwater mines and obstacles near Umm Qasr harbour – the country’s only deep-water port.
They proved crucial to US operations. Coalition forces needed to open shipping lanes quickly so humanitarian aid and commercial supplies could begin flowing into southern Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi forces had seeded the approaches to the harbour with underwater explosives and obstacles designed to slow or damage coalition ships.
Navy dolphins were deployed into the murky waters of the harbour, including one called Makai, then about 18, and Tacoma, around 20.
They worked alongside military divers and mine-clearing teams, using echolocation to pinpoint the underwater mines.
When one was discovered, the dolphins would swim to the surface, where Navy vessels were circling, and slap the side of the boat – a signal for the disposal teams to move in.
According to Navy accounts, the unit helped coalition forces locate more than 100 underwater mines and obstacles around the harbour approaches.
More than two decades later, amid another war in the Middle East, US forces are confronting another mine-strewn sea passage in the Strait of Hormuz.
Kevin Eyer, a former US Navy mine warfare commander, said Iranian “bottom mines” – explosive devices resting on the seabed rather than floating beneath the surface – are one of the most difficult naval threats to detect.
Among those that could have been used in the strait are Russian-designed MDM-series mines and the EM-52 rocket-propelled mines, thought to be capable of launching an explosive warhead upward towards a ship.
Iran is also thought to possess large numbers of simpler mines, such as Sadaf-class systems, which force commanders into painstaking clearance operations.
Mine warfare specialists say the dolphins excel in exactly the kind of environment where other systems, despite the advances in underwater robotics since the Cold War, struggle most.
In shallow, muddy and cluttered waters with poor visibility, they come into their own.
So far, US Central Command has refused to comment on whether dolphins have been deployed to clear the strait. But it appears to be precisely what the secretive unit was trained to do.
What sounded like a throwaway joke at a Pentagon briefing turned out to reveal one of the strangest surviving capabilities in modern warfare.
Somewhere off the coast of San Diego, bottlenose dolphins are training for war. And off the coast of Iran, they may already be fighting one.
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