From Russia Without Love! The return of the spy whale

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

When you think of a spy it’s probably the usual, James Bond-style tropes: Smart suit, fancy car, bulging forehead, blowhole. Wait, what?

Yes, this week has seen the reappearance of a beluga whale that is believed to be a Russian spy.

Back in 2019, marine experts in Norway noticed a white-colored whale that they suspected was trained by the Russian navy as part of a program to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.

The whale was said to be actively seeking out fishing vessels and trying to pull ropes from the sides of boats, and it was wearing a tight harness which seemed to be for a camera or weapon, raising suspicions that the animal had been given military-grade training by Russia. Inside the harness were the words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” and “Actual Spy” (maybe).

Suspicions were also aroused when the whale ordered some herring “shaken, not stirred” and tried to shag everything.

Anyway, the spy whale is back, reappearing off Sweden’s coast. Having spent years traveling slowly south from Norway’s far north, the whale has sped up in recent months in an attempt to destabilize Sweden’s efforts to join NATO, or find a mate, or both.

Animals have been used as spies for years, with spy pigeons deployed during World War I. The CIA took pigeons’ ability to find their way back home a step further with the Tacana Project in the 1970s. They trained pigeons to fly clandestine Cold War missions to the Soviet Union but instead of bringing back secret messages, they carried cameras that could take photos of sensitive military sites and secret locations. The intel on their success is still classified.

Further back in time, in the northern English town of Hartlepool, legend has it that during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship was wrecked off the coast and the only survivor was the ship’s mascot, a monkey. The people of Hartlepool had never seen a monkey before (or a Frenchman) and convicted the monkey of being a spy and hanged the animal on the beach. The townsfolk then became known as “monkey hangers.”

Fast-forward to 2002 and the town’s football club’s monkey mascot H’angus — real name Stuart Drummond — was elected as Hartlepool mayor, not once but three times, because the people of Hartlepool preferred a joke candidate to someone who might improve public services, a trick copied by the citizens of London when they elected Boris Johnson as mayor in 2008.

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.