Secrets of the Spy Whale - The Reluctant 007

Some animals, by virtue of their extraordinary stories, create an awareness and empathy that outlasts their own lives. In the whale and dolphin world, we think of Keiko, Shamu, Fungie and now we need to add Hvaldimir to the list.

We’ve written about this charismatic beluga and his mysterious backstory on a number of occasions and now a new BBC documentary, Secrets of the Spy Whale, seems to have unraveled the truth. Or part of it at least.

After 10 months of research, the conclusion is that Hvaldimir was part of a Russian programme, training belugas to guard its naval fleet. So less about snooping around Scandinavian fjords trying to pick up intelligence, and more about alerting Moscow to foreign agents snooping their own ships.

The documentary team met one of the last remaining veterans of an early US Navy programme run from Point Mugu in California. Former dolphin trainer Blair Irvine, now in his 80s, explained how he had developed the programme. “Swimmers create bubbles, bubbles cause noise. The dolphin’s hearing is extremely sensitive and in this context it was unfailing,” he said.

Irvine and his team trained dolphins to swim like sentries, listening out for intruders. They would push a paddle with their rostrum, or snout, to sound an alarm if they detected noises. The Soviet Union soon launched its own programme using similar techniques. A phalanx of dolphins is thought to have guarded the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. Kept in floating cages, they were trained to warn of the approach of any underwater saboteurs.

In the 1980s, as the strategic importance of the Arctic grew during the Cold War, a new branch of the programme was launched in the northern Russian city of Murmansk. Here, Shaw suspects, these mammals were used to guard the ballistic missile submarines of the Northern Fleet. A former Soviet dolphin trainer and nuclear submarine commander Volodymyr Belousiuk, who was stationed in Murmansk at this time, reveals in the documentary that instructors turned their attention to whales because dolphins became ill in sub-zero temperatures.

So why (or how) did Hvaldimir go rogue? Marine mammal researcher Dr Olga Shpak worked in Russia researching marine mammals from the 1990s before returning to her native country, Ukraine, in 2022. She discovered that the whale, then named Andruha, was first captured in 2013 before being moved to a dolphinarium in St Petersburg, Russia, as part of the military program. There, trainers and vets worked with the animal to equip him for his new role. But Hvaldimir had very different ideas.

“What I’ve heard from the guys at the commercial dolphinarium who used to have him was that Andruha was smart, so a good choice to be trained,” Shpak told the BBC. “But at the same time, he was kind of like a hooligan—an active beluga—so they were not surprised that he gave up on [following] the boat and went where he wanted to.”

However, even after he had discharged himself from the training programme, Hvladimir put what he had been taught into practice, swimming right up to touch the cameras being carried by anyone who tried to swim close by. One marine mammal researcher who studied him interacting with people in the harbour at Hammerfest in Norway said “It was obvious that this particular whale had been conditioned to be putting his nose on anything that looked like a target,”.