Dolphins - saboteurs from the CIA: "Project OXYGAS" declassified in the United States

Some of them are associated with the "OXYGAS Project", which was carried out in the 60s of the 20th century.

Alexander Sychev

Details are reported by the American online publication Popular Mechanics.

As it turned out, the American secret service tried to adapt bottlenose dolphins to carry out military operations in the world's oceans.

At that time, ichthyologists, and after them the common people, were fascinated by dolphins. The largest mammalian brain. Incredibly smart. Maybe they are even brothers in mind. They have a fairly rich vocabulary. They learn quickly and are literally in love with people.

Exploiting the emerging fashion for friendship with dolphins and warming it up, Hollywood made a feature film, and then the television series "Flipper" about a smart dolphin who makes friends with people, serenely splashes in the warm coastal waters of Florida, entertains and rescues, when required, his two-legged friends , and sometimes brings villains to the surface. Touching romance and full-length sur.

Either the series, or the sincere delusion of ichthyologists and the rising general excitement influenced the brains of the practical "cloak and dagger knights" from Langley, but one of them dawned on a brilliant idea - to put dolphins on the US Secret Service. Their military merits were dizzy - smart, trained, in the depths of the world's oceans, like a fish in water, swift and dexterous, not like clumsy divers and slow scuba divers. In addition, they can complete any risky task for literally a couple of kilograms of halibut.

In 1964, a secret program was launched to raise gratuitous dolphins-saboteurs. They wanted to shift the sabotage performed by military scuba divers onto the trained animals. The most audacious of the known acts of sabotage, carried out by them, was the blowing up of the battleship "Novorossiysk". In the recent past, it was the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare. The ship ended up in the USSR Navy for reparations.

It was blown up on the roadstead of Sevastopol. Killed 829 crew members and rescuers from other ships of the squadron. According to one version, confirmed by Hugo D'Esposito, a former combat swimmer, the bombing was carried out by Italian submariners from the 10th flotilla, based in the Crimea during the war.

For work within the OXYGAS Project, the agency acquired at least two wild bottlenose dolphins, which were specially captured. CIA officials hoped to train dolphins to sneak into enemy bays and harbors, attach explosive devices to the hulls of ships, and then return to a waiting submarine in international waters.

In November 1964, the Office of Research and Development (a research arm of the United States Environmental Protection Agency) reported somewhat controversially:

"Quite frankly, this project has progressed faster than we expected, although unbridled enthusiasm is not justified at this time".

According to the declassified documents, the program ran into problems. First of all, the communication between the trainer and the animal was malfunctioning - the dolphins found themselves with a temper, and if they followed orders, then only their trainer. Unfamiliar scuba divers were deeply indifferent to them.

I also had to puzzle over the form and methods of transporting payloads. It turned out that dolphins have their own understanding of aesthetics and convenience.

The CIA documents do not mention the types of explosive devices, but most likely they were talking about mines used during the Second World War. The CIA, of course, would not mind attaching nuclear explosive devices to dolphins and secretly delivering them to important coastal facilities of a potential enemy. The destruction inflicted by the Fat Man dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 impressed them. But "Fat Man" weighed 4.5 tons. A task beyond the strength of the dolphins.

Be that as it may, in January 1965, the CIA conducted a full-scale test of war dolphins. One of the February reports said that "two dolphins have learned to deliver dummy ammunition ..." I wonder where and what they delivered.

Apparently, the conducted tests of "unmanned systems", as the dolphins were sometimes called in the documents, did not give answers to all the questions. The CIA's Maritime Department formulated them as follows: how to control a trained dolphin, how to deliver it to a remote part of the world and pick it up after completing a mission. In the end, they came to the conclusion that it would be more convenient to modify the submarines - to install a container for transporting dolphins with a valve for the exit of animals on the hull. Some CIA artist even sketched a drawing for the bosses to represent the process in pictures.

Initially, Project OXYGAS did not greatly destroy the CIA's faith in the idea. They continued to invent new secret missions for dolphins - "attack on various types of ships", "reconnaissance of the harbor and coast using photographic means", "collecting special electronic intelligence", placing "sonars, acoustic and seismic buoys" ...

The department even dreamed that dolphins would install sensors for “missile detection”, biological and chemical weapons, and detectors for the presence of radioactive substances. This idea was prompted by China's first nuclear test. The CIA wanted to impose sensors on the Celestial Empire in order to know as much as possible about the tests.

However, reality gradually cooled hotheads in the CIA. Dolphins turned out to be not smart enough to perform various tasks and not reliable performers.

The CIA acknowledged the existence of natural limitations and turned to the Navy's Office of Naval Research for help. Who, if not sailors, know better those with whom they sail. A month later, the chief of one of the scientific departments of the Navy expressed concern that the dolphins "fixate on pleasing their trainers and may ignore unknown agents during the mission".

By 1967, the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate recommended a change of tactics. Dolphins began to be taught intelligence gathering. They had to swim to the coastline of the enemy country, find a "dead drop" left by a spy in shallow water (as the CIA called a special container) and deliver it to a submarine. However, experts soon noted that it was difficult to train dolphins to travel more than 12 miles in unfamiliar waters. They were constantly distracted by something and did not feel very confident in an unfamiliar place.

In September 1967, the CIA seemed disillusioned with OXYGAS and decided to share the financial burden with the Department of Defense. The sailors did not let the CIA approach their budget. But interest in dolphins was suddenly expressed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the predecessor of the current Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The money was found. Scientists at the Agency hoped to be able to take advantage of dolphins' unique echolocation abilities and learn from them to distinguish between types of sonar. Dolphins, if they heard them, were not interested in sonar.

In 1970, the CIA finally stopped funding the program, and the materials were sent to the archives. The trainers were unable to convince the dolphins of the importance of the work they were entrusted with.

Only the naval forces continued to tinker with the dolphins. Sailors trained animals to search for mines and other underwater explosive devices. The program continues to this day. Dolphins are interested in looking for all sorts of gizmos and receive a reward for it. In addition, fish sometimes jump out of the sand. You can eat them. Dolphins, apparently, like to prevent the death of people more than to kill them and harm them in every possible way. However, as the knowledge accumulated by ichthyologists shows, such nuances are unknown to dolphins.