For recovery missions at greater depths, the Navy turned to deeper-diving marine mammals. Following the debut of orca shows at marine parks in California early in 1968, Ridgway commissioned Ted Griffin of Namu Inc. to capture two killer whales for the Navy Marine Mammal Program. In October a Navy transport plane flew Ahab and Ishmael to Point Mugu, where they became the first orcas to be trained in the open ocean. Ridgway also bought a deep-diving pilot whale named Morgan from a local fisherman who had snared him off the coast of Catalina Island.
Hall soon trained Ahab to locate and retrieve objects from depths of 800 feet. Morgan, the pilot whale, could dive twice as deep. While their biosonar was just as discriminating as that of dolphins, orcas proved less obedient to commands in the open water. Ahab had a habit of disappearing at sea for days at a time, and Ishmael finally went AWOL one afternoon during training exercises, never to return. Since killer whales were judged too unreliable to handle torpedoes, Hall designated the pilot whale for the Deep Ops retrieval program. On one notable occasion, Morgan located a torpedo at 1,800 feet and attached a hydraulic lift bag that raised it safely to the surface.
• • •
In 1969, North Vietnamese frogmen were infiltrating the port at Cam Ranh Bay and attaching explosives to the sides of American ships. As a countermeasure, Hall trained the Point Mugu dolphins for “swimmer interdiction.”
Hall, equipped with a snorkel and a rebreather, played the enemy swimmer trying to penetrate Mugu Lagoon without being detected by the bottlenose sentries. Once he’ d trained the dolphins to ram intruding swimmers with their snouts, Hall never made it anywhere close to the beach before being intercepted. Several cracked ribs later, Hall flew eight of the bottlenoses and one pilot whale to Hawaii aboard a specially equipped cargo plane, and then on to Guam for final operational training.
In early 1970 the five best-performing guard dolphins arrived at Cam Ranh Bay. The Navy anchored three catamarans with netted dolphin pens hanging between the pontoons across the mouth of the wide bay at 9:00, 12:00, and 3:00. The dolphins were trained to continuously scan their sector of the bay and to press a black or white paddle with their snouts every two minutes: white for “all clear,” black for “swimmer in the water.” When a dolphin pressed the black paddle, the door to the pen would open and release the animal into the bay. Before leaving the pen, the dolphin would press its snout into a custom-fitted fiberglass nose cone armed with a barbed steel hook that protruded from the front. The dolphin was trained to quickly track down the swimmer, stab him in the buttocks or the upper thigh with the barbed hook, pull out of the nose cone, and return to its pen. The nose cone was designed to rapidly inflate and jettison the swimmer to the surface, where Navy SEALs in high-powered black speedboats would swoop in for the capture. The swimmer saboteurs, drawn from the ranks of North Vietnamese army officers, were considered high-value interrogation subjects.
The system worked flawlessly for the first few interdictions—until the swimmers began carrying hand grenades and tossing them into the approaching speedboats. The SEALs eventually designed countermeasures to prevent grenade attacks, and, after losing several highly trained saboteurs to the dolphin/SEAL patrols, North Vietnam stopped sending swimmers into Cam Ranh Bay.
• • •
While its “swimmer nullification” program remained classified, rumors and reports continued to circulate about the Navy training “kamikaze dolphins” to kill enemy swimmers with antishark explosive devices and .45 caliber “bang-sticks.” The Navy denied using dolphins to target enemy swimmers with lethal force. But over the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, interviews with former Navy animal trainers and CIA operatives detailing these programs appeared periodically in newspapers, magazines, and books—as well as a Navy SEAL who described working with dolphins to plant limpet mines in North Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor.3
One reason rumors of these extreme kamikaze dolphins persisted is that Lilly proposed just such a scenario in Man and Dolphin:
If they are military types they could be very useful as antipersonnel self-directing weapons. They could do nocturnal harbor work, capture spies let out of submarines or dropped from airplanes, attacking silently and efficiently and bringing back information from such contacts. They could deliver atomic nuclear warheads and attach them to submarines or surface vessels and to torpedoes and missiles.
Both the popular media and contemporary politics lent credence to stories about dolphin dark ops. The 1973 Mike Nichols film The Day of the Dolphin featured a fictionalized John Lilly character, played by George C. Scott, whose Caribbean research center is subverted by shady intelligence officers who train his dolphins to plant explosives under enemy boats. Two years later, the Church Senate Committee hearings into extralegal CIA operations uncovered plans that were developed—although never deployed—to assassinate Fidel Castro by training dolphins to deposit explosive-filled conch shells in a cove where the Cuban leader liked to snorkel each morning.
1973
Marine Corps Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii
Bionics had finally come of age, at least in popular culture. From 1974 to 1978, actor Lee Majors reigned as the first bionic TV superstar in The Six Million Dollar Man. His character, US astronaut Steve Austin, had been critically injured in a crash and was “put back together again” with bionic replacement parts that endowed him with superhuman vision, strength, and speed.
After the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, the focus of the Navy’s marine mammal research shifted from “What can they do?” to “How can we build technology to replicate what they do?” As Hall and Ridgway had demonstrated, dolphins consistently outperformed human divers and existing sonar technology for guarding harbors and detecting mines. But dolphin crews were expensive to maintain and difficult to transport around the world.
The Navy hoped it could gradually replace its high-maintenance dolphins with bionic drones. On a broader level, it wanted to reverse engineer dolphin echolocation to improve existing sonar technology. In 1970 the Navy drained the porpoise pool at Point Mugu and relocated its marine mammal biosonar research to the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. Sam Ridgway moved to San Diego to oversee cetacean physiology research, while John Hall decamped to graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, where he befriended Ken Balcomb and Bob Gisiner.
In Hawaii, an electrical engineer and experimental psychologist directed a team of acousticians and statisticians to develop bionic sonar.4 The more they learned about dolphin biosonar, the more daunting their bionic design challenge appeared. Dolphins could collect, assimilate, and interpret an astounding amount of data, and they could do it amid the acoustic complexity of the open ocean. And dolphin signal processing exceeded anything that computers could replicate in the 1970s.
Research into dolphin hunting behavior in the wild offered tantalizing clues for designing the kind of short-range, high-frequency sonar systems that might someday replace dolphins as minesweepers and harbor sentries. Dolphin biosonar operates in a highly mobile and adaptive fashion, with decisions about next actions flowing out of real-time assessment of streaming information. When the Navy searched the sea, it ran a grid in straight lines on a regimented schedule. But a dolphin continues to adjust its swimming pattern and sonar algorithm as it goes, circling an unknown object, scanning it from different angles to create a three-dimensional model, sorting relevant data from extraneous data, and, finally, extrapolating historical data points to arrive at accurate judgments about a target: Is this fish going to taste good or make me sick? Is this an armed mine, or a decoy?
Navy researchers confirmed Lilly’s early observation that dolphin sleep occurs in one brain hemisphere at a time, while the other hemisphere continues to scan the environment for data—in much the same way that an antivirus program continues to scan a hard drive even when the drive is “sleeping.” But duplicating the dolphin’s continuous learning cycle required a level of artificial intelligence design that lay decades in the future.
Another avenue of biomimicry research examined the group-learning dimension of dolphin biosonar—what today would be called “crowd-sourced intelligence.” As herd animals, dolphins in the wild are constantly pooling and exchanging their search data. The closest analogy would be the modern internet search engine, which scans oceans of data using specific terms, tags, and criteria, while simultaneously incorporating a steady stream of user search requests, past and present.5
In the eighties, the Navy moved closer to deploying its dolphin drones, which it called Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, or AUVs. They looked like dolphins in size and shape, and were equipped with multibeam sidescan sonar that approximated dolphin biosonar. But the AUV had a gaping hole in its motherboard where a real dolphin’s “wet brain” lives and works. After a quarter century of close observation, Navy researchers had learned a lot about the dolphin’s physical and neural anatomy but very little about its mind and how it made judgments. Despite the early confidence of naval engineers that they could manufacture a bionic dolphin, the “advanced biologicals,” as the Navy referred to its marine mammal recruits, had been evolving their biosonar for 30 million years—too big a head start, it appeared, to overcome in just a few decades.
• • •
In 1986, in the wake of the John Walker–Jerry Whitworth spy trial, the Navy persuaded Congress to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow the Navy to collect dolphins in the wild for unspecified “national defense purposes.” The Navy’s marine mammal menagerie swelled to more than 100 dolphins, dozens of sea lions, and a supporting cast of beluga whales recruited for deep dives in Arctic waters.
In 1987, for the first time since the Vietnam War, the Navy redeployed dolphins as seagoing sentries—this time in the Persian Gulf. When Iran began mining the harbor in Bahrain to disrupt oil tanker traffic, the Navy dispatched six dolphins to clear mines, protect US warships against enemy swimmers, and escort Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the harbor. Many of the dolphins couldn’t handle the sudden transition from the cold water of San Diego to the extreme warmth of the Gulf. One named Skippy died of a bacterial infection. The Marine Mammal Program was still classified at the time, but news of the dolphin deployment in the Persian Gulf leaked to the media.
When the New York Times and other outlets reported that the Navy was endangering dolphins to protect Arab oil tankers, the animal rights movement mobilized in protest. A year later, the Navy proposed deploying dolphins to guard the Trident missile submarine base at Bangor, Washington. When animal advocates sued the Navy over the health risks of moving the San Diego–based dolphins to cold northern waters, a judge ordered the Navy to study the issue, and the Navy abandoned the project.
After the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, the Marine Mammal Program was among the first American military projects to be downsized.6 The Navy donated its Kaneohe Bay station to the University of Hawaii—on condition that its research team could continue its dolphin work as university faculty—and moved the remainder of its “advanced biologicals” to its facility in Point Loma, California, for ongoing training and research under the direction of Sam Ridgway.
The Navy dolphins would not be called up for active duty again until the outbreak of the second Gulf War. When the Navy deployed its Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for mine-clearing operations, the AUVs worked only where the sea floor was sandy and flat. In more complex environments, they proved unreliable. Without a fully functional dolphin drone, and with new underwater enemies to combat, the Navy turned once again to its porpoise pool for help.
21
Mr. Balcomb Goes to Washington
MAY 5, 2000
Sandy Point, Abaco Island, the Bahamas
Things had been tense between Diane and Ken during the week since he’ d returned from Smugglers Cove. She was clearly upset that he’ d decided to talk to 60 Minutes and appear at the DC press conference without consulting her. It never seemed to occur to him, she noted, that his decisions affected both of their lives, and both of their careers. She was plenty angry about the way the US Navy operated in the Bahamas, but the risk of calling them out in public was greater for her, since she was just getting started in her research career. Balcomb always talked about how they were equal partners, but then had taken it upon himself to torpedo any chance that either of them would ever get research money from ONR. He may have invited 60 Minutes to their research station and agreed to hand over their videotape, but she had no intention of appearing on camera for an interview.
The night before the 60 Minutes crew arrived, Balcomb stayed up late reviewing the videotape from the stranding and its aftermath. He indexed each tape by time, date, and location, including the footage of the destroyer in the channel, Darlene Ketten’s beachside necropsy, and the late-night CT scanning up in Boston. After all the years he’ d spent behind the camera photographing and videotaping whales, it was eerie to see himself on-screen, wading out into the shallows to examine the stranded whales. Stranger still were the video images of deep-diving beaked whales lolling in three-foot surf and lying inert on beaches.
Balcomb drove up to Marsh Harbour Airport to meet the TV crew. First off the plane were producer Mary Walsh and on-camera correspondent David Martin, who together covered the Pentagon beat for 60 Minutes. On the drive to Sandy Point, Walsh laid out her “Navy versus the whales” angle. She wanted to interview Balcomb and shoot some “B-roll” footage of the local scene for color. But as Ben White had predicted, what she seemed most focused on was the video footage of the stranding and its aftermath. Talking heads were necessary filler for any segment, and it was Martin’s job to elicit something quotable from his interview subjects. But the emotional hook, line and sinker for this story had always been the images of whales on the beach, and the volunteers fighting valiantly to rescue them.
Dave Martin wanted to interview Balcomb where the first whale had stranded in front of the house. Martin stood on the beach in pressed chinos and an expensive-looking but tasteful polo shirt. Balcomb wore a faded Earthwatch T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He declined the producer’s offer of makeup. While the sound engineer hooked up and tested Balcomb’s lapel mike, Ken tried to pretend that he’ d be having a one-on-one conversation with Martin. He wished that Walsh hadn’t already told him that every Sunday night, 17 million Americans tuned in to the loudly ticking stopwatch on 60 Minutes.
Martin began his interview by introducing Balcomb as “a marine biologist who worked for seven years for the Navy tracking submarines.” Balcomb had agreed to this intro in advance. Under the circumstances, it seemed relevant. After 25 years of silence, the 60 Minutes broadcast would mark his first disclosure, public or private, of the secret sound surveillance he’ d conducted for the Navy. The funny thing, he realized, was that Diane had made a point of going grocery shopping during the interview, so she still didn’t know what he’ d done during the Cold War.
Balcomb quietly and methodically narrated the series of whale strandings on March 15, the daylong rescue efforts, and the next day’s rush to collect fresh specimens. He held up a photograph of the destroyer they’ d seen in the canyon late the second day. Martin leaned in to ask the question he’ d come to the Bahamas to ask:
“Do you think the Navy is responsible for the strandings?”
Balcomb wasn’t surprised by the question. He’ d seen the segment title, “Who Killed the Whales?” taped across the clapsticks during the sound check. If he rendered a verdict publicly, before Ketten published her findings, he knew the Navy would go after him with a vengeance. Diane was right to worry about being caught in the cross fire.
Martin waited in silence for Balcomb’s response. The cameraman zoomed in for the trademark 60 Minutes close-up of the whistle-blower’s moment of truth.
“I believe the Navy did it,” Balcomb answered.
MAY 9, 2000
Washington, DC
Balcomb loved to fly, but he hated flying into cities. The air, the traf
fic, and the noise were all toxic to him. It had been 34 years since he’ d last visited Washington, DC. In the summer of 1966, he’ d landed a six-week job at the Smithsonian between his bird-banding trip and his induction into the Navy. Back then the only air-conditioning was in movie theaters and supermarkets. There was no subway yet, and Reagan National was simply called National Airport. But he suspected that one thing hadn’t changed: the strong stink of politics that hung over the city.
Although he preferred to travel light, Balcomb hauled a large suitcase and a duffel bag out of the terminal, both of them filled with videotape cassettes and an editing deck. He clambered aboard the subway for the ride to Silver Spring, where he had an appointment with the Office of Protected Resources at Fisheries headquarters. He’ d offered to preview the tape he was planning to screen at the press conference the next day, in hopes that he might preserve enough goodwill to retain a role in the investigation.
Those hopes were dashed as soon as he walked into the conference room. Not one of the ten people seated around the conference table rose to greet him. The only friendly face he knew at headquarters, Roger Gentry, had pointedly left the building for another meeting.
While Balcomb screened his video, the suits around the table watched in silence. When it ended, he asked if there was anything they objected to his sharing with the press. Someone muttered, “All of it.” No one laughed. The head of the division asked him to delete some slides ONR had published in its preliminary Environmental Impact Statement for Low Frequency Active sonar. Balcomb agreed to make the cut. Then he nodded to the stony faces around the table and left.
He took the subway to a Motel 6 out on Route 1 that he’ d booked online from Abaco. Even by Balcomb’s Spartan standards, it was a dump. He ate dinner next door at the Pizza Hut and spent the evening deleting ONR slides from each of the dozen videotape copies he’ d brought with him. Before going to bed, he tried on the clothes he’ d brought for the press conference: a brown blazer he purchased to wear at his brother’s wedding six years earlier and a white collared shirt that some Earthling had left behind in Abaco. His khaki pants had a pizza stain that he rubbed clean with a damp towel. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, Balcomb saw a heavily bearded castaway stuffed inside a too-tight sport jacket. He should have gotten a haircut, he realized. Diane always cut his hair, and it was too late to look for a barbershop. He borrowed a pair of scissors from the girl at the front desk and trimmed his beard over the bathroom sink, wondering to himself when it had gone so gray.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 28
