In April 2019, a beluga whale was spotted swimming in Norwegian watersnot a particularly special sighting, you might think. However, there was something off about this whale. It was wearing a GoPro camera that had a belt with a label on the inside that read Equipment of St. Petersburg. The whale was most likely an animal spy, which was trained by the Russian government.
Sounds crazy, right? Not at all. The idea of using animals as government operatives isnt a new one. In fact, over 2,000 years ago the Romans were using pigeons to send secret military messages to each other. Pigeons were so effective that they were still being used during World War II. The United Kingdom alone used about 250,000 pigeons for a number of secret missions, such as communicating with their human spies behind enemy lines.
Since then, the worlds militaries have thought of all sorts of ways to use animals to gather or pass secret information onsome more successful than others. |
