War of the Whales (39 page)

Balcomb mumbled something about White not knowing everything that was involved.

White stared him down. “I know about you and the Navy, Ken.” Balcomb didn’t know how much White knew, but he’ d learned not to underestimate him. “And I know all about the Navy. All that bullshit about how blue and thick Navy blood runs. I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, right in the deep, dark shadow of the Atlantic Fleet. My old man was military intel. I learned all the secret handshakes before I left the playpen. That’s what this is all about, don’t you see? It’s all about the secrets and who gets to keep them. You and me, we’ve got to drag those nasty Navy secrets out of Davy Jones’ locker, and put ’em on TV. Until then, the Navy’s just going to keep stonewalling, and the whales are just going to keep washing up on the beach.”

Balcomb told White that he had work to do. Alone. On his way out the door, White pointed to another stand of firs that needed attention. “I’ll just swing by next time I’m in the neighborhood and give them a little TLC.”

J Pod was spouting up a storm out in the cove. But Balcomb didn’t feel like getting in the boat today. He tucked a photo of the new calf’s dorsal fin into the catalogue, below its mother. No sex determination yet. Just an alphanumeric tag: J-36.

Balcomb was annoyed by White’s diatribe. Just because he’ d grown up as a military brat and rebelled against his father, it didn’t mean that White understood what it meant to have served. Balcomb was 60 years old, a proud veteran of two tours—too old and too loyal to call out the Navy in public. He’ d taken oaths. He knew how to keep secrets, and he understood why the Navy had to keep some things hidden.

When he checked his email that afternoon, Balcomb found a message from Ben White with the subject line “Secret Handshakes.” There was no message, just an online link to a Navy press release dated that same day, entitled “Navy Supports Investigation of Whale Strandings in the Bahamas.” Five weeks after the stranding, this was the Navy’s first formal response. Most of it was standard press office boilerplate: “The U.S. Navy takes its role as a steward of the seas very seriously . . .” and “Navy peacetime operations and training events are designed to fully comply with U.S. environmental laws and regulations . . .” Then, buried deep in the second page, Balcomb found the first acknowledgment that the fleet had been conducting exercises in the Bahamas:

The Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, is reviewing the transit of seven ships and three submarines through the area during the morning and afternoon of March 15th in an effort to determine if any action by these vessels could have created an environmental hazard to the marine mammals.

Balcomb wondered how many Navy lawyers had helped coin that bloodless hypothetical: “if any action by these vessels could have created an environmental hazard to the marine mammals.” He’ d seen that “environmental hazard” up close, in the dead eyes of a shark-ravaged Cuvier’s and in the perfectly preserved body of the Blainville’s that beached in a shallow lagoon—just before he cut off its head and stuck it in a bait freezer. He wondered: Now that those heads had given up their secrets to ONR and Fisheries, would anyone ever hear the truth?

Balcomb didn’t believe in fate. It was just a coincidence that he was the only person in the Bahamas that day who knew enough about beaked whales to properly collect and preserve the specimens. But if it had been just chance—if he had just happened to be there with cameras and flensing knives at the ready, and Bob Gisiner’s business card in his desk drawer, and four decades on beaches and in boats studying beaked whales—if that was all simply random, then what happened
next
was up to him. The stranding had happened on his watch. And now he had to decide what to do about it. He could wait to see if the Navy and Fisheries followed through on their investigation, or he could try to put public pressure on them to do the right thing.

Balcomb knew he’ d given up most of his leverage when he handed over the specimens. Fisheries had the heads now, and the Navy’s press office spin machine was up and running. But he still had the photographs and the video of the whales on the beach, and of the destroyer in the canyon. If he hoped to challenge the Navy’s sanitized version of the Bahamas stranding, he decided, it was time to step up and speak out.

Balcomb emailed Jasny, saying that he’ d come to the press conference. Then, before he could change his mind, he also emailed the
60 Minutes
producer in New York and told her he’ d be back in Abaco in a week, if she still wanted to bring down her crew.

20

The Dolphins That Joined the Navy

The clandestine Navy program that aroused the darkest public speculation and fueled the animal rights community’s deepest distrust was its decades-long Marine Mammal Training Program.

Balcomb didn’t know about the program when he was working inside the classified Sound Surveillance System. Even Walter Munk, who conducted highly classified Navy research throughout his career, didn’t know that alongside their intensive funding of oceanography and marine acoustics research, his Navy sponsors were making a parallel investment in studying cetacean biosonar, navigation, and communication.

In setting its sights on militarized marine mammals, the Navy took a page from John Lilly’s book
Man and Dolphin
, which presented two opposing visions of whales: as beacons of higher consciousness who could lead us toward interspecies communication, and as aquatic biowarriors who could be trained to assist humans in specialized naval operations.

After its opening-page paean to dolphins as ambassadors from a higher realm,
Man and Dolphin
shifts focus to their potential as military assets. “Many people have asked me if it is possible to teach these animals to detect submarines and to communicate their detection to human beings,” Lilly wrote. “I don’t think we need to teach them to detect submarines; I think they detect submarines already. . . . They may be highly military types. Let us try to find out.”

He went on to itemized a range of promising venues for deploying dolphins: “Cetaceans might be helpful in hunting and retrieving nose-cones, satellites, missiles, and similar things men insist on dropping in the ocean. They might be willing to hunt for mines, torpedoes, submarines, and other artifacts connected with our naval operations. They might also be willing to do some scouting and patrol duty for submarines or surface ships, and they might carry their protagonist activities to the point where they can be used around harbors as underwater demolition teams operators.”

Lilly’s musings on dolphins’ potential as marine sentries, minesweepers, deep-water object retrievers, and, perhaps, bombardiers, was a virtual blueprint for the Navy’s subsequent development of operational “marine mammal systems.”
¹

•  •  •

The Navy’s Marine Mammal Research Program began as a straightforward physics experiment. Dolphins had long been observed to be among the fastest swimmers in the sea, so the Navy had a natural interest in studying their hydrodynamic properties, from their streamlined fuselage to the drag-reducing properties of their skin. The Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at China Lake was a dry lakebed in the Mojave desert, 100 miles inland. But its satellite facilities on the Pacific Coast concentrated on improving torpedo propulsion, speed, and accuracy.

In 1961 NOTS purchased a female white-sided dolphin it named Knotty from Marineland of the Pacific. For the next year, until Knotty died, NOTS researchers conducted a variety of tests to measure her speed and propulsion through the water. The impact of those studies on submarine design is evident in comparisons of before-and-after diagrams of their hulls, which became markedly less boatlike and more cetacean in shape after 1962.

The research program soon expanded to include animal training. In 1961 the Navy lost out to the Air Force for contracts in support of the man-in-space program. This was particularly galling to the Navy, since its “right stuff” test pilots had been recruited as NASA’s first astronauts.

In an effort to grab back some of the public spotlight, the Navy launched its man-in-the-sea initiative. While NASA was promoting its celebrity astronauts as new world explorers, the Navy tried to focus the public imagination on the deep inner space of the oceans. Sealab, conceived as an ocean-floor research lab analogous to a space station, was to be manned by human “aquanauts,” who would be supplied with food and other essentials by dolphin couriers. The Navy code-named the dolphin component of Sealab “Project Arion,” after the mythical Greek poet who was rescued from drowning by a passing dolphin.

To train the dolphins for Sealab, the Navy constructed a large concrete tank, affectionately known as “the porpoise pool,” just up the coast from Malibu at Mugu Lagoon. But the three white-sided dolphins it purchased from a fisherman in Santa Monica died within weeks of their arrival. So the Navy borrowed a veterinarian from a nearby Air Force base to try to figure out how to keep its dolphins alive in captivity.

Until he was recruited to treat the Navy’s dolphins, Sam Houston Ridgway’s veterinary experience had been confined to treating Air Force sentry dogs. He was an avid fan of Lilly’s just-published
Man and Dolphin
, but growing up in South Texas, he’ d never seen a marine mammal. His first encounter with a dolphin was dissecting the dead whitesides the day he arrived at Point Mugu. When Ridgway opened up the dolphins, he was at a loss to comprehend their physiology. William Schevill and Barbara Lawrence had diagrammed the dolphin skull in an attempt to understand how it echolocated, and Lilly had created a cortical map of its neural pathways. But there was no published literature on dolphin respiratory, digestive, and circulatory systems.

The Navy turned to its long-standing partnership with Marineland in Florida for help. Marineland’s curator and head veterinarian, Forrest Wood, came aboard as director of the nascent Marine Mammal Training Program at Point Mugu. Wood brought along a new supply of dolphins, his own expertise in dolphin health care, and several trainers who had tutored animals for Marineland shows and for Hollywood movies such as
Doctor Dolittle
. Wood taught Ridgway how to keep the Navy dolphins alive in captivity, while the animal trainers instructed him on how to train dolphins to respond to sound signals and food rewards in much the same way that guard dogs are trained. Sam Ridgway would remain the scientific director of the Navy Marine Mammal Program for the next four decades.

In 1964 the Navy produced a feel-good documentary about its program to train dolphins as man’s faithful helpmate in the deep ocean. Narrated by movie star and former Navy officer Glenn Ford,
The Dolphins That Joined the Navy
was a 30-minute tribute to the Navy’s dolphin program and a promo for its upcoming Sealab expedition. Among the gee-whiz technologies showcased in the film was a John Lilly–inspired “human-dolphin translator,” which converted human voice commands into a high-frequency register presumed optimal for communicating with dolphins. “These dolphins are calling to each other,” Glenn Ford intoned over footage of a pair of chirping bottlenoses. “We can hear them, but we don’t know what they’re saying—yet. The United States Navy intends to find out.”

Sadly, there would be no Hollywood ending for Sealab. The director of the human-dolphin translator program died in a mysterious laboratory accident, and during a Sealab training exercise, aquanaut Berry Cannon developed a problem with his breathing gear and drowned in the arms of his fellow divers. Sealab was scrubbed, and Congress pulled its funding for the Navy’s broader man-in-the-sea program.

Then, in 1967, CIA satellite surveillance discovered that the Soviets had undertaken their own dolphin research program, headquartered in an old hotel on the shore of the Black Sea. Russian science articles purloined and translated by US naval intelligence documented extensive research into dolphin bioacoustics, physiology, anatomy, radiotelemetry, and hydrodynamics. Fearing an imminent “dolphin gap,” Congress ramped up funding for the Marine Mammal Training Program, shifting its focus to operational “animal systems” that could directly support naval operations.

Almost overnight, all of the Navy’s marine mammal research and operations became classified and would remain so until the end of the Cold War.

In the 1990s, John Hall would become Joel Reynolds’ indispensable tutor in marine biology, bioacoustics, and sonar. But back in 1967, all John Hall knew about dolphins was what he’ d read in John Lilly’s books. He had just earned his master’s degree in marine science from Humboldt State University in Northern California and was looking for a job when Sam Ridgway hired him to help train dolphins and whales at the Navy’s research facility in Point Mugu.