Stop the presses! Barely a month after President Donald Trump visited Beijing, a spy scandal is brewing in the pristine waters off China’s long stretches of ocean coastline. China’s Ministry of State Security addressed the situation in a mail on the social platform WeChat, the exact text of which depends on the translator you choose. we are passing Google Translate Interpretation here.
The post is really a great read. It begins by setting the scene: China’s territorial waters, an “extensive blue territory (that) is a precious gift of nature to the Chinese nation.” And here we are not referring to beautiful beaches and abundance of fish. No, the sea “(provides China with) strategic space and abundant resources to promote high-quality development and promote Chinese-style modernization.”
But despite high-quality development and Chinese-style modernization, all is not well in the vast blue territory! No, beneath the waves, “a covert war of invisible espionage is quietly unfolding.”
“Foreign intelligence agencies,” the post continues, “are continually collecting and stealing sensitive maritime data through various new types of spy equipment.” My God! What kind of spy equipment are we talking about here?
Well, the culprits are many and varied, but the ones that caught our attention were “spy turtles and spy fish.” Yes, apparently these devious sea creatures have been “equipped with sensors” and sent to “swim in specific areas, collect ocean data, and transmit it to satellites overseas.” You might be wondering exactly how much data a turtle could collect, but according to the Ministry, this is no laughing matter. “Sensitive data such as ocean current dynamics, water temperature characteristics, temperature distribution and seabed topography, if stolen by foreign intelligence agencies, will seriously endanger China’s national security, military security and economic security.”
We’ll let experts assess the severity of the threat turtles and fish pose to China’s national, military, and economic security, and let readers ponder whether the current state of America’s national security apparatus has left anyone at the CIA equipped to draw a bath, much less a covert operation involving training turtles and fish to spy on the topography of the Chinese seafloor.
To be fair, the CIA has prior experience in this area, having made more than its fair share of contributions to the surprisingly well-populated pantheon of animal espionage nonsense. Your correspondent recently addressed one of their wildest contributions to the genre, Project Acoustic Kitty, for another outlet: the tl;dr is that the agency tried to use a cat to spy on suspicious Russian agents, and it was exactly as anyone who’s ever interacted with a cat would expect.
Other world powers have also dabbled in using animals for mischievous purposes. Who could forget the beluga that emerged off the coast of Norway in 2019 use a harness equipped with a camera mount? The immediate suspicion was that, despite appearing innocent and playful, the suspiciously friendly cetacean was actually (drum roll) a Russian spy! Why would anyone think such a thing?
Well, there was the fact that the harness had a logo that said, “TEAM ST. PETERSBURG,” and also the fact that Russian state television had aired a documentary a couple of years earlier about… the training of belugas as spies. (Rumors that the beluga also carried a banner reading, “Hello, I’m a Russian spy!” remain unconfirmed.) For its part, Russia denied the accusations. In fact, an analyst at a Russian think tank turned the tablesaccusing “Norwegian idiots” of “robbing certain St. Petersburg zoologists” who were conducting perfectly innocent studies on whales.
Still, it could be that the CIA’s turtle training department is the last bastion of competence in a crumbling imperial intelligence apparatus. Or it could be that the Russians have started studying turtles. Who can say for sure? It’s a wild old world out there.
