Kamikaze Dolphins?
The best dolphins are: Dan Marino, Mark Duper, and Iranian whales?
Do you ever hear stories that sound so absurd they sit with you and make you quietly chuckle? The April 23rd Wall Street Journal article “What to Know About Mines and Minesweeping in Hormuz, Including Dolphins” and its follow-up “Iran Is Grasping for a Solution to an American Blockade It Can’t Break” fall squarely into that category.
The first article lays out the operational landscape in the Strait of Hormuz, including mines, minesweeping, and the range of tools available to the U.S. Navy. Among those tools is the long-running Marine Mammal Program - dolphins trained for detection tasks.
It is the second article, however - by Benoit Faucon - that pushes the story further. Quoting anonymous Iranian officials, it raises the idea of Iran potentially considering “mine-carrying dolphins.”
The claim took on a life of its own after being amplified on CNN by Karim Sadjadpour. Framing Iran as contemplating “desperate measures,” Sadjadpour referred to “suicide dolphins equipped with mines,” adding that similar ideas had been discussed in the past.
In the aftermath, both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine publicly rejected the notion that Iran had any such program underway. Caine even compared the discussion to the kind of premise found in Austin Powers in Goldmember.
But what sounds like a ridiculous claim at first becomes a much more convoluted narrative once you factor in the history of animals in relation to national security. Combined with a 2000 BBC News article that spread widely, it contributes to a situation where, in 2026, we are talking about exploding animals on live television. What a time to be alive.
PIGS ON THE WING
The Cold War was an era defined by extreme thinking in national security. There was Operation Northwoods - a proposed plan of false-flag sabotage targeting civilians to justify war with Cuba. There was Operation Washtub - a joint FBI and Air Force program that recruited Alaskans as covert “stay-behind” agents in the event of a Soviet invasion. And then there was the U.S. mammal program.
As journalist James Bamford - one of the most important journalists regarding intelligence agencies through novels like The Shadow Factory -has noted in discussions of intelligence history, animal programs were not myths or fabrications, but real Cold War experiments with unconventional tools.
Established in 1959, the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program trained dolphins and sea lions to locate objects, functioning like underwater versions of bomb-sniffing dogs. In the same era, Bob Bailey helped develop early training systems for dolphins using behavioral techniques associated with B.F. Skinner.
Around the same time, the CIA pursued its own unusual experiments. One of the most infamous - Acoustic Kitty - attempted to use a surgically modified cat as a mobile listening device. The project reportedly cost millions before being abandoned as impractical.
An October 1976 CIA Scientific and Technical Intelligence Report titled Capability of the Soviets to Train Marine Mammals for a Military Operational System described methods being trialed by the USSR. It noted Soviet efforts to use marine mammals to retrieve equipment in the Black Sea, with the capability potentially expanding to open-ocean operations within a few years.
Iran would later enter the equation through espionage accusations published in the Iranian newspaper Resalat in 2007. In its July 10 edition, the paper alleged that foreign intelligence services were using squirrels for surveillance operations against Iran. Reuters later reported that while a police commander appeared to acknowledge the story, he also stated, “I have no specific knowledge on the subject,” leaving the claims unverified and vague.
Which brings us to the present - and to how unverified reporting becomes accepted truth.
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
The modern “kamikaze dolphin” framing traces back in part to a March 2000 BBC News report drawing on Russian-language reporting in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The BBC article attributed claims to former Soviet dolphin program figures, including Boris Zhurid, rather than presenting independently verified evidence.
Unfortunately, the original Komsomolskaya Pravda article - “Crimean saboteur dolphins became Iranian mercenaries” (March 2, 2000) - is no longer available online, but the BBC report preserves what are, at minimum, some striking claims.
The same month, Zhurid continued to discuss the situation in an interview with The Moscow Times. In that same reporting, a senior scientist at Moscow State University’s biology department who had worked with Zhurid on related experiments stated that “no dolphins were used in military operations in the U.S.S.R,” while still acknowledging that dolphins had been studied for non-combat tasks such as item retrieval.
While some publications, such as Business Insider, framed the claims as part of longer-running rumors about Iranian “kamikaze dolphins” dating back more than two decades, other outlets were more accepting of the March 2000 reporting. The BBC article was widely circulated and discussed across outlets including The Jerusalem Post, Yahoo! News, Salon, Military.com, nj.com, The Sun, The Telegraph, with claims about dolphins being used to deliver or attach explosives often repeated without introducing new evidence or independent verification.
Months after the BBC article circulated, the LA Times would run its own piece describing “fantastic unconfirmed reports” about the dolphin program. One deputy director of a sea mammal training center dismissed the stories as the product of “sick imaginations,” while Zhurid acknowledged that certain weapon designs for dolphins had existed, though he emphasized they were not deployed “en masse.”
Journalist Patrick Cockburn, writing for The Independent, spoke with Zhurid as well as Valentina Inuza of the Sevastopol oceanarium and Colonel Viktor Baranets, a former Soviet defense official. Baranets referred to the animals as “fighting dolphins,” though Cockburn noted it remained unclear whether any such capabilities had ever translated into operational use - or whether they were ever intended to.
Elsewhere, in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a Ukrainian naval spokesman in Crimea stated that the dolphins had no military function at all, describing them as part of a civilian dolphinarium. Marine biologist Anatoly Bezushko was even more direct, telling the outlet: “Kamikaze dolphins work in movies, but not in real life.”
Which raises the obvious question: what movies?
WATCHING MOVIES
The 1973 movie Day of the Dolphin played a significant role in reinforcing public speculation about military dolphin programs, a point later acknowledged in Navy materials.
Starring George C. Scott - known for films like Dr. Strangelove and The Changeling - the movie sits comfortably in the paranoid, institutional anxiety of its era. Directed by Mike Nichols, who also made Catch-22, it blends Cold War suspicion with the then-growing fascination around animal intelligence and military science. The story itself draws loosely from the research of John C. Lilly.
Lilly had been working with dolphins since the late 1950s, often describing them as “the humans of the sea.” His early research focused on communication between species, but after leaving the National Institutes of Health in 1961, his work drifted into more experimental territory involving consciousness and psychedelics.
Over time, dolphins moved from laboratory subjects to cultural symbols - framed in bestselling books, research speculation, and eventually Hollywood films as near-human intelligences with their own form of communication. Once that shift happened, it became much easier for later narratives about “combat dolphins” or “kamikaze dolphins” to take hold.
LET’S GO CRAZY
That pattern of animal usage in warfare has carried into the 2020s.
During the Russia–Ukraine war, Russia has been reported to maintain dolphin enclosures in Sevastopol, with satellite imagery from the UK Ministry of Defense and commercial providers such as Planet Labs showing expanded structures near naval facilities as the conflict progressed.
At the same time, the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program continues to operate, with publicly acknowledged deployments focused on detection and recovery roles. In 2015, the program reportedly maintained around 85 dolphins and 50 sea lions, and it remains active today according to recent Navy disclosures.
Who knows what the future of warfare holds. Were the dolphins in question actually the submarine nicknamed “Persian Gulf Dolphins?” Anything feels possible in the Wild West of the modern day.
