China’s Ministry of State Security says foreign intelligence agencies are fitting sea turtles, fish, and other marine animals with sensors to collect data off the Chinese coast. The accusation appeared Friday in a post on the ministry’s WeChat account, which described “an unseen covert war of espionage” unfolding in the seas around China.
Overseas spy agencies have spent recent years “continuously collecting and stealing sensitive maritime data through various new types of espionage equipment,” the post said, among them “spy turtles” and “spy fish.” In certain Chinese waters, the ministry claimed, “relatively large living marine animals have been fitted with sensors to swim in specific areas, collect ocean data, and transmit it to overseas satellites.”
The ministry named no country, gave no location for where the animals had supposedly been found, and produced no evidence. Its post listed other tools alongside the animals, including detection buoys, “a new type of wave glider,” and equipment mounted on ships. Foreign services have spent years trying to map the underwater coastline, analyze Chinese naval activity, and monitor offshore oil and gas deposits, it said.
Researchers, fishermen, and vessel owners were asked to stay alert and report anything suspicious. China has previously paid anglers for handing in suspected maritime spy gear before, with rewards reported at up to 500,000 yuan, or about $73,000, for recovering a device.
Stories about animals pressed into espionage surface every few years, and not all of them come from Beijing. A beluga whale wearing a harness with an apparent camera mount turned up on the Norwegian coast in 2019, fueling speculation it had been trained by the Russian navy, though Moscow never responded.
Four years later, the British military assessed that Russia appeared to be training dolphins near occupied Crimea, with the animals “likely intended to counter enemy divers,” according to the UK Ministry of Defence.
The U.S. Navy runs the most openly acknowledged version of the idea. Its Marine Mammal Program, based in San Diego, has trained bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions since the 1960s to find sea mines and guard harbors against enemy divers.
However improbable the framing sounds, the underlying tools are real. Scientists routinely tag marine animals with sensors for oceanography, and unmanned wave gliders drift for months collecting ocean data.
For all the specificity of its language, the post contains nothing an outsider could verify. Beijing offered no coordinates and showed no recovered hardware.
