Cute animals in the spying game.

A white beluga whale has been found wearing a harness off the coast of Norway. The harness is marked 'Equipment of St Petersburg' and was designed to hold a GoPro camera. The whale is "charming locals by dancing in the water, playing with balls, and letting schoolchildren tap its nose". Apparently it has been trained by the Russian Navy at Murmansk, probably to spy on vessels. Last month a Griffon vulture Nelson was arrested in Yemen for suspected espionage. It came down in the city of Taez, possibly out of hunger. Nelson is 2 years old and came from Bulgaria where "his wing was tagged and equipped with a satellite transmitter by the Fund for Wild Fauna and Flora (FWFF). The bird is believed to have "migrated from Bulgaria, to Turkey, to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and then Yemen" where his GPS tracker was mistaken as spying equipment. Fortunately he has been handed back to FWFF and is recovering. But, Russians are not the only ones. Americans have tried using cats and bats for spying and have even thought of using insects with tiny transmitters. In 2007, Iranians arrested 14 "spy squirrels" loitering near a nuclear enrichment plant and in 2013, Egyptians arrested a stork. Instead of suspecting little squirrels Iranians should have been awake to Mossad agents watching how they were collecting and storing records of nuclear weapons program, since February 2016. On 31 January 2018, the Israelis broke into "a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran", "cut through 32 Iranian-made safes" with "torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from the intelligence collected during the planning of the operation" and escaped with "50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos and plans". If a cute beluga whale escaped, Russia can always use a red-haired beauty, named Mariia Butina. "Mariia Butina wasn't hiding. The red-headed, gun-toting young woman whom the FBI has accused of being a Russian spy posed with high-level Republican politicians, including former Sen. Rick Santorum and Wisconsin Gov. Rick Scott Walker and other influential conservative players, like NRA chief Wayne LaPierre," wrote A Finley. Being an open society the US is susceptible to foreign dark money, wrote former Vice President Joseph Biden and Michael Carpenter. "We don't know how much illicit money enters the United States" "but in 2015, the Treasury department estimated that $300 billion is laundered through the US every year". Of course, the US has been interfering in other nations for decades, including regime change in Iraq and Libya through illegal invasion. The world of intelligence is messy and is becoming more complex, wrote S Joshi. At least animals are cute and entirely innocent. Humans are the problem.