Speaker 1: I think clearly the word that it's in all our
Speaker 1: heads right now is galliaphobia, right. I mean, that's obvious.
Speaker 1: The irrational fear of sharks.
Speaker 2: That's the word for irrational fear of sharks.
Speaker 3: That's it's called being afraid of sharks.
Speaker 2: I mean it is rational. I'm John Ceipher.
Speaker 3: And I'm Jerry o'she I.
Speaker 2: Served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 2: living undercover all around the world.
Speaker 1: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 1: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 2: created conspiracies in our operations.
Speaker 1: We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 2: news almost every day.
Speaker 1: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 1: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 2: Welcome the mission implausibles.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I really like about today's
Speaker 1: conspiracy is that people realize when you first walk into
Speaker 1: the agency, depending on which door you use, but if
Speaker 1: for insiders, if you use the Berlin Wall door right
Speaker 1: entrance and you come in off to the right, we
Speaker 1: have a small museum, and in the museum there's this
Speaker 1: case and there's a fish in there, and the fish
Speaker 1: had a camera in it. And this is from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and I think certainly declassified now, but the
Speaker 1: CIA was using an aquatic animal to gather intelligence, right,
Speaker 1: And I always wondered, after the movie Jaws came out,
Speaker 1: how we could like bring this small little fish and
Speaker 1: put it together with this with Bruce the movie Shark.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so today's episode has to do with a
Speaker 2: variety of things. Has to do with sharks, it has
Speaker 2: to do with Israel, a place where you spent some time,
Speaker 2: and it has to do with Russia, a place where
Speaker 2: I spent quite a bit of time. And so it
Speaker 2: should be fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think parts of it will be jumping
Speaker 1: the shark, and I'm really looking forward to getting into it.
Speaker 3: You can't help yourself, I can't.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 3: It's a dad joke thing.
Speaker 2: So let me let me try to just give you
Speaker 2: a sense of this soul. The conspiracy is that Israel
Speaker 2: had trained sharks to attack Russian tourists that were swimming
Speaker 2: in Egypt in order to hurt the Egyptian tourist industry.
Speaker 2: And so just to this, the background of this is
Speaker 2: in December twenty ten, there were several shark attacks that
Speaker 2: occurred off the South Sinai resort of sharmel Shak in Egypt,
Speaker 2: and shortly thereafter there was ajoe on Egyptian TV where
Speaker 2: this captain Mustafa, who was a professional diver, supposedly commented
Speaker 2: that the sharks who were involved in the attack were
Speaker 2: normal ocean sharks, in other words, not the ones that
Speaker 2: normally reside off the waters of Egypt. And the commentary
Speaker 2: went on to say that they discovered a small shark
Speaker 2: which was implanted with a GPS device and alleged that
Speaker 2: the GPS device founded one of the sharks was in
Speaker 2: fact a quote guiding device planted by Israeli agents.
Speaker 1: Now I'm not one hundred percent sure why they would
Speaker 1: do that, because they're not at war really with the Egyptians,
Speaker 1: and they seems to me Israel would actually want to
Speaker 1: have a prosperous Egypt, not a desperate Egypt sort of
Speaker 1: at their throat. Now I remember, and I don't have
Speaker 1: this at my fingertips, but in Iran, and this is
Speaker 1: where it gets sort of ugly. In Iran, a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago, the Iranians found a cheetah, a wild
Speaker 1: cheetah of which there are just a couple of dozen
Speaker 1: left in the wild, and it had a censor around
Speaker 1: its neck, and the Iranians they deduced from this that
Speaker 1: it must be an intelligence operation because it was I
Speaker 1: guess maybe found near a sensitive site or something like that,
Speaker 1: and so Iran decided to kill all the cheetahs, and
Speaker 1: it actually began trying to exterminate them, and of course,
Speaker 1: as you'd expect, it turned out that the cheetah was
Speaker 1: tagged because it was from a wildlife preservation group trying
Speaker 1: to determine how cheatahs migrate in order to best protect them.
Speaker 1: But there is the story in the nineteen fifties, which
Speaker 1: may or may not be true, that CIA tried to
Speaker 1: put listening devices into a cat.
Speaker 3: Do you remember this, Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The problem was the cat never stuck around where it
Speaker 1: was supposed to. It was I don't even remember the story,
Speaker 1: but the point was that a cat was hanging around
Speaker 1: like the Russian ambassador's house, and the Russian ambassador was
Speaker 1: bringing him into the house and feeding it. All I
Speaker 1: remember is it didn't go well for either the CIA
Speaker 1: or the CAT a leading indicator into this story and
Speaker 1: why it gets any traction at all. It's the myth
Speaker 1: and mythos and mystique behind intelligence services, especially MOSAD. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's the reality of espionage that you
Speaker 1: and I both know that includes things like I can
Speaker 1: remember early in my career, back when they still had
Speaker 1: public telephones, if I had to make a call that
Speaker 1: I didn't want listen to out of the embassy, you'd
Speaker 1: oh for a little walk and you'd find a public
Speaker 1: telephone bootho you'd make a call. But then you'd come
Speaker 1: back and at the end of the month you got
Speaker 1: to do your your monthly accounting, and I would have
Speaker 1: to end up writing like a paragraph on why I
Speaker 1: spent this twenty cents.
Speaker 3: It was like who was the call to? Why did
Speaker 3: I have to write right? Right? So you never see.
Speaker 1: James Bond having to account for like a twenty cent
Speaker 1: phone call. So the mystique that most sought are these
Speaker 1: mysterious intelligence all powerful on this intelligence agencies have these powers,
Speaker 1: I think is part of a powerful mistique that people
Speaker 1: want to have or need to have.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen overseas when we've lived in different
Speaker 2: places that viewpoint. It can either benefit us or be
Speaker 2: a curse. Right, So, yeah, there are times when I've
Speaker 2: lived in countries where, honestly God, they think the CIA
Speaker 2: is all seeing, all knowing, can do all these other
Speaker 2: all these kind of things. I lived in one country
Speaker 2: where we got to report from the local service who
Speaker 2: believed that we had a nuclear device, like a nuclear
Speaker 2: bomb that we kept in our office that we could
Speaker 2: use against the country. And I'm not sure why they
Speaker 2: thought we would blow ourselves up. But the reality of
Speaker 2: CIA and other intelligence agencies is they're bureaucracies. But there's
Speaker 2: that view, especially with Israel, that somehow they had this
Speaker 2: special skill and special knowledge and they're the best spies
Speaker 2: in the world. And I think they actually promote some
Speaker 2: of that kind of stuff because you and I have
Speaker 2: worked with Israel and they're very, very good, and they're
Speaker 2: part of the world. They have more authorities than we
Speaker 2: do to do things like kill people and stuff, but
Speaker 2: by no means are they ten feet tall. There's this
Speaker 2: view out there that they're unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Well, John, aside from sharks, I think we saw in
Speaker 1: seven October that Israeli intelligence doesn't always get it right,
Speaker 1: they're not ten feet tall, and they're made of human beings,
Speaker 1: just like anybody else.
Speaker 2: Well, let's get to our guest, so Jerry. Today, we're
Speaker 2: lucky to have Kieran man Gin with us. Kieran is
Speaker 2: a researcher and creator and host of the Shark Files podcasts.
Speaker 2: These are true stories about where humans and sharks come together.
Speaker 2: So frankly, he's the perfect expert to talk to us
Speaker 2: today about our conspiracy. As you know here on there's
Speaker 2: this story which you know better than we do. So
Speaker 2: I was wondering if you could give us a short
Speaker 2: overview of the real story and what it morphed into.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, it began November thirty, first, twenty ten, within
Speaker 4: the space of an hour at an Egyptian resort in
Speaker 4: the Red Sea called Charmel Shake, which gets millions of
Speaker 4: international tourists every year. There were two shark attacks, quite
Speaker 4: severe but non fatal. Yeah, that's where it all began,
Speaker 4: and there was a lot of panic at the time,
Speaker 4: a lot of international attention, and it doubled when the
Speaker 4: next day there were two further attacks a short distance
Speaker 4: on the coast from the to the previous day, So
Speaker 4: it actually echoed the film Jaws quite a lot in
Speaker 4: that beaches were closed. The mayor came out and said
Speaker 4: that we have this under control and everything. And what
Speaker 4: happened was they went out hunted the sharks. They took
Speaker 4: to a board, and they quickly them as the guilty sharks,
Speaker 4: let's say. And within a couple of days the beaches
Speaker 4: were reopened like Jaws, as I said, and nothing to
Speaker 4: see here, carry on. But the week of always say
Speaker 4: shark panic culminated on the fifth of December when a
Speaker 4: German tourist called Ranada Seifert, she was swimming on a
Speaker 4: busy beach outside the Higatt Regency hotel in Charmel Shak
Speaker 4: and she was fatally attacked by an oceanic quite tip shark.
Speaker 4: And yeah, it was a really shocking event, witnessed by
Speaker 4: a lot of people. And again the coastline was closed
Speaker 4: for a couple of days. And I think the conspiracy
Speaker 4: by the Egyptian authorities and by some parts of the
Speaker 4: Egyptian public as well, kind of sprang up from trying
Speaker 4: to make sense of the shock around the events and
Speaker 4: also the really negative international attention that it brought.
Speaker 1: So what came out of that then is instead of
Speaker 1: finding reasons for why these shark attacks happened, which are
Speaker 1: very rare, yes, extremely extremely rare, statistically, that they had
Speaker 1: look beyond the sharks to look for a wider conspiracy,
Speaker 1: and that became then yeah, Mosad, Israel special forces and
Speaker 1: so forth.
Speaker 4: So the compelling theory was that Mossad had thrown a
Speaker 4: deadly shark into the Red Sea. That was how I
Speaker 4: was phrased. And Mohammed Shusha, who's the governor of South
Speaker 4: Sinai in Egypt, the region where Charmel Shaik is, he
Speaker 4: said that it is not out of the question, but
Speaker 4: it needs time to be confirmed. So that was his
Speaker 4: official line on that. Helpful, But I suppose it's worth
Speaker 4: looking at the fact that Charmel Shaik actually has a
Speaker 4: kind of a geopolitical significance as well. So if you
Speaker 4: go back to the Six Day War in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: Israel occupied charm El Shaikh and it became renamed Ophira,
Speaker 4: and that's where it developed from like a I guess,
Speaker 4: a dusty kind of settlement on the Red Sea into
Speaker 4: a tourist resort under Israeli control. And then in nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty two, with the Camp David Accords. It was actually
Speaker 4: given back to Egypt by his and they ran with
Speaker 4: the developing tourist industry there and it's grown into a
Speaker 4: huge tourist hub.
Speaker 1: Let's run with this, Okay, how would you go about
Speaker 1: finding a man eating shark? Train the shark to eat people,
Speaker 1: feed it on peoples in some sort of way, and
Speaker 1: then I have to smuggle it in and drop it
Speaker 1: off into Egyptian waters In the conspiracy theory, Yeah, how
Speaker 1: would that work?
Speaker 4: The statistical likelihood is so tiny of a shark actually
Speaker 4: attacking someone that it's extremely rare. So you can't even, like,
Speaker 4: if you were to try to guarantee that a shark
Speaker 4: would even bite somebody, it's very difficult to do. We
Speaker 4: know that sharks can be trained to do basic tasks.
Speaker 4: So if you go back to the nineteen fifties, there's
Speaker 4: an American sharks scientist called doctor Eugenie Clark, and she
Speaker 4: trained lemon sharks to bump a particular dinner bell to
Speaker 4: actually get a meal thrown into a pool for them,
Speaker 4: and they could remember this for several months afterwards. So
Speaker 4: sharks can't be trained to do basic tasks. But I
Speaker 4: think to do something complicated I think be really difficult
Speaker 4: to do that securitis.
Speaker 1: If I recall correctly, some of the media on these attacks,
Speaker 1: there was also a suggestion, strong suggestion, that the sharks
Speaker 1: were also attacking Russians, specifically targeting them because I feel
Speaker 1: bad for the German tours, but I believe most of
Speaker 1: the people attacked were Russians. And somehow it was in
Speaker 1: this that the sharks were being taught not only to
Speaker 1: attack people, but to differentiate. Could you tell us how
Speaker 1: sharks actually these kind of sharks what drives a predatory behavior.
Speaker 4: If someone is isolated, for instance, like in four of
Speaker 4: the five cases over that week in Sharmel Shaikh, the
Speaker 4: people who were bitten were actually isolated from people around them,
Speaker 4: So that's quite a big factor if you're swimming alone.
Speaker 4: Also possibly if you're splashing quite a bit. And there's
Speaker 4: other things that might like contrast between the water and
Speaker 4: say jewelry, or the idea of maybe wearing like the
Speaker 4: suggestions of a colorful swimsuit or different things like that
Speaker 4: that might create contrast with the blue of the water
Speaker 4: that could attract the shark's attention. But you know, they're
Speaker 4: not border security. They won't be able to delop what
Speaker 4: nationality you are. Three of the five Byte victims were Russian,
Speaker 4: one was Ukrainian, and then the as I said, the
Speaker 4: final one was German. So I think it was just
Speaker 4: the basic fact of a lot of Russians go to
Speaker 4: Sharma Shik. It's a really popular destination for Russian tourists.
Speaker 4: So I think that really explains it more than any
Speaker 4: prejudice on the part of the shark.
Speaker 3: That's what they want you to think.
Speaker 4: I'm being paid by Big Sharks to say exactly.
Speaker 2: So, Kiran, you mentioned that sharks can be trained. Are
Speaker 2: you aware of any governments or militaries that try to
Speaker 2: use sharks or train sharks for government or military purpose?
Speaker 4: Well, the US military uses a spy shark. It's a
Speaker 4: designed to look like a real shark, but it's a
Speaker 4: it's a robot. It's kind of a kind of a
Speaker 4: prototype as such, and it's been used to I guess,
Speaker 4: discreetly monitor things going on at sea. But I've never
Speaker 4: heard of an actual shark being trained or used for
Speaker 4: any purposes like that. There's an interesting one with there's
Speaker 4: a luga whale called Valdemir who's become something of a celebrity
Speaker 4: in I think it's Norway, And he was found a
Speaker 4: couple of years ago wearing a harness and a collar,
Speaker 4: and there's quite compelling evidence that there was attempts made
Speaker 4: to train him to be a Russian spy whale to
Speaker 4: keep an eye on naval activities and different things like that.
Speaker 4: So I mean whales like say beluga or an orca
Speaker 4: or dolphin or something is much more intelligent and complex
Speaker 4: in many ways than a shark would be, and would
Speaker 4: be a better candidate than that.
Speaker 1: Well, there's training and then there's sort of like managing
Speaker 1: or exploiting. So we all know that sharks can go
Speaker 1: into a feeding frenzy if there's blood in the water.
Speaker 1: That blood they can sense it from miles away.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Also I understand that they have strunk smell sense.
Speaker 3: Urine is another thing.
Speaker 1: Then we'll attract them surprising like living here and why
Speaker 1: they tell you don't pee in the water if you
Speaker 1: don't want to deal with sharks, right? Is there a
Speaker 1: way to manage sharks, like to draw them into a
Speaker 1: particular area.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Looking back at the investigation into why the attacks
Speaker 4: happened at Charmel Shake, there were two or three factors
Speaker 4: that could answer your question. One of them was there
Speaker 4: was an Australian freighter, a large ship that dumped sheep
Speaker 4: carcasses into the Red Sea in the weak or so
Speaker 4: before the attacks, and that created like a let's say,
Speaker 4: a chum slick in the water. Another big factor was
Speaker 4: there was illegal feeding of fish, small colorful fish inshore
Speaker 4: in Charmel Shake. So this was tourists at the resorts
Speaker 4: getting leftover food from restaurants or scraps of their lunch
Speaker 4: and bringing them along the jetties along the shoreline and
Speaker 4: throwing scraps into the water and attracting small fish inwards.
Speaker 4: So this was seen as another possible factor that like
Speaker 4: smaller fish were attracted and then slightly larger fish came
Speaker 4: to feed on them. And then we were talking about
Speaker 4: shark's sense of smell. One of the huge superpowers that
Speaker 4: sharks have as well is they have along their snouts
Speaker 4: these things called amplay of lareen Zini and they're these
Speaker 4: kind of electro receptors, So even in some conditions, even
Speaker 4: more so than smell, they can allow a shark to
Speaker 4: detect tiny movements changes in the water. So yeah, if
Speaker 4: you were trying to attract sharks. I mean, there are
Speaker 4: a lot of shark tour operators dive boats and they're
Speaker 4: kind of experts in this. And a couple of years
Speaker 4: ago and Shark Week actually was interesting. They did a
Speaker 4: test to see what kind of music sharks like, So
Speaker 4: they put speakers underwater and they they came to the
Speaker 4: conclusion that sharks love heavy metal. So this kind of low,
Speaker 4: deep pulsing sound, because the theory is that it replicates
Speaker 4: the kind of low vibrations of struggling prey that might
Speaker 4: tell them a meal is there. So all the perfect conditions,
Speaker 4: the probability of a shark actually biting someone is still
Speaker 4: so remote, and I think that's part of the fascination
Speaker 4: that these kind of incidents are generally so rare. That's
Speaker 4: why I think one of the things that we focus
Speaker 4: on them so much, you know, right.
Speaker 1: But the rest of the story, though, is charmel Shadon
Speaker 1: doesn't have lots of I mean, there was a spike
Speaker 1: right in shark attacks and they didn't continue.
Speaker 4: I think because of the conditions like the overfishing far
Speaker 4: and far from shore, the rise in marine temperatures as
Speaker 4: well in the region, like a couple of those factors
Speaker 4: still exist, but I don't expect we'll see something like
Speaker 4: twenty ten again because, as I said, it's just such
Speaker 4: an outlier.
Speaker 2: But an anomaly is the perfect thing if you're trying
Speaker 2: to create a conspiracy theory or if it draws people
Speaker 2: to try to explain something. So if this hadn't happened before,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden there's a spike, people are
Speaker 2: going to come try to explain it. And if the
Speaker 2: authorities don't have a good handle on it, which just
Speaker 2: sounds like they didn't at first, it sort of draws
Speaker 2: conspiracy theorist. Well that was great. Let's just take a
Speaker 2: quick moment for a break, and we'll get back to
Speaker 2: Egyptian sharks in just a moment.
Speaker 3: Okay, John, Let's get back into the water.
Speaker 1: So Kian, I'm old and I have been to Charmelshake
Speaker 1: when it was under Israeli control, and I remember swimming
Speaker 1: in those waters and they were beautiful. And my understanding
Speaker 1: is from friends who've been there afterwards, is that the
Speaker 1: coral has been to dynamite fishing and all sorts of things,
Speaker 1: and not right in front of the tourist places, but
Speaker 1: on the other side, and that there's been large environmental degradation,
Speaker 1: like the sharks are I would assume are hungary er
Speaker 1: now because there's less places for the chain as you
Speaker 1: you know, the life chain to go up to the
Speaker 1: small fishes to feed the larger fishes that feed the
Speaker 1: fishes that feed the shark have disappeared.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. As I said, there's a lot of depletion
Speaker 4: of fish stocks in the open sea, like the in
Speaker 4: the Red Sea region. So if you look at the
Speaker 4: two species of shark involved in both of those in
Speaker 4: those incidents in sharam you have the oceanic quhitetip shark
Speaker 4: and the make O shark, and both of them are
Speaker 4: actually very rarely seen in shore, so they're more commonly
Speaker 4: in open ocean, open sea, and they're feeding on marlins,
Speaker 4: orther you know, large fish as well. But seeing as
Speaker 4: those stocks have been depleted, and actually in two of
Speaker 4: the incidents in twenty ten, a charm they actually found
Speaker 4: in a necropsy on the Mago shark that they caught
Speaker 4: that it had a severely depleted liver and that it
Speaker 4: was suffering from malnutrition. So this might have made it
Speaker 4: act in a kind of a typical way where it
Speaker 4: was taking extra risks that it wouldn't normally take. And again,
Speaker 4: I think we're going back to the conspiracy. I think
Speaker 4: these conspirators often helped to overlook or hide some kind
Speaker 4: of inconvenient truths about overfishing or other kind of issues.
Speaker 1: So Kieran, how was tourism and affected in the immediate
Speaker 1: aftermath of the sharkitects.
Speaker 4: The bigger impact will actually never really know because within
Speaker 4: a couple of months the Arab Spring had happened and
Speaker 4: tourists just fled from the country.
Speaker 2: Well, we determined that it's pretty hard to train shark,
Speaker 2: especially to pick out certain ethnicities. But is it possible
Speaker 2: that it could be a robot shark?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I suppose there's a couple of things that
Speaker 4: might fly in the face of that. Basically, from the
Speaker 4: injuries that were examined by shark bite investigators, they found
Speaker 4: very familiar shark teeth patterns on the victims wounds they
Speaker 4: could tell from people who's bitten. Victor Cully on his knee,
Speaker 4: you could see these kind of distinctive raking puncture wounds
Speaker 4: that told them it was a mako shark when they
Speaker 4: looked at it or in the case of Alga Martzinko,
Speaker 4: who was bitten on the first day. I know she
Speaker 4: on a quite tip shark. There was more serrated kind
Speaker 4: of cuts that were really distinctive with that shark species bite.
Speaker 4: I don't know what kind of engineers Massad had for
Speaker 4: this job, but they would have had to replicate shark
Speaker 4: teaths extremely accurately and brilliantly to do so.
Speaker 1: Even sharks are victims of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4: They are, yeah, probably one of the most persecuted victims
Speaker 4: of conspiracy theories. They're an easy target, you know, they
Speaker 4: can't really stand up for themselves. So that's my job.
Speaker 4: I suppose that's what I'm trying to do in part.
Speaker 2: Well, you seem to be doing a very good job
Speaker 2: of it, so thank you so much for spending time.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, absolutely fascinating. Now over to John Stern.
Speaker 5: All right, guys, so I did my research, as is
Speaker 5: my job, and here's what I got. I talked to
Speaker 5: a few experts on sharks. The first one here is
Speaker 5: Mary Roach. She told me about a Navy program in
Speaker 5: the nineteen sixties to use sharks as weapons called Operation Headgear,
Speaker 5: and guys, spoiler alert, it didn't work.
Speaker 6: I'm an author. I write nonfiction books for the general
Speaker 6: public science related. But for a book called Grunt, which
Speaker 6: I had to do with military science, I had a
Speaker 6: chapter on efforts to create a shark repellent and that
Speaker 6: led to something that didn't make it into the book,
Speaker 6: Operation Headgear, which was a military effort to use sharks
Speaker 6: to deliver bombs.
Speaker 3: All right, so when was this? Which branch of the military.
Speaker 6: Ration Headgear span the years from nineteen fifty eight to
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy one. It was a project carried out It's
Speaker 6: Script's Institution of Oceanography with funding from the Navy, and
Speaker 6: it was an effort to use sharks to deliver a
Speaker 6: payload a bomb wherever they wanted.
Speaker 5: Before we get into how you get the sharks to
Speaker 5: do what you want, how would they get the bombs
Speaker 5: to go off when they wanted?
Speaker 6: Okay, so the big problem before you even get to
Speaker 6: detonation was how do you get them where you want
Speaker 6: them to go? Because this is a fairly simple gadget.
Speaker 6: It's called operation headgear because it's something that was placed
Speaker 6: on the shark to kind of steer them. So you
Speaker 6: kind of like have it set up in advance all right,
Speaker 6: this is where we want the shark to go. When
Speaker 6: the shark leaves the proper heading goes off course, it
Speaker 6: would be programmed to deliver a noxious stimulus, and that
Speaker 6: would be that was a five to twenty five volt
Speaker 6: shop on one side or the other of the shark.
Speaker 6: The idea being if the shark feels the shock on
Speaker 6: one side, it tries to get away, so it swims
Speaker 6: the other direction. That was the theory. What happened is
Speaker 6: they didn't take into account the fact that when sharks swim,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of kind of yawing back and forth.
Speaker 6: You know, as they swim, they're going to go left, right, left, right.
Speaker 6: So he kept just going like and the sharks would
Speaker 6: get pissed and there was a violent reaction, probably trying
Speaker 6: to shake the thing off.
Speaker 5: Otherwise, I'm sure it worked fine, right.
Speaker 6: It was interesting. The reason they chose sharks was also fascinating.
Speaker 6: You would think the Navy had worked with porpoises, dolphins.
Speaker 6: You would think that that would have been because they're
Speaker 6: very intelligent. You would think you've worked with them, they
Speaker 6: seem smart. Why would you not choose them? And the
Speaker 6: rationale behind using sharks there were a number of reasons.
Speaker 6: One was, unlike the porpoise, they're very quiet. They don't vocalize,
Speaker 6: you know, the dolphins are like clicking and making adorable
Speaker 6: flipper sounds. Also, it doesn't have a swim bladder, so
Speaker 6: it wouldn't be picked up on sonar. You know, this
Speaker 6: is like a secret agent on a mission, so it's
Speaker 6: got to be stealthy. And they actually felt that the
Speaker 6: lesser intelligence of the shark was an advantage because they
Speaker 6: felt they could and this is a quote, intellectually dominate
Speaker 6: the shark anyway under that kind of control. They never
Speaker 6: got very far, They never completed even that the distance.
Speaker 6: They were very unhappy and I can read you the
Speaker 6: conclusion from it. You know, this was a long time
Speaker 6: that they worked on this. We have serious reservations concerning
Speaker 6: the suitability of a shark as a vehicle for command,
Speaker 6: guidance or transporting a payload any distance.
Speaker 5: And then the other shark expert I spoke to it
Speaker 5: was Christina Zanato. Christina dives with the sharks and she
Speaker 5: knows them on a direct level better than maybe anyone
Speaker 5: else on earth.
Speaker 7: My name is Christina Zanato.
Speaker 8: I am a professional diver based in the Bahamas working
Speaker 8: with sharks in the wild as a behaviorist and ecologists
Speaker 8: for the last thirty years. I'm also a cave explorer
Speaker 8: and technical instructor. Shark is a very unique word. The
Speaker 8: smallest shark in the world is the size of a pen.
Speaker 8: The biggest shark in the world is the size of
Speaker 8: a bus and a filter feed. My goal is to
Speaker 8: educate people about the meaning of.
Speaker 7: The word shark, the value of sharks in our oceans
Speaker 7: for the survival of the ocean, which ultimately is our survival,
Speaker 7: and the different understanding of what that word means. Sharks
Speaker 7: is a living, a.
Speaker 8: Breathing, thinking, intelligent creature who has been surviving in the.
Speaker 7: Oceans for over four hundred and fifty million.
Speaker 8: Years or comfortably shares their world with as humans encroaching
Speaker 8: into them.
Speaker 5: There is a series of shark attacks in the Red
Speaker 5: Sea off the coast of Egypt, and it was put
Speaker 5: out there that these were trained sharks to hurt the
Speaker 5: Egyptian tourist industry economically. The crux of this all is
Speaker 5: a belief that anyone, let alone the Israeli Secret Service,
Speaker 5: is capable of training a shark to do anything as
Speaker 5: complicated as that there.
Speaker 7: Is a basic training that is a trigger by a reward.
Speaker 8: Doctor Eugenie Clark back in nineteen fifty five talks and
Speaker 8: lemon sharks that at the ring of the bell they
Speaker 8: could push the button and get a little treat. You
Speaker 8: might be able to do it once, but on the
Speaker 8: second time the sharks like, Noah, I've already done that.
Speaker 7: So no, there's no level of training like that of sharks.
Speaker 5: Are there more likely scenarios for a shark to bite
Speaker 5: someone than military training?
Speaker 8: When we talk about shark bites, we always try to
Speaker 8: you know, there's this viscous lineup, or it's a vicious attack,
Speaker 8: or its aggressive, or it's an attack. But at the
Speaker 8: end of the day, this is an animal trying to
Speaker 8: feed and that's how natures design them to feed. More
Speaker 8: is we forget that maybe these animals are going through something.
Speaker 8: We forget that we are damaging their environment, we are
Speaker 8: removing their food, we are invading into their world of
Speaker 8: through coastal development, taking away the reverstrairies, building all the
Speaker 8: resorts on the beach.
Speaker 7: And they were like, oh, there's more encounters with sharks.
Speaker 8: Will there's some more people in the war and were
Speaker 8: encroaching into their world a little bit more, and.
Speaker 5: Then I did some research on robotic sharks. Long story short,
Speaker 5: there's no way someone could build a robotic shark that
Speaker 5: could do this. I also do research about the Egyptian
Speaker 5: tourist industry at its peak was twenty ten, the year
Speaker 5: of these attacks. It served about fourteen point seven million
Speaker 5: visitors to Egypt that year and the revenue was twelve
Speaker 5: and a half billion dollars, which was eleven percent of
Speaker 5: the GDP. But in terms of Russian tourists, the largest
Speaker 5: group was German tourists, Ukrainian tourists, which hopefully will not
Speaker 5: be considered Russian tourists in the near future, Saudi Arabian,
Speaker 5: the United Kingdom, Italy, Russian tourists were way down on
Speaker 5: the list. Now, if you really wanted to use a
Speaker 5: smart animal, beluga whales would be your choice. Beluga whales
Speaker 5: are trainable, smart, friendly, and they have an amazing communication vocabulary.
Speaker 5: The big problem with training at beluga whale is they
Speaker 5: actually don't kill people. Well, I guess it's that time
Speaker 5: where we have to welcome Adam Davidson in Man.
Speaker 3: I thought we were going to stick with experts.
Speaker 9: I only have one question robots are real sharks. Robots
Speaker 9: are real trained sharks.
Speaker 1: I think clearly the word that's it's in all our
Speaker 1: heads right now is galliophobia, right, I mean, that's obvious,
Speaker 1: the irrational fear of sharks.
Speaker 2: What's the word for irrational fear of sharks?
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 1: Is rational Galliophobia is what the entire audience is thinking now.
Speaker 1: And I think this conspiracy theory plugs into that. Whenever
Speaker 1: you go swimming, there is always a rational concern for
Speaker 1: one safety, right, you can drown, things can to take
Speaker 1: you from underneath. And I think fear of sharks is
Speaker 1: that everyone has. And if the theory is that the
Speaker 1: sharks were sent by a unfriendly intelligence service to damage
Speaker 1: your economy, I think just that story is very effective. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's take a break from the craziness just for a
Speaker 1: minute or two.
Speaker 9: So you know, I've lived in the Middle East. I've
Speaker 9: spent a lot of time in the Middle East, in
Speaker 9: both Israel and the Arab world. And one thing that
Speaker 9: I would actually say Israeli governments and Arab governments have
Speaker 9: both invested a lot in is creating a mystique around
Speaker 9: Israel's kind of superpowers. Right, the Israelis for obvious reasons.
Speaker 9: They are a tiny nation surrounded by people who they
Speaker 9: perceive as enemy, and they have some good evidence. There's
Speaker 9: some pretty amazing moments in Israeli history, the Six Day
Speaker 9: War in Tebe where even the independence warn forty eight
Speaker 9: forty nine. But then also there is both Israel's foreign
Speaker 9: policy but also its own domestic politics is really wrapped
Speaker 9: up in the idea. That is, especially Israeli special forces
Speaker 9: and Israeli technical people, the hackers, the scientific people in
Speaker 9: the military are beyond the best in the world. They're
Speaker 9: the smartest, the greatest, the most amazing. So it feels
Speaker 9: like the ground is really set for people believing like,
Speaker 9: if you can think of it, the Israelis could pull
Speaker 9: it off.
Speaker 1: And it's also set for blaming the Mossad, which you
Speaker 1: can blame for everything, right, if it's this ultra effective organization,
Speaker 1: you can blame your own shortcomings on it. So if
Speaker 1: you're an Arab country you've got high inflation, or if
Speaker 1: you've got internal strife for the crops don't come in, well,
Speaker 1: it's not the regime's fault, right, you can blame the
Speaker 1: other and people would be inclined to believe it. So
Speaker 1: I think the Red Sea Egyptian shortcomings which are much
Speaker 1: more likely to explain this, the loss of habitat, loss
Speaker 1: of food supplies, making them more aggressive and so forth.
Speaker 1: That's not where you want to go. Where you really
Speaker 1: want to go is it's somebody else doing this to us.
Speaker 3: It's not our fault. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Still, I mean, you listen to putin. The CI is
Speaker 2: blamed for everything that goes bad in Russia, and so
Speaker 2: I'm sure in the Middle East blaming Israel is just
Speaker 2: sort of a handy thing to be able to have
Speaker 2: to take blame off yourself.
Speaker 9: I do have a question, which I've actually had my
Speaker 9: whole life. How do people in the intelligence community look
Speaker 9: at the Israelis? As a young Jewish guy, I was
Speaker 9: raised to thank Yeah, they're like the greatest spies and
Speaker 9: special forces operators in the history of the universe. How
Speaker 9: does CIA look at Mosad? And it's not just Masad,
Speaker 9: it's Shinbette tess. I heard macall, there's a bunch of
Speaker 9: these hyper elite Israeli groups.
Speaker 2: Israel relies on the intelligence services to an unusual extent.
Speaker 2: They're a small country and a dangerous part of the world.
Speaker 2: And their political masters are very focused on what the
Speaker 2: intelligence services can do. And also they have laws that
Speaker 2: allow the intelligence services to do things that we in
Speaker 2: the West aren't allowed to do, assassinate, these these type
Speaker 2: of things. And so I think they're very effective and
Speaker 2: they're part of the world. But when people say, oh,
Speaker 2: they're the best in the world, by no means do
Speaker 2: they have the resources, ability, or whatever of a place
Speaker 2: like the CIA, the or US intelligence community that has
Speaker 2: worldwide reach, incredible resources, links with others all around the world.
Speaker 2: And so to compare them to a bigger service like
Speaker 2: the CIA is not really fair to them.
Speaker 1: They're a niche service. They focus on one or two
Speaker 1: things and they do those very well. And because they
Speaker 1: got their back to the wall, they're highly motivated for
Speaker 1: good reasons they should be, and they're effective. They're pretty
Speaker 1: merciless when it comes to their mission and they and
Speaker 1: they need to be.
Speaker 9: But is it that they're good on a relative basis
Speaker 9: or are they actually just plain good? Like are there
Speaker 9: jobs you would be like, you know what the Israelis
Speaker 9: would do better than.
Speaker 2: The Americans, Well, there's things that we can't do, Like
Speaker 2: they can go into a place like Iran, and put
Speaker 2: bombs down and stuff like that. That's not something that
Speaker 2: we're allowed to do for legal reasons, for our own
Speaker 2: sort of internal things. And so there's things that we
Speaker 2: might go to them that they have skill in because
Speaker 2: they do those kind of things, not to bomb for
Speaker 2: us necessarily, but some of their knowledge that they gain
Speaker 2: by being in places where we can't be and that
Speaker 2: type of thing. But the thing is, we do the
Speaker 2: same with the Brits and the Japanese and others who
Speaker 2: have things that we don't have that we can then
Speaker 2: take advantage of.
Speaker 1: So Mosad and Cia are both creatures of democracies. We
Speaker 1: have to do what our politicians tell us to and
Speaker 1: so we are policy instruments to a greater degree, and
Speaker 1: when policy is not good or policy is flawed, then
Speaker 1: what we do is going to be flawed, even if
Speaker 1: we're successful. There's this great book, Rise Up and Kill
Speaker 1: First is a history of the Mosad, and even some
Speaker 1: of their greatest successes tactical successes have led to strategic failures.
Speaker 1: For example, how Mosad or the Israeli secret services were
Speaker 1: able to track and locate and find a way to
Speaker 1: kill shaik Ya seen the head of Hamas and Okay,
Speaker 1: he's a bad guy. He was killing Israelis. He arguably
Speaker 1: deserves it, only arguably because the people that replaced him
Speaker 1: were open to operating with the Iranians despite the fact
Speaker 1: that they were radical Sunnies. And then what Israel faced
Speaker 1: was Hamas plus Iran, whereas you see, didn't take resources
Speaker 1: and weapons from Irans because they were Shia. Israel arguably
Speaker 1: because of policy, not because of what Israeli secret services did,
Speaker 1: arguably made things worse. So it was that good or bad.
Speaker 1: It was a tactically good, perhaps strategically less so.
Speaker 9: All right, So let's dig into sharks being specially trained
Speaker 9: to eat. So to me, this one ranks fairly low
Speaker 9: as a convincing It's not an elegant conspiracy theory. There's
Speaker 9: a lot of moving parts, a lot of room for
Speaker 9: err I don't know how many shark trainers you need.
Speaker 1: Pretty much established that you can't train sharks, that's one
Speaker 1: of the problems. You can manage them. You can bring
Speaker 1: them into an area through chumming and so forth.
Speaker 2: So the notion that train sharks go after certain tourists
Speaker 2: with the plan of, you know, destroying the Egyptian economy
Speaker 2: doesn't hold together. But it certainly is possible that a
Speaker 2: group could come in and dump just a bunch of
Speaker 2: sharks in an area where there's lots of tourists and
Speaker 2: hope expect that it would cause some sort of panic.
Speaker 1: That's possible, right if you're trying to convince Egyptian public
Speaker 1: that it's not their fault that the Red Sea environment
Speaker 1: is all screwed up. It's the most out I think
Speaker 1: it could be effective domestically inside of Egypt, and certainly
Speaker 1: this is where it's been spread is among Egyptian politicians
Speaker 1: trying to explain this. But to the wider world. I
Speaker 1: don't think the Russians by it. I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: else does either.
Speaker 2: I think it's it's pretty for a short term Egyptian
Speaker 2: politician try to get himself out of being blamed for something.
Speaker 2: It probably had some utility.
Speaker 9: So I'm giving this one. I'm giving her a one
Speaker 9: point eight. It's kind of original, it has a little creativity,
Speaker 9: but as a conspiracy theory, like if we're in the
Speaker 9: meeting of the conspiracy theorists of the world, I don't
Speaker 9: think this one's getting any awards.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to disagree.
Speaker 1: I just got a phone call from my buddy Hamid
Speaker 1: in Cairo and he said, this is a four point
Speaker 1: eight Wow.
Speaker 9: Okay, yeah, Well my.
Speaker 2: Buddy Yuri and Tel Aviv just called me and so
Speaker 2: that's not true.
Speaker 5: To one mission implausible. It was produced by Adam Davidson,
Speaker 5: Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producers
Speaker 5: are Rachel Harner and David Salinger. This has been a
Speaker 5: production of honorable, mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia.