Source: Vocativ

Your guide to the sharks, vultures, and pigeons that just may be working for the Mossad

The Middle East has long been fertile ground for a good conspiracy theory—whether it’s Jews and the September 11 attacks, the CIA and Arab Spring, or the alliance of Western businessmen, journalists and politicians that supposedly helped oust Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi last year.

But it’s not just humans that are surreptitiously helping to bring down governments. There’s apparently also a whole sub-world of animal spies that are working to destabilize Mideast regimes. In one case, a very suspicious stork was turned over to local police in Egypt. In another, a shark that was attacking swimmers was briefly linked to a Mossad plot.

Even puppets sometimes need to answer for their actions. Abla Fahita, an Egyptian muppet-type character, was forced to go on national television recently to deny that her appearance in a phone commercial was actually a coded message to the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Tweet at us: Is your animal spying on you?

As with all good conspiracy theories, there’s just enough historical precedent to resonate with believers. American and British forcesused homing pigeons during World War II to carry messages, and the CIA reportedly trained dolphins, ravens and even cats for use in surveillance and weapons detection with varying degrees of success during the Cold War. Israel, too, has tried to cultivate some four-legged allies: Its security service was said to have trained gerbils for use in airport security, believing their keen sense of smell could help detect a rise in adrenalin. Problem was they couldn’t distinguish between a nervous flyer and a potential bomber.

The gerbils, in fact, may have been the inspiration for G-Force, a 2009 Disney film about “an elite team of animal spies.” The comedy was largely dismissed by critics. “The plot is pretty ridiculous,” wrote one.

Here are some of the most recent cases involving suspected Israeli animal spies.

When: August 2013

The Animal: Stork

The Case: “Death on the Nile”

Egyptian authorities “arrested” the bird after a device was found attached to its leg. A fisherman in the Nile River southeast of Cairo first detained the suspicious stork and handed it over to the local police. The device turned out to be a wildlife tracker used by French scientists to trace the stork’s migrating patterns.

While cleared of spying, things did not end well for the stork. It wasreportedly caught and eaten shortly after being released into a conservation area in southern Egypt.

REUTERS

When: July 2013

The Animal: Falcon Kestrel

The Case: “Day of the Falcon”

Turkish police seized a small Falcon Kestrel who had an Israeli tag attached to its foot. Medical personnel at Firat University in eastern Turkey identified the bird as an “Israeli Spy” in their registration documents.

The bird was forced to undergo a battery of tests, including X-ray scans, which found that it wasn’t carrying any surveillance equipment. (It was,however, found to be carrying a grudge. Jews do that.)

AFP/Getty Images

When: January 2013

The Animal: Carrier pigeon

The Case: “Bird on a Wire”

A few months before the Stork incident, a carrier pigeon wascaptured north of Cairo after a message was found attached to one of its feet and a microfilm to the other. The microfilm supposedly carried the message “Islam Egypt.”

Egypt’s Criminal Investigation Department took the lead in the investigation, had the microfilm developed and determined that the bird was not a spy. Or was it? The mystery of the microfilm was never explained.

When: December 2010

The Animal: Vulture

The Case: “Agent R65″

A griffon vulture, caught by a hunter in rural Saudi Arabia, was turned over to security forces after it was found to be wearing a suspicious GPS device and a “Tel Aviv University” leg tag with the ID code R65. Rumors quickly spread, and were picked up by several Saudi newspapers, that the bird was an agent dispatched by Mossad.

The real explanation was a little more mundane. The griffon is in danger of extinction in the mountains of Israel and is the subject of a reintroduction project. As part of that project, vultures are tagged to keep track of the population.

(A similar case was reported in Sudan in December 2012. Authorities accused a vulture of being an Israeli spy. An Israeli ecologist explainedthe bird was part of a group of about a 100 tagged by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and fitted with a GPS system that could take distance and altitude readings.)

A fisherman holds the shark which was identified by an Egyptian diver as the shark which attacked four tourists in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh December 2, 2010. REUTERS

When: December 2010

The Animal: Shark

The Case: “Jaws” (or as more than one blogger dubbed it, “Jews”)

A series of rare shark attacks in the Egyptian beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh prompted accusations that the sharks were part of a Mossad plot—sent into Egyptian waters to scare off visitors and disrupt tourism. Reports claimed a remote controlled GPS tracking device was attached to the shark and was being used to control it.

“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm,” a local government official was quoted as saying.

Others pointed out that it would be difficult for the Mossad shark to distinguish its Arab target from a friendly Jew, aside from the fact that the Jew would probably not be a good swimmer and would most likely be accompanied by his mother who would be yelling at him to swim closer to shore.

In any event, the shark in question was eventually caught and dismissed as a spy threat.