“America Sent Dolphins” — Why Australian Divers Searched Iraq’s Deadliest Port By Hand

Just after half past 4:00 in the morning on the 18th of February, 1991, the American assault ship USS Tripoli was leading the coalition mine clearance force through the northern Persian Gulf when an Iraqi LUGM contact mine detonated against her starboard bow. The blast tore a hole 25 ft long and 23 ft high through the plating below the waterline, and within the hour a third of the ship’s fuel was gone into the sea.

 Tripoli was the flagship of the entire mine countermeasures effort, the one vessel in the Gulf whose whole job was finding these weapons before they found her. The ship that hunted mines had been caught by one, and her crew spent the rest of that night shoring bulkheads to keep her afloat. Less than 3 hours later, about 10 mi away, the Aegis cruiser USS Princeton passed over two Italian-made manta influence mines resting on the seabed.

 Each carried 325 lb of explosive, and they fired together beneath her stern. The shock whipped down the length of the hull, cracked her superstructure, and put $15 million of repair work into one of the most advanced warships afloat in under a second. Two hits in one morning ended any argument inside the United States Navy about what Iraqi mines could do.

12 years later, the same two weapons turned up in the same waters hidden inside rows of rusty oil drums. On the night the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, boarding parties from the Australian ship HMAS Kanimbla ran their rigid inflatable boats alongside a line of Iraqi tugs moving down the Khawr Abd Allah, the waterway that connects the open Gulf to Iraq’s only deepwater port.

One tug, the Jumariya, was towing a cargo barge stacked with 44-gallon drums lined up in neat rows like any harbor workboats load. Australian sailors climbed aboard and began opening them. Packed inside sat 68 sea mines, Mantas, and LUGMs, the same two types that had holed Tripoli and Princeton prepared for laying in the exact channel the coalition fleet and every relief ship behind it would have to use.

 The Australians seized the tugs and the barge intact with every mine still on its cradle. Ashore, the fight for the port town of Umm Qasr opened on the 21st of March led by Royal Marines of the British 3rd Commando Brigade with American Marines of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and Polish Grom Commandos working beside them.

The new port fell fast and then the old town held out for days longer than any planner had allowed. Even once the last defenders gave up, the water stayed shut. Off the coast, the British relief ship Sir Galahad waited with 650 tons of food and water while television crews counted each day of delay because no captain would bring a loaded hull up a channel that might be mined.

The American answer arrived by cargo aircraft from California. Nine Atlantic bottlenose dolphins trained by the United States Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego flew into the theater with their own handlers and veterinarians. The first animals in history sent against live mines in a combat zone.

 Australia’s contribution arrived with far less publicity. Clearance Diving Team 3, 32 men of the Royal Australian Navy, went into harbor water so loaded with silt that a diver couldn’t see his own gloves in front of his face mask. They worked the berths and wharf pilings by touch, arm over arm along weighted search lines, feeling across the mud for anything with a machined edge.

On one of those sweeps, deep in the murk of the harbor basin, a diver’s hand came down on curved steel plate rising out of the bottom. A whole hull was lying under the port of Umm Qasr, and her cargo was still aboard. Umm Qasr sits at the head of the Khor Abd Allah, hard against the Kuwaiti border in the far south of Iraq, and it is the country’s only deepwater port.

Anything that entered Iraq in bulk, grain, or medicine, or machinery parts came over its wharves. The coalition had promised the watching world that humanitarian relief would follow the troops within days, and the only way to move relief in 1,000-ton lots was by sea. That made a working port the first hard objective of the ground war, and it made the channel leading to it the most examined stretch of water on Earth that week.

Everything depended on proving a safe passage through an estuary that had already produced 68 captured mines before the first ship moved. The fear behind all that that caution had been earned a decade earlier. In the months before the first Gulf War, Iraq had sown well over 1,000 mines across the northern Gulf, one of the densest defensive minefields laid anywhere since the Second World War.

That field was a large part of why the planned amphibious landing on the Kuwaiti coast never went in. And after the shooting stopped, coalition ships spent month after month sweeping lanes through water they had supposedly already won. Tripoli and Princeton were the proof of what even two weapons from that field could do to a modern fleet.

Any officer planning the 2003 campaign had read those damage reports. The men Australia sent against that problem belonged to a small and specialized branch. Clearance divers of the Royal Australian Navy train to find and disarm explosive objects in shallow water, in harbors, and on beaches, the places where sonar returns turn to clutter and machines start guessing.

Whenever the branch deploys into a combat zone, its people operate under a single name, Clearance Diving Team Three. The title carries its own service record because this was the team’s second war in these exact waters and the first one had started where the fires were still burning.

 In the weeks after the first Gulf War ended in 1991, 23 Australian Clearance Divers worked through the wrecked ports of Kuwait under a sky stained black by the burning oil wells. They cleared ordinance off the beaches where the landing never happened and they cleared a captured naval base as well, item by item, in the first combat tasking for the branch since Vietnam.

The job earned little attention at home and none abroad. 12 years on, the same unit name went back to the same Gulf and this time the mines were waiting in the water ahead of the fleet instead of behind it. The Royal Australian Navy came to the invasion with a task group already in place.

 The frigates Anzac and Darwin and the transport Kanimbla had spent months enforcing the United Nations embargo, running boarding operations against smugglers in the same waterway the war was about to flow through. Kanimbla worked as the hub for boarding parties, her flight deck and boat davits cycling teams onto anything that moved down the Khor Abdallah.

By the time the order to invade came, Australian boarding teams knew the estuary traffic better than anyone else in the coalition. That local knowledge paid off on the first night of the war. Kanimbla’s sailors kept score the way boarding ships always have, with a tally board on deck recording every vessel stopped and searched.

The board filled steadily through the northern winter as the teams worked the queue of dhows, tankers, and workboats trying to slip cargo past the embargo. Months of that traffic taught the boarding parties what an honest load looked like, how a master behaved when his papers were real, and how a hull sits in the water when it carries more weight than its manifest admits.

That education is what led a boarding party look at a tug and barge riding low on the first night of the war and decide the drums deserved opening. The interception rested on months of that pattern reading, and the Jumairia wasn’t the only catch. A second mine layer, the Al Raya, was taken in the same operation, and the boarded vessels carried more of the same weapons beyond the 68 packed into the barge drums.

The crews were detained, the vessels were secured, and within days the captured mine layers were sailed to Kuwait flying the Australian white ensign. Every mine went into coalition custody instead of into the shipping channel. Intelligence officers now held the complete picture of the operation they had just stopped, and it confirmed a deliberate plan to shut the only relief route into Iraq.

 The mix of weapons on those decks was chosen with intent. The LUGM is a horned contact mine riding a mooring cable, an old design that still needs only one touch, and the manta is a squat fiberglass cone that sits on the bottom, listens for a ship’s noise and magnetic field, and gives sonar almost nothing to see. One type had ripped open Tripoli, the other had crippled Princeton, and both were about to be planted in a waterway barely wide enough for two ships to pass.

If the barge had reached its laying positions even hours earlier, the approach to Umm Qasr would have been closed before the war ashore properly started. Instead, the channel was merely suspect, which still meant every meter of it had to be proven. The stakes behind the channel ran past the fleet. Basra, the largest city in the south with more than a million people, had lost much of its clean water supply in the first days of the war and aid agencies were warning openly about disease.

The land routes from Kuwait could carry trucks and trucks couldn’t move relief on the scale a city requires. The arithmetic kept coming back to the one deep water port and its single suspect channel. Every day the water stayed unproven, the warnings out of Basra grew sharper and the pressure on the clearance force ratcheted up another turn.

 The Australians were also firing on the war’s opening night and doing it in a way the navy hadn’t done in a generation. As Royal Marines of 40 Commando assaulted the Al Faw Peninsula to seize the oil infrastructure before it could be wrecked. The frigate HMAS Anzac stood in close and put 5-in shells onto Iraqi command posts, bunkers and artillery positions ahead of them.

It was the first naval gunfire support delivered by an Australian warship since Vietnam 31 years earlier. The gun crews fired mission after mission through the week that followed and the sailors started calling that opening day 5-in Friday. Iraqi positions on the peninsula folded under the weight of it and the Marines pushed through.

 Um, Qasr itself was supposed to be a walkover and the world watched it refuse to be one. Television crews traveling with the assault force broadcast the fighting live, some of the first live pictures of an actual ground battle ever put to air and what they showed was Marines pinned behind sand berms by defenders who hadn’t read the script.

It took until the 25th of March before the town and port could be declared secure. By then the story had shifted from the fighting to the cargo sitting offshore because the relief ship everyone had promised was still riding at anchor waiting on the water to be cleared. The clearance force assembled for that job was one of the stranger orders of battle ever put together.

Command folded the 32 Australians into a combined task unit alongside American and British counterparts. The American element, Naval Special Clearance Team One, brought Navy SEALs, explosive ordnance technicians, unmanned underwater vehicles, and the dolphins. Britain ran mine hunters and dive teams of its own.

 The work divided along practical lines. Open running lanes went to sonar and to the animals, which could cover distance no human could match. The wrecks, the warps, and the cluttered harbor bottom went to the men who worked by hand. Dolphins were the piece the world wanted to hear about. The San Diego program had been training bottlenose dolphins since the 1960s, and it had form.

Dolphins had stood sentry duty against enemy swimmers at Cam Ranh Bay during Vietnam, and they had screened tankers and hunted mines in the Gulf during the escort operations of the late ’80s. The Navy rated a dolphin’s natural sonar above any manufactured sensor it owned for telling a mine casing from a rock or a drowned car.

 Sending the animals against live mines in the middle of a shooting war was new ground, and the line was crossed at Umm Qasr. Moving the animals to the war was an operation in itself. Each dolphin traveled in a water-filled transporter with a veterinarian in attendance, flown across the world in the back of a transport aircraft, and then craned into a holding pen at the port.

The Navy called the deployment package the Mark 7 system, and it arrived complete with handlers, small boats, medical stores, and its own fish supply. Reporters loved every detail. A war that was only days old on television had produced its first novelty, and the novelty whistled and took fish from a handler’s fingers in front of the cameras.

 The working method was simple and tightly drilled. A dolphin swam a lane, located a suspect shape, backed away without touching it, and dropped a weighted marker nearby, then returned to the handlers boat and reported for a fish. Two of them, Tacoma and Makai, went into the water at Umm Qasr in the last days of March, straight off the aircraft and into the brown estuary.

Another of the program’s animals, K-Dog, had already been photographed mid-leap in front of a landing craft, and the picture ran in newspapers around the world. The coalition’s newest mine hunters were a global story before they had found a single object. Tacoma’s first operational task was checking the lane that Sir Galahad would take up to the port.

Two hours into the job, he vanished. For the next 48 hours, the most publicized member of the entire clearance force was absent without leave in an active war zone. His handler, Petty Officer Taylor Whitaker, stood at the water’s edge, slapping the surface, and holding out the animal’s favorite fish, and told reporters he wasn’t worried since Tacoma had probably found some local marine company.

 Tacoma eventually turned up near Umm Qasr, safe and sound, and the Navy put him back to work as if nothing had happened. The disappearance went international while the clearance schedule ground forward without him. An animal rights group wrote to the American defense secretary demanding that animals be left out of the war altogether.

 Editorial pages argued about dolphins and ethics, and the port of Umm Qasr briefly had a more famous missing mammal than it had a working crane. None of the coverage mentioned that other members of the same task unit were spending those same days lying face down in the mud under the wharves. The Australians never made the papers that week, which measured camera appeal rather than results.

 The branch doing that unfilmed work stays small on purpose. A Royal Australian Navy clearance diver spends the better part of a year in training before he touches an operational team stacking diving medicine, demolitions, and ordnance recognition on top of the diving itself. And the course carries a reputation inside the fleet for breaking fit men without apology.

The product is a sailor who treats a live mine the way an electrician treats a live wire as a technical problem with rules. 32 of them covered every wet task the invasion produced and the Navy never needed to ask for more. In the harbor basin the visibility was zero and the Australian part of the operation photographed poorly because there was nothing to film.

A diver lay flat against the bottom with his own breathing loud in his ears following a weighted line laid across the mud sweeping his hands in overlapping arcs until his fingers met an object. Every contact had to be identified by touch alone and the object under his glove might be a fuel drum or an anchor chain, a bicycle frame, or a mine.

The work advanced at the speed of a man’s hands hour after hour, tide after tide, and none of it could be handed to a machine or an animal. Sorting the harbor floor of Umm Qasr was a job for fingers and nerve. Touch identification is its own trade and the syllabus for it exists for a reason. A L U G M under the fingers is a moored sphere with horns unmistakable once found and a manta is a smooth squat cone of fiberglass that could pass for harbor junk to anyone who hadn’t drilled on one.

The manta was designed to beat instruments with a shape and casing that gives sonar a weak return and a firing system that waits for the sound and magnetism of a real ship. A sensor package can be fooled by a mine built to fool sensors. A trained hand moving over the casing in the dark cannot, which is why the dirtiest berths belonged to the divers.

 It was on one of those sweeps that the team made the find of the operation. Resting on the bottom, buried to her waterline in silt, lay a sunken Iraqi minelayer, and her mines were still aboard, still live. The wharves of a port the coalition was about to run its entire relief effort through stood directly above a loaded weapons carrier that no sonar picture had flagged and no dolphin had marked.

Divers had found her with their hands in water where the beam of a torch stopped inside an arm’s length. The team worked her the only way the water allowed, dive after dive in nil visibility. They fixed her position, traced her hull plate by plate, and confirmed the load inside her.

 Then the ordnance was marked for disposal and dealt with before most of the port above ever knew she existed. Not one weapon from that cargo reached the shipping channel. A vessel built to close the port had been found and neutralized by men crawling past her in the dark, and the discovery never made a headline anywhere in the world.

 The dolphin who went missing for 2 days remained a bigger story than the minelayer that got found. Underwater work was only half the tasking. The same divers spent their hours out of the water working through the port above, checking offices, cranes, and warehouse floors for booby traps left behind by the garrison. A port is a machine with a thousand hiding places, and every switch room and stacked container had to be treated as rigged until proven otherwise.

The checks turned up ordnance and traps in a facility the relief effort needed intact, and the clearing went on around the clock while the first cargo manifests were already being drafted offshore. Beyond the gates, the town needed the same treatment faster still. The divers went into the streets of Umm Qasr alongside British commandos lifting unexploded mortar bombs and rocket-propelled grenades out of the ground where the fighting had left them.

Ordnance that has been fired and failed is touchier than ordnance still in its crate because the arming process has already begun. And every pickup was a slow, bare-handed argument with corroded fusing. Families were already drifting back into those streets as the work went on. The divers logged the job in the dry language of ordnance disposal, and the people moving back into the houses saw it rather differently.

 Relief pressed in behind the clearance teams faster than anyone had planned for. Engineers ran a fresh water pipeline across the border from Kuwait toward Umm Qasr in the first weeks of April, and the port town turned into the proving ground for every promise the coalition had made about aid. None of it could move until the ordnance was gone from the streets and wharves it had to move through.

The divers’ slow, bare-handed work sat at the front of a queue that stretched from the port gates all the way to the dry taps of Basra. And everyone in the queue was in a hurry except the men defusing it. While the hand searches went on below and ashore, the channel outside was being processed lane by lane. The British mine hunters, Sandown and Bangor, pinged their way up the waterway meter by meter.

American Sea Dragon helicopters dragged mine-sweeping sleds across the surface at low level, engines hammering over the mudbanks. Unmanned underwater vehicles crawled the bottom, and behind them the dolphins proved each cleared lane again before anyone would sign it off. Layer over layer, machine checking animal checking man, the channel to Umm Qasr was proven a strip at a time.

 On the 28th of March, a little over a week after the boarding parties had climbed onto the Jumairia, the commanders declared a lane 200 yd wide safe for shipping. The lane ran through an estuary that Iraqi mine layers had been caught trying to seed with the two most proven ship killers in the region and nobody in the trade would call such water clean.

The mine warfare officers called it proven instead, which is the strongest word their profession allows itself. Then they invited the world’s press to watch a ship at her hull on their work. Sir Galahad came up the Khor Abdallah that same day following the mine hunter Sandown with the American patrol ship Firebolt and two Kuwaiti patrol boats in company.

650 tons of food and water came alongside at wharves that had been searched glove by glove through water proven by sonar, by sled, by dolphin, and by hand. Cameras from every network in the theater filmed her lines going ashore. It was the first promised delivery of the war to actually arrive and the port that received it had been certified by a combined team in which the dirtiest work belonged to 32 Australians.

 More relief ships followed her in through the same 200-yd lane in the weeks after and Umm Qasr turned into the funnel for everything the aid effort could move in bulk. Within a month, the berths that had been searched glove by glove were back in daily use and the harbor that had opened the war as a suspected minefield was receiving scheduled sailings.

For the men who had proven the water, the reward was the next tasking. Clearing one harbor hadn’t emptied southern Iraq of ordnance and the list grew as the front rolled north. What the team found over the following month showed how close the coalition had come to a much longer war on the water. In April, the divers moved north up the waterway to clear a second port at Khor az-Zubair, closer to Basra, and repeated the whole routine in the same black water.

They ran the birth searches by touch, checked the sunken wrecks, lifted and logged the ordnance, and handed over another industrial harbor meter by meter. The port serves the factory belt south of Basra and its basins held the same silt, the same junk, and the same zero visibility as Umm Qasr. Press boats stayed behind at Umm Qasr, so the work at Khor az-Zubair went unrecorded while the same men repeated the same job one port deeper into Iraq.

The estuary war had a rhythm by then and the team was setting it. A detachment then crossed to the Al Faw peninsula, the flat tongue of land between the Khor Abdullah and the Shatt al-Arab, where the Royal Marines had gone ashore on the first night under Anzac’s gunfire. The shoreline had been fortified and mined and over 10 days the Australians cleared mines and other ordinance from 160 square kilometers of coastal flats.

Leading Seaman Paul Virgin walked those sweeps with a Colt carbine slung across his chest and an Australian official war photographer, David Dare Parker, shot Petty Officer Dean Campbell and Able Seaman Colin Von Richenberg walking a cleared path across ground as bare as a salt pan. The pictures show two men strolling an empty mud flat, which is what mine clearance looks like when it has been done properly.

 The last major task took the divers into a storage area attached to the Iraqi Navy’s school of mine warfare. Inside they found sea mines and anti-submarine mortars plus the rest of the school’s working stock stacked and waiting. This was the reserve that any second mining campaign would have drawn on, the depth behind the barge that Canimbla’s boarding parties had stopped on night one.

The divers cleared it weapon by weapon until the school had nothing left to teach with. An arsenal meant to shut the Gulf’s northern waters ended its war as an Australian inventory list. The ledger of the mine war reads simply enough now. Boarding parties took 68 mines on the water before they could be laid with more aboard the other seized vessels, and the divers found a loaded mine layer by hand beneath the working port.

The team proved two harbors and swept a fortified peninsula, then emptied the mine school’s stock for good measure. Across the whole campaign, the coalition lost not a single hull to a mine in the Khawr Abd Allah, which is the only statistic a clearance diver ever really answers to. The 1991 fleet had taken two crippling hits from that same arsenal.

The 2003 fleet took none. Some of that night’s work ended up in Canberra. The white ensign flown by Kanimbla’s steaming party aboard the captured mine layer went into the Australian War Memorial’s collection, and so did a small boat and a galley spoon taken off the Jumairiyah, souvenirs of the moment Australian sailors stood on the deck of a ship built to sink their fleet.

The spoon sits in the catalog today alongside the war’s grander relics, logged with the same care as any metal. Sailors have always kept score in their own currency, and a spoon from an enemy mine layer’s galley is about as honest as that currency gets. By the end of May, the 32 were home, their deployment wrapped inside 3 months.

They came back without a parade, which suited a branch that measures success by the absence of events, and absence doesn’t televise. Tacoma’s two-day disappearance remains the most famous single episode of the whole mine war of 2003, retold in every story about animals in uniform since. The men who felt their way past a live cargo in zero visibility still come second in the telling to a dolphin.

Nobody in the branch has ever bothered to correct it.