The Great Calamari Caper of ‘83

Picture it: Langley, 1983. The air is thick with stale coffee, paranoia, and the faint scent of Brut aftershave. Some fresh-faced analyst from Yale, probably named Chad, slaps a satellite photo onto his superior’s desk. It’s a grainy black-and-white shot from the brand-new spy satellite launched by the fiercely neutral—and vaguely geological—Sultanate of Upper Djarum, bought for a price that would make a Saudi prince blush. The photo shows a Soviet Delta III submarine docked at Polyarny. But draped over its flank is… something. A tentacle? A new kind of naval hose designed by a sadist? The shlong of a leviathan? The CIA’s finest minds, men who could find a communist in a phone booth, were stumped. Was it Project KRAKEN? A biological weapon? Some new kind of Kremlin-approved kink? They had no fucking clue.

Naturally, the Agency couldn’t just *ask*. That would be admitting they were mystified by what looked like calamari foreplay. So, in their infinite wisdom, they dispatched the destroyer USS *Somers* to go have a poke around the Barents Sea. Meanwhile, the Soviets—who, it turns out, were having the exact same “what the absolute fuck is that?” conversation over at the Lubyanka, because the Sultan was a magnificent bastard playing both sides—were royally pissed. Not only was their top-secret sub being ogled by a foreign satellite, but it looked like it was being molested by an octopus. It was a matter of national pride. They sent out the frigate *Bodryy* (“Spry,” which is just a hilarious name for a boat) to tell the Yanks to piss off.

The resulting naval “skirmish” was less *The Hunt for Red October* and more two bald guys fighting over a comb. The American captain, a man whose chin was in a passionate long-term relationship with his neck, radioed the *Bodryy*. According to a heavily redacted transcript I *definitely* didn’t lift from a burn bag, the exchange went something like this: “Be advised, Soviet vessel, we have questions regarding your… aquatic ordnance.” The Russian captain, whose blood was 80% potato vodka, allegedly replied, “Is none of your business, imperialist pig-dog. Our hoses are the envy of the world.” For forty-eight hours, they nudged each other around in the freezing water like hormonal walruses, firing a few warning shots that tragically spooked a pod of migrating belugas, before both sides got bored and went home.

The whole fiasco was quietly buried, but the ripples were magnificent. A new CIA department was born: the Division of Unidentified Marine Phenomena, or DUMP. It became a bureaucratic black hole, a place where moron agents were sent to write speculative reports on mermaids with missiles. Its annual budget, I shit you not, eventually exceeded the GDP of Bolivia. The incident also gave rise to a classic piece of spook slang. For decades after, whenever a situation was hopelessly, inexplicably fucked, some grizzled case officer would lean back, light a cigarette, and mutter, “Yeah, but is it a tentacle?” No one ever found out what was in that photo, by the way. The original was “lost” in a suspicious fire at the Djarum National Archives, along with the Sultan’s prized collection of German pornography.