A Russian Navy ship with a fishy past is currently sailing around the eastern Mediterranean. Described as an oceanographic research ship, outside observers believe the Yantar is actually a spy ship using mini-submersibles to conduct cloak and dagger work on the bottom of the sea.

The Yantar is a Russian Navy ship that joined the fleet in 2015. Officially described as a "special purpose ship" or "oceanographic vessel," the ship is operated by the Russian Navy's Main Directorate of Underwater Research, which is thought to control Russia's undersea espionage efforts.

Yantar is designed to act as a mothership to mini-submarines, with hangars for storing manned and unmanned submersibles and cranes for lowering them into the water. While that's useful for legitimate scientific research, the reality is that the ship is often spotted lingering above the undersea cables that carry data across the ocean floor, linking entire countries and even continents in the global telecommunications network.

Yantar recovering a crashed MiG-29 on the seabed. H.I. Sutton

In 2015, just as U.S.- Cuban relations were thawing, Yantar was sighted off the coast of Cuba at Guantanamo Bay, where one undersea cable comes to shore. According to journalist H.I. Sutton, author of , in late 2016 it was off the coast of Syria, hovering over yet another undersea cable, when a mysterious Internet outage struck the country. The ship has also operated off the east coast of US and Canada, near Portugal, in the Mediterranean, and in the Persian Gulf.

Yantar is host to two deep-diving Russian-made submersibles, a 3-man submersible named Rus and a second vessel named Consul. Both can dive to a depth of 20,000 feet. Both have spherical, pressurized inner steel hulls to withstand the immense pressures of the deep and hydraulic manipulators for interacting with objects on the seafloor. Sutton says the Yantar might also employ, "a Canadian-supplied deep diving system system called Deep Worker. These carry one or two people and can operate at depths of 600 meters. In addition to the manned submersibles aboard there is at least one type of large working ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) which we don't know very much about. "

What could Yantar be up to? The manned submersibles and ROVs are an ideal platform for locating undersea cables and splicing them to add a hardware tap. Like a wiretap placed on a phone line, splicing a cable and adding a tap allows the tapper to receive all communications being passed through the cable. The practice was invented by the U.S. intelligence community, which used the specially outfitted submarine USS Halibut to install taps on Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. Known as Operation Ivy Bells, the taps allowed U.S. intelligence to intercept Soviet military communications in the area, potentially giving advance warning of impending attack.

Submersible AS-37 "Russia". H.I. Sutton

Right now, according to Sutton, Yantar is currently operating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is currently sitting right where an undersea cable links Israel and Cyprus.

Cable splicing (and tap removal, known as "delousing") isn't the only thing the Russian ship does. "Yantar has been observed using her deep sea vehicles to investigate Russian Navy fighter jets which have crashed into the Mediterranean while flying combat missions over Syria," Sutton told Popular Mechanics. "Russia lost two jets in 2016, an Su-33 Flanker and a MiG-29 Fulcrum. It is possible that she is recovering sensitive equipment from the wrecks, and that she will also be able to detect if other countries have also visited them."

Special thanks to Yörük Işık of [link href='http://bosphorusobserver.com' 0='data-tracking-id="recirc-text-link"' link_updater_label='external' target='_blank']The Bosphorus Observer

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

for use of his photography in this article.