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What is it about trying to figure out a sound when you're alone in your bed?
Noises multiply mysteriously.
Or lurk around corners.
Can you even trust that you heard anything at all?
U.S. State Department Building, Washington, D.C., August 9, 2017.
Steve Dorsey from CBS News.
Hi, Steve.
Hi. Just a quick change in topic.
Can you tell us about the incidents that have been going on in Havana affecting U.S. government workers there?
Yes. So we are certainly aware of what has happened there.
Give me one second here.
It was the first summer of the first Trump administration.
Reporters have been spending a lot of time in this stifling press room.
Now, something seems to be going on in Havana, Cuba.
We take this very seriously.
What is this?
An NBC journalist asks, what is this?
This incident. This incident.
And that's what we're calling it.
We don't know exactly what...
Since 2016, you don't know what this incident is?
What this requires is providing medical examinations to these people initially when they started reporting what I will just call symptoms.
Until that afternoon, it had been a closely held secret that in late 2016, in Cuba, American CIA agents and diplomats began to hear a sound they called the thing.
When they heard the sound, they felt a strange pressure inside their heads.
And then they started to get sick.
The thing seemed to be attacking them.
News reports sounded like science fiction.
Embassy staff complaining of headaches, of nausea, of dizziness, of hearing loss.
They say this was brought on by these blaring, grinding noises.
It seems to have been inside or outside the homes, or if it was some sort of sound weapon fired from outside into inside.
A recording of the otherworldly sound was posted on Twitter.
At the time, we were on an all-consuming deadline for a podcast about an unsolved murder in West Cork, Ireland.
But we were pulled in by this mystery sound.
There was an audiograph, visualising the sound waves.
I remember playing it over and over, gazing at the spikes, not really sure what I was meant to be looking for.
The comments were full of jokes.
Maybe it's an alien life form trying to communicate.
A new piece by Yoko Ono.
A ray gun.
Only that last one wasn't a joke.
A fabled weapon, dreamt of by the Americans and Russians for more than a century.
Had someone finally figured out how to fire invisible bullets?
A story took shape.
This was a new weapon, deployed by an old enemy.
And this thing that became known as Havana Syndrome spread around the world,
infiltrating embassies on every continent, afflicting hundreds.
American agents were falling over, blacking out, losing the ability to ever work again.
Cases were identified in multiple other countries.
Russia, Austria, Colombia, Serbia, India, Vietnam, the US and the UK.
The problem was, no one could find the weapon.
Doubt crept in.
If you put a lot of pieces of evidence, it gives the appearance of a solid story.
But once you start seeing if they do fit together, they don't.
Most of these guys are intelligence operators in Cuba.
Intelligence people engage in mendacity all the time.
Just read any John Le Carre novel and you'll see.
So, we're going to believe those guys?
Come on.
Who's patient zero?
Hey.
Hey, Sam.
Hey, man. How are you?
No, no, no. We're good, man. How are you doing?
Patient zero.
He's a British-American, former CIA agent.
We met through a source on an encrypted messaging app called Wicca.
To prove his identity, he sent a photo of himself standing with Mike Pompeo,
director of the CIA at the time.
Pompeo is presenting him with the exceptional service medallion
in recognition of what happened to him in Cuba.
It's like the CIA version of a purple heart.
They give it to agents who were injured in the field.
The CIA once treated him like a hero.
Since then, things have become a lot more complicated.
Today, he's at the center of a contested reality.
To fellow sufferers, he's a whistleblower,
refusing to allow his government to sweep an ongoing national security threat under the rug.
For the people who dismiss Havana Syndrome as a myth,
this man is that myth's creator.
He uses an alias, Adam, as in the first man.
He was the first spy in Cuba to speak up,
to come forward with this story of a mysterious energy,
so far undetectable, somehow on the attack.
Yeah, it's easy to get in your own head sometimes and think that
maybe this isn't real.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe this is psych.
Maybe I am crazy.
But that's gaslighting.
And they've done that to us for years.
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
I'm Sam Bungie.
I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is Episode 1, Psychological Fortitude.
When Adam first heard the thing, he was alone in his apartment,
three miles back from the glorious Havana seafront.
The Cubans control what houses the US Embassy can rent.
So they control the entire environment.
Adam's place was in a modest neighbourhood of whitewashed apartment buildings.
This was his first posting as a field agent,
and he was the new kid on the block.
I wasn't in one of the Cuban McMansions, unfortunately.
I wish I was.
Some of my colleagues got that.
I got the short end of the stick, and so I got this little crap hole.
It didn't matter.
It did what I needed it to do.
It was Christmas 2016, and most of the staff at the embassy
had gone home to spend it with family in America.
On the evening of December 29th,
Adam was on his bed watching a sitcom on his laptop.
That's when he first got the notion that something was wrong.
All the dogs started barking at once,
and then a loud sound kind of just came into the room,
just really filled the room.
It felt like my head was in a vice,
and someone was just, like, turning it.
This excruciating ear pain,
this jarring, disorienting pain.
Adam got out his phone
and started texting his brother back home in the US.
My head feels like it's going to explode.
My head is fucking spinning.
And then it just ramped up to a level where I started blacking out.
Then that tunnel started kicking in,
and I realized that if I went out in this,
I didn't know if I'd come back from it.
He rolled off the side of his bed and let himself drop to the floor.
He wanted to get out of his bedroom.
Something was present fully in that room,
but was only in that room.
He managed to make his way downstairs
and spent the night on the sofa.
And was in quite a lot of pain.
I didn't really sleep that night.
I can't tell you how happy I was to see the sun coming up.
That morning, Adam headed straight to the US Embassy
to get a medical check-up.
I want to rule out natural occurrences.
And he's like, well, you didn't have a stroke.
What's going on?
And I explained to him the sound
and how it was uncomfortable and the pain.
And he goes, well, that happened to me about a month ago.
I go, shit, okay.
Well, I feel a little less crazy.
You know, no one wants to come forward with a story like this.
You know, what happened?
And he tells me his whole story.
The doctor himself?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't want to say his name,
but he was the Embassy Medical Officer.
What did he say had happened to him?
Compared to what happened to him?
So with him, he'd been home with his girlfriend at the time.
They'd been watching TV downstairs
and a very loud sound filled up their living room
and was very uncomfortable.
He went outside and looked around
and that seemed to have stopped at that point.
But he hadn't really thought anything more of it
because it wasn't necessarily painful for him.
It was more uncomfortable and loud.
And so I asked his permission.
I'm like, well, can I go and tell your story to the RSO,
the regional security officer
who's in charge of security for all American diplomats.
He goes, sure, that's fine.
So I went upstairs to see him
and as it progressed the story,
you could see him kind of having this little realisation
happen in his face.
He goes, that happened to me.
My wife was very sensitive to noise
and she was screaming on the other side of the house
and whatever was going on.
And I go, well, I think we've got a problem now.
We reached out to both officials for their stories.
The RSO didn't want to talk.
The medical officer we didn't hear back from.
But Adam's saying there were now three people in the embassy
sharing experiences of the same mysterious sound.
The others may have had little choice
but to shrug it off as a curiosity.
But as a trained spy in Cuba,
Adam navigated a different realm
and he was already connecting dots.
From an intelligence standpoint,
the Cubans are pound for pound
probably one of the best services in the world.
Russia's the drunk frat boy.
You know, they kick your door and punch you in the face.
China will pick your pocket
and then steal your social security number
and run up credit card debt.
The Cubans do both
and then make you think that it never happened.
What does a poor Caribbean island nation
want with such a world-class spy operation?
Well, it has a lot to do with the fact
that America has been obsessed
with trying to defeat its red neighbour.
Ever since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959,
America shut Cuba out of the global economy
and secretly used the CIA
to try to overthrow the government,
dreaming up literally hundreds of plots to kill Castro.
Even JFK conceded it made America look,
quote,
slightly demented.
Yet somehow the regime Castro set up is still there,
an itch that America just can't scratch.
Cuba's own intelligence service
confused and countered CIA infiltration
by learning from the best,
the KGB.
According to one senior defector,
Soviet intelligence had a particular MO.
They wanted to change the way Americans perceive reality.
We were there from 1988 to 90.
We discovered that the Cubans
had an amazing double agent programme.
This is former CIA agent Suzanne Matthews.
They would throw their officers at us
and allow their officers to be recruited.
So there was a huge expose right before we moved to Cuba
because most of the agents that the agency had
were double agents.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down
and the world moved on.
But Cuba and America did not move on.
They were frozen in time.
The Cold War mindset baked into the relationship.
Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst.
Everybody who's chosen for a post like Havana,
whether you're State Department, CIA, or anything else,
you should be vetted for your psychological fortitude
and your ability to rise above things
and not overreact and not see shadows that aren't there.
Adam can't tell us much about his recruitment or training.
But the CIA must have seen qualities in him
that showed he was cut out for the job.
He's medically retired now
on account of whatever happened to him in Cuba.
He lives on a property in the US
where he built a home shooting range.
This is the sound of Adam doing target practice.
He sent me the video not long ago.
He's wearing ear defenders
and emptying a clip from a large pistol
dinging the little steel targets with every bullet.
The CIA can train you to use lethal force like this,
but what they can't teach,
and what they apparently saw in Adam,
is a willingness to use it.
In order for my job,
you get way more additional psych screening
to make sure you can handle
what the Cuban government is about to throw at you.
There's a profile they have found
that works psychologically for certain roles,
especially for my role.
I think they want people right on the line of sociopathic
or the ability to get to that line if they need to.
This is probably why I was getting up my job
and why I got hired, frankly.
But you're dealing with life and death,
and you need to be able to make
pretty cold, calculated decisions
when it comes down to it.
You can't be emotional and get all upset.
There are mind games that go on.
You need to understand that mind games happen.
That's Fulton Armstrong again.
He was posted to Cuba back
during the Clinton administration.
I had headlights smashed on my car
and two flat tires at a time numerous times,
and yelling at me and my daughter and my wife
when we're taking Sunday afternoon walks.
Yelling?
Yeah, yeah.
What would they yell?
Threats.
They would drive by and wave their fists like this.
Harassment happened,
and inappropriate stuff, undiplomatic stuff,
and we did stuff to them up here.
He means to his opposite numbers in Washington.
We would do fun things like
Cuban diplomat would go into a store
and somebody would come up
and accuse them of shoplifting
just for harassment.
They would have to explain themselves
and be embarrassed in front of other people
and hustled around and things like that.
That's part of life.
Obviously part of life if you happen to be a spy.
That life is a long way from where Adam had been
just three years earlier,
working as a cop in an American seaside town.
When Adam first agreed to meet,
I pictured some furtive encounter
in a crowded public place.
Instead, he invited me to his parents' house
in the north of England where Adam was born.
Oh, you all right?
We can close that door if you want.
Sure, OK, great.
I don't think I really imagined secret agents
even having a life before they became spies.
Yet here I was in Adam's parents' living room
looking at his family photographs.
Yeah, that's music, huh?
Wow, there you are, with your own cruiser and everything.
In the photograph, Adam looks tall and stocky
with a boyish open face.
Adam's family moved to the US for work
when he was still a kid.
He went through American high school
and then took a job in the summers
with the hometown police force.
There was no dramatic tap on the shoulder
from a CIA recruiter.
Adam was just in his mid-twenties and restless.
PD was great and I loved it to death,
but my goal was to find my limits.
It's always been to find my limits.
Like, that's why I've done everything I've ever done.
So he started carpet bombing
law enforcement agencies with his resume.
I was just looking for a different job
in this one call and I was like,
well, that'll be different.
Adam got called for an interview
with the CIA in Boston.
He'd felt like the odd one out
among the new prospects,
like the only one who hadn't come
from an elite college
or a high-end law firm.
There weren't many people
that were like me,
kind of more blue-collary.
But he says he impressed his assessors,
breezing through several rounds
of interviews and psych examinations.
After I got hired,
you can meet with the docs
and basically go through your hiring packet
while you're testing and shit.
Adam says he did well on his skills tests.
In particular, he was off the charts
for spatial reasoning,
which apparently can mean
you're gifted at anything
from map reading
to efficiently packing a suitcase.
If you're in the CIA,
it helps you figure your way
out of tight spots.
Adam's mum confirmed
this is something he's pretty good at.
This is the one that keeps life entertaining
all the time.
Oh yeah, even before this.
Oh yeah.
We won't go into all that.
What?
What do you mean?
I do adventure stuff,
you know,
go climbing Nepal.
Back when he was in
the small-town police force,
Adam had found an outlet
in overseas travel.
He saved up to go on long trips
during the winter months
and kept searching
for more extreme experiences.
He persevered through bouts
of dysentery in Hungary and India,
a case of pulmonary edema
while mountain climbing
in the Himalayas.
Australia.
Yeah.
In the decompression chamber
because of the dive initially.
It's a long story.
Like the climb,
the dive went wrong.
We got washed out to sea,
floated off into shipping lanes.
These experiences find me,
or I find them.
Always, always.
It doesn't seem like a pattern,
but when you put it all in one go,
it does, I guess.
Adam didn't tell his parents
he joined the CIA,
not straight away.
Then, shortly before he's due
to head off to a secret camp
for training,
he broke the news
over Thanksgiving.
His mum was not thrilled.
I said,
oh,
I'm so happy about that,
you know, but...
Yeah, you weren't very afraid.
No, I was...
Why weren't you happy
about it when you heard
what he was up to?
I suppose you're always
looking out for your child,
aren't you?
Obviously, you're worried.
You know,
it's not a straight job
where you go nine to five,
you go home,
and you're done.
A lot can happen
in between times.
From a parental point of view,
that was my anxiety.
Not that I didn't think
he was capable of doing it,
because from all his exploits
previously,
he's always came back
amazingly,
smelling of roses.
Adam says his appetite
for extreme experiences
was another thing
that made him stand out
to the CIA.
What I think they liked
about me was
I was willing to go
anywhere in the world
by myself,
and I did it for fun.
It was just one last thing
they had to worry about with me.
They knew that I would be fine
wherever they dropped me off.
It was just pick a place.
It was my husband's
favourite assignment
and one of the worst for me.
Suzanne Matthews
worked for the CIA in Cuba
under diplomatic cover
alongside her husband,
Jason Matthews,
who later became a writer
of popular spy thrillers
like Red Sparrow.
They were posted there
together in the 80s
as what the agency calls
a tandem couple.
I mean,
it takes a special
type of person.
Not everybody
wanted one of these
assignments.
In a place like Havana,
there's no such thing
as not work.
You know,
you're on all the time
because you're being
followed all the time.
We had constant
harassing surveillance.
Suzanne says
they might return home
to find their dog
had been put in a closet
or come down in the morning
to find a cigarette butt
in the ashtray
in their living room.
And that sends
a message,
you know,
that we own you.
You know,
this is our house,
not your house.
Any socialising
happened in designated spaces
with other spies
and diplomats
in the tropical heat
and mostly
in tennis whites.
Canadians had
a tennis court,
so we played
a lot of tennis there
with the Brits
and the Canadians.
And then there was
this Diplo club
outside of Havana
with some clay courts
and a swimming pool.
You know,
your world is compacted.
Suzanne says
you could always spot
surveillance at the Diplo club.
They even followed them
to a getaway
at a Cuban beach resort.
On that trip,
they pranked her husband
by approaching him
about joining their side.
We think it was more
just harassment.
They just wanted
to ruin our vacation.
These attempts
at normal life
could be punctured
any time,
sometimes by events
they couldn't explain.
We did have
some weird experiences
in Cuba.
It was the weirdest thing.
We had a party
and someone picked up
a glass to drink out of it
and it just exploded
in their hand.
Wow.
Yeah.
What did you make of it?
Well,
we didn't know.
We thought,
OK,
so maybe
it's cheap glass.
So was it
the reaction
between the ice
and the glass
and the heat?
Well,
it was never that hot.
But like exploded,
not cracked.
No,
no,
it just exploded.
Just this weird
exploding glass.
There are lots
of strange stories
on the internet
about exploding glasses.
It even happened
once to our editor
in his house
in Shepherd's Bush.
But something
that may strike you
as odd at home
can suggest something
much more perilous
on hostile ground.
For a CIA agent
in Havana,
it was as if the Cubans
might be responsible
for anything.
And it simply added
to that disorientating
sense of what lay
beyond the confines
of the Diplo Club
or the embassy
or the ambassador's
residence,
a world that was
uncontrollable,
uncanny,
malevolent.
It's hard not
to imagine
feeling very
unsettled by that.
Did you ever
wonder if you
were cut out
for it?
Oh, yes.
Yes, always.
You know,
because the stress
is enormous
and you have to be able
to deal with that stress.
There were people
who would freak out
and, you know,
there's no reason
to freak out.
That's Michael Palmley
who headed up
for slimmed-down
US presence in Cuba
during the mid-2000s.
I mean,
at the end of the day,
when your tour of duty
is going to end,
you'll leave.
Then you can tell,
you know,
your grandchildren
all sorts of stories
about the kind
of experiences you had.
But in the meantime,
that's your job.
But his wife,
Marie-Catherine,
who was in Havana
with him,
says the eavesdropping
could place a burden
on relationships.
You couldn't even
have an argument
in private.
You know,
in a couple,
a normal couple,
you have more
than one
every six months.
They would put,
things are put
strategically,
you know.
It's inhibiting
to have that
under your bed.
Did you find stuff?
We never looked.
Don't go looking.
And as Michael says,
they'll replace it
and the next time
you won't know
where it is.
I used to say
that the only place
that I could have
a bug-free conversation
was in the surf
at a beach,
you know,
away from the shoreline.
In the sea.
Because you knew
that they were listening.
He says that part
of the job
as head of the embassy
involved overseeing
the well-being
of his staff,
keeping an eye out
for anyone
not coping so well.
Like the time
someone came to him
convinced that their dog
had been deliberately poisoned.
The person had that reaction
to their environment,
then you've got to respect that.
And we talked about it
and he came to the conclusion
that it might have been
an accident
or maybe the dog
was just getting old.
It wasn't necessarily
that the neighbors
poisoned him.
And was that your conclusion?
I didn't know.
But I wasn't going to jump
to the suddenly paranoid conclusion.
Paranoia is not a good thing.
And it was understandable
that people could
become paranoid.
It's not as though danger
wasn't out there.
Even paranoid people
still have enemies.
The harassment
was immediate.
In the little over two months
that Adam had been in Havana,
there'd been lots of incidents,
like the run-in he had
on his way into work.
You know,
they ran me off the road.
This was a busy
main thoroughfare
going into Havana,
onto the Malecon,
and it was completely
dead that day.
Which I was driving
down that road going,
this is really odd.
There's usually lots of cars
on this road.
Sideswiped off the road.
Blew up both wheels.
And you're like,
okay, that makes sense.
Got it.
So you think they
kind of shut down the road
in order to do this
thing to you?
Yeah.
The Cuban's like,
well, could have been an accident.
And you can't prove it.
So it's just a data point.
Another time he found
the internet cables
had been cut
outside his apartment.
And one evening
he came home
to find his neatly
folded shirts
had been pulled
out of the drawers,
scrunched up
in the corner
of his bedroom
and covered in urine.
There are other stories.
The diplomat
who found his mouthwash
had been replaced
with urine.
A colleague
who told Adam
she had found
a scorpion
sellotaped
to her pyjamas.
You wonder what
the point of all this was.
Maybe the idea was
just to put the CIA
agents off their game
to unnerve them,
make them less effective
in whatever they were there to do
by keeping them on edge.
Adam recalls these experiences
with a wry amusement.
He believed he was
particularly suited
to dealing with
the kind of surveillance
and harassment
that had rattled
former agents
like Suzanne Matthews.
He seemed to think of it
as something like
the good-natured
hazing rituals
for a club
that he was excited
to be accepted into.
It was,
I don't know,
I don't know how to describe it
because it's a bit
of a twisted mentality
for most people
to understand that
it was fun.
He says there was a man
who would sit
at the end of his street
all night
in a plastic chair
monitoring Adam
and the other Americans
in the neighborhood.
Adam made a habit
of putting his bins out
in the early hours
just to startle the guy.
Fuck it,
you've got to have
some fun with it, man.
They're fucking with you.
You've got to fuck back
a little bit.
It's no wonder
they came after me
when they did.
That morning
after he first heard
the sound invade his bedroom,
Adam had wanted
to get checked over
by the medical officer.
He hadn't had much
of a plan beyond that.
But then
the embassy's medical officer
and the security officer
both reported
hearing sounds themselves.
I go,
well,
I think we have to meet
with the ambassador
and tell him
what's going on.
It appeared to me
something had happened,
somebody was doing something
and we needed to get
to the bottom of it.
This is Jeff De Laurentiis,
the former US ambassador
to Cuba.
What would your instinct
be to do?
Is it something
that you investigate further?
Do you feel like you need
to tell Washington quickly?
Both.
We immediately informed
Washington and immediately
tried to figure out
what was happening.
And how do you figure out
what's happening?
That I'm not going
to talk about.
De Laurentiis
has been fairly tight-lipped
about the meeting
with Adam in his office
that morning.
He's a seasoned diplomat
who had been posted
to Cuba several times before.
He was a heavyweight
and that was precisely
why President Obama
himself had wanted him
in the job.
I had already been
an ambassador at the UN
and I think part of the reason
someone like myself
was sent down,
apart maybe from
the Cuban experience,
was that they also wanted
to send a signal
that we were sending
someone at a higher level
I guess,
in the hopes that
the relationship
would begin to change.
There's a period
after Castro's revolution
where the US had
no presence at all
in Cuba.
The huge waterfront
modernist American
embassy building
opened right before
Castro seized power
stood empty,
a seven-story reminder
of the failed relationship.
Over the years,
public figures
of many strikes
had tried to make
a difference,
but the territory
was politically treacherous.
Cuba was not a place
to touch.
It had burned
many a career
because it was
very controversial.
The relationship
was controversial.
It had a very strong
domestic element to it.
By domestic,
he means in the US,
where anti-Castro
Cuban exiles
pressure Washington
to remain hostile
towards Castro,
hoping to one day
take their country back.
In the late 1970s,
President Jimmy Carter
made some progress
with Cuba,
and a small number
of American diplomats
began to rattle around
an embassy building
that wasn't formerly
an embassy.
Then there was
a change of administration
and everything halted,
and so those who were
at the point of the spear
of pushing for
that particular opening
found themselves
in a difficult situation,
and that cycle
repeated itself.
De Laurentiis
had been hired
to help manage
the most significant
progress in relations
since Castro's revolution
in 1959.
But what he was hearing
from Adam and the RSO
in his office
on the seventh floor
of the embassy building
sounded concerning.
And he said to me,
he goes,
if it happens again,
come to my house,
you know,
come to the residence,
and I'll send a message
to them that
we know what's going on,
we're not playing.
So we go, okay.
Adam drafted a report
for De Laurentiis
to send back
to the State Department
in Washington.
And wrote a cable
to his own higher-ups
at the CIA.
I wasn't asking them
to do anything.
I wasn't asking for help.
I wasn't asking for anything
at the time.
I was just going,
these are the facts
of what happened.
Be aware.
We'll keep you updated
sort of thing.
And then it was
the holiday weekend.
Was part of you thinking,
let's see if this happens again?
No, I thought it was done.
I thought it was,
in my mind,
it was a one and done
sort of thing.
I was like,
all right, well, that's it.
You know.
I didn't think that
it would possibly happen again,
but it did.
I was on my computer
watching TV
just like I had the night before,
same time, same routine.
The first time
he'd heard the noise,
Adam lay in his bed
putting up with the sound
for as long as he could.
He didn't want
whoever was doing this
to know it was getting to him.
The whole Cuban MO
is to find what gets
under your skin
and keep doing it
for the duration
of your tour.
But now Adam
dropped the act.
That was the time
when I go,
well, you know,
I'm going to go
and figure it out.
This is when
Adam began making recordings.
I went outside
almost immediately
after hearing it.
So you're moving...
I'm moving around
my house in my backyard.
It's a typical
Saturday evening
in Havana.
Dogs barking,
neighbours chatting,
an American CIA field agent,
groping in the bushes
with a recording device.
I caught it tonight,
motherfuckers.
Staggering around
to the outside
of his bedroom window,
he registered a spike
in the sound.
It seemed as if
the sound was being
directed there
in his bedroom.
It wasn't lost on me
that those sounds
and shit and feelings
would stop quite quickly
after you go out there
with your phone
to record it.
For now,
Adam didn't want
to bother the ambassador again.
But he knew
he didn't want
to stay in his apartment.
So he crashed
at a friend's house nearby
and returned in the morning
to investigate.
When he spoke
with the guy
in the apartment above him,
a US embassy worker
who'd been at home
at the time of the attacks,
that guy remembered
hearing all those dogs
that all started
barking at once.
But as for any
mysterious ear-splitting drone,
he hadn't heard a thing.
Yet any time Adam
went back into his bedroom
to grab some clothes,
the dogs would bark
and then the sound
and strange pressure
would start up again.
Adam rode his bicycle
around the neighbourhood,
looking for what
exactly he didn't know.
But he expected
to find some kind
of smoking gun,
a dodgy-looking van
with blacked-out windows,
radar equipment,
hidden under a tarpaulin.
But things look normal.
There were some people
out and about,
but there was nothing
that I would pinpoint
as anomalous,
so I was a bit
aggravated by that.
Then again,
since Adam was living
in a fishbowl,
there was only so much
snooping around
that he could get away with.
I tried to break
into the house behind me,
but people were watching
and I just didn't want
to get arrested
by the Cuban police.
I thought it was a bad idea.
Meanwhile,
Ambassador De Laurentiis
was trying to work out
what the official
next steps should be.
I don't know whether
you have experience
of anything like this
in previous posts.
No.
But I should say
I don't think anybody has.
Because it's a very
unusual situation.
We're not talking
about petty harassment.
This is something different.
Escalation.
Yeah, sure.
Previously,
harassment in Cuba
took the form
of psychological trickery.
This was something
quite different.
These people
weren't letting air
out of tyres
or leaving cigarettes
in ashtrays.
The concern
was that they were
targeting Americans
using a state-of-the-art weapon.
There is sort of
a code of conduct
for intelligence officers
worldwide.
We know
it's the great game.
This is former CIA agent
Suzanne Matthews again.
It's like playing chess.
There's nothing physical
about it.
There's nothing violent
about it.
There is a respect
and there is a line
that you don't cross.
Adam ran things down
as far as he could.
Then he shook it off.
He tried to get back
into the mindset
of the guy who loved
being a young CIA agent
in Havana.
I was doing my job
and I was getting
a lot of praise.
He was so busy
that when he began
about a fortnight later
to display weird symptoms,
at first he didn't
even notice.
Adam says in Havana,
feeling a little off
was normal.
When you're in Havana,
like, everyone
gets sick all the time.
It's an embassy thing.
Oftentimes it's a small
space for a lot of people
and it's almost like
a daycare with kids.
People are always
fighting off illness
and sickness.
You just call it Havana.
Like, oh, that's Havana.
Anything strange
that happens,
anything weird illness
you get,
any oddity,
you're like,
oh, it's just Cuba.
Like, that's just
what everyone did.
But what was happening
to him was increasingly
hard to shake off.
By mid-January,
he was feeling woozy
and generally off
his game at work.
Adam says he would be
hit by waves of exhaustion.
Having a meal
with friends,
he'd fall asleep
at the table.
I knew that my writing
and everything
became incoherent.
I was forgetting things
that couldn't function
correctly.
He developed disturbing
problems with his balance.
When I would enter
a room with different
lighting that was dimmer,
I couldn't stay standing.
I would get these
massive, like,
vertigo spin drop
you to the floor.
Violent, violent events.
He'd felt safer
crashing at his friend's house,
but then whatever he believed
had been targeting him
seemed to find him there.
Not the sound this time,
but those same feelings
of pressure.
They felt very similar
and I'd wake up
with pools of blood
on the pillow
from coming out my nose.
Like, massive amounts of blood.
Adam started playing
the last few weeks
over in his mind,
conversations he'd had
with colleagues.
At a party one evening,
he'd run into
that medical officer
and the security official
from the embassy.
He played them
his recording
and says they agreed
it sounded very similar
to what they had heard
in their own homes.
Adam realised
he hadn't been right
for weeks,
not since that
very first night.
With the recordings
of the sound
on his phone,
he felt like he had
all the proof
that he needed.
He texted his brother
with his theory
of what was being
fired at him.
This was some kind
of ultrasonic noisemaker.
One of those things
that can make you puke
and your head cave in.
You know,
the Navy has those
on ships.
I said,
but selectively shut
through windows.
Oh yes.
So if this was brought
to light,
it would make a stir.
Adam knew the stakes
of making such a claim.
If he called this out,
he risked upending
something historic.
For the first time
since the 1960s,
America and Cuba
were speaking again.
And right now,
on the surface,
they were practically
the best of friends.
There was a great
diplomatic party going on.
And here was Adam,
the new guy,
about to switch on
the lights
and cut the music
and tell everyone
that the hosts
had spiked the punch
with poison.
Next time,
on Havana Helmet Club.
President Eisenhower
said,
that's enough.
We're leaving.
There were people
in the administration
who would have tried
to sabotage negotiations.
I used to send messages,
not saying by anybody,
but this is for Obama
and this is for Castro.
It was a sense
that the clock was ticking.
There were forces
within the Cuban government
having second thoughts
about a rapprochement
with the United States.
But being a CIA agent
in Cuba,
it's a provocation, right?
You have to understand,
if you're the only one
not putting your intelligence
offices in other countries,
then you're the only
stupid one on the block.
From BBC Radio 4,
this is Havana Helmet Club.
Listen to the latest episodes
first on BBC Sounds.
If you want to be notified
when the latest episode drops,
make sure you're subscribed
to Havana Helmet Club
on BBC Sounds
and have push notifications
turned on.
Havana Helmet Club
is written and presented
by Sam Bunke
and Jennifer Ford
and edited by Guy Crossman.
Our story editor
is Mike Olive
and our producer
is Larry Ryan.
Original music
by Tom Pintons.
Sound design
by Meryn Royards.
Additional sound design
and mix
by Peregrine Andrews.
Commissioning editor
for the BBC
is Dylan Haskins.
Assistant commissioning editors
are Sarah Green
and Natasha Johansson.
Havana Helmet Club
is a Yarn production
for BBC Radio 4
and BBC Sounds.
In Northern Ireland
from the late 70s
to the early 90s
the IRA killed
over 40 alleged informers.
Men and women
accused of passing information
to the police
and the British Army.
But the man
who often found
tortured and sometimes
killed these people
on behalf of the IRA
was himself an informer.
A secret British Army agent
with the code name
Steak Knife.
These were British agents
but they had to find
other agents.
Just how was one man
allowed to lead
a double life for so long?
It's not like James Bond.
It's not a black and white situation.
When lies are still being told
to this day
who do you believe?
I wouldn't even know
where to start
and I'm with the IRA.
Steak Knife.
Listen now
on BBC Sounds.