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One of the things that endears you to Adam is that when he's telling stories, he doesn't cast himself as the hero.
He'll happily tell you about having to get rescued while mountain climbing, or accidentally drifting out into shipping lanes while scuba diving.
Adam once lived to be in thrilling situations like this.
It's why he loved being a CIA field agent, and he wasn't phased when things didn't go to plan.
At one point down there, I went to photograph this military parade, and I couldn't figure out this route.
And I ended up marching with the Cuban Communist Party, down through the streets, with Raul Castro up in the stands, 100 metres ahead.
And I'm like, I'm in this parade.
I can just picture him, head darting in all directions, looking for a way to get out.
You can't turn around because there's just walls of people marching.
And now I'm stuck being ported along by these groups.
It's like something from the Pink Panther or something, but you're suddenly in the Communist Party.
Oh my God.
I eventually got out before passing the main tranche, and I went home.
I was like, we're going to call that one a fail.
But those are the sort of things that would destroy me today.
Just the overwhelm of people and sounds and movement, and trying to stay upright.
Right. So, yeah, I know my limitations now.
Memories like this remind Adam of what he has lost.
The building, the job, I miss it. I miss it terribly.
I had met my people.
I knew the first time that I went down there for some of my testing, I was like, this is where I belong.
Adam says that when he arrived in Havana after three years training, he was in peak physical condition.
He tires easily these days.
He wears a weighted vest to help with his balance and goes everywhere with a support dog.
You're in a dark room in the middle of the day, and, you know, you start looking at your life and you go,
how did I go from the pinnacle of where I could be in my job, physically, mentally, all of these things, to this?
And, you know, I was alone.
When others started to get sick, Adam gave himself a new mission.
He brought everyone together.
So, yeah, we're the Havana Helmet Club.
That's what we called each other.
Like the tinfoil hat brigade, a sort of two fingers up at the people who didn't believe them.
I made stickers and I handed them out to people that I deemed worthy in the club.
The sticker design is like the Havana Club rum label,
white writing over a red circle with a sketch of a landmark Havana statue on top.
Because if you weren't laughing, you were crying, you know, and it cheered people up and we gave them to the closest people to us,
like the doctors and the people that supported us.
So, in my mind, if you had a sticker, you could show them to the others and you'd be all right, you know, you could trust them.
Adam may not be as physically fit as he once was,
but in his pursuit of answers for him and his fellow victims, he's still a force to be reckoned with.
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
I'm Sam Bungie.
I'm Jennifer Ford and this is episode three.
This looks real.
In the six weeks since the first incident in his apartment,
Adam says he'd been sending regular cables back to headquarters.
They charted the increasingly severe symptoms among him and a growing number of victims.
In all that time, he says, the CIA took no action.
That is, until Adam heard from a guy we'll call Paul Andrews.
Andrews arranged to meet me on a street corner outside an Apple store.
Your destination is on the right.
Huh.
As I drove by, I spotted him scanning the faces of the passing crowd.
He had a folder under his arm and was standing perfectly straight.
He looked like a serious man, the type you'd want looking into a tricky problem.
He was the new guy on the CIA's medical team when the situation began to unfold in Havana.
People were very busy in my office.
They had lots on their plate.
Andrews was scrolling through general traffic, the CIA's central message system,
when one cable in particular caught his eye.
There was a communique from Cuba and it related to unusual health events or something that needs
to be investigated.
I had no idea initially what all the symptoms meant.
I couldn't say.
Andrews was troubled by the cable, but he says he learned that others in his office
didn't share his level of concern.
They were saying, oh, this is just stress.
These are a bunch of little girls they need to man up.
We don't have time for this.
We need to nip it in the bud.
It's just psychological, things of that sort.
This was before they'd ever talked to him, before they'd had them examined, before anything.
How did you witness that?
Was that in conversation?
In conversation.
Andrews was an occupational health doctor.
He'd worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, specialising in gauging emerging threats.
You don't just dismiss things.
That's playing a statistical game and eventually you lose.
Initially, Andrews got the go-ahead to take this on himself.
No one told me to stop.
And he tried to make up for lost time.
He gathered key people who knew about Cuba, weapons, illness outbreaks.
So there were many paths to go through involving health, involving acoustics and other disciplines to try and interrogate the entire situation.
And he made some calls to find somewhere to bring Adam.
Andrews knew he'd need a specialist.
He got clearance to look for help outside the CIA.
He called up medical centres in Washington and then beyond.
The same name kept coming up.
Someone who may be able to handle this strange and delicate situation.
A doctor who not only specialised in hearing and balance issues, but also who crucially used to work in the military and still had security clearance.
A doctor working out of Miami called Michael Hoffer.
The call that I got was,
Dr. Hoffer, yes.
This is the State Department.
We have a problem.
And that kind of a call I had never gotten in my 21 years in the military.
And here I am in the civilian world now getting that phone call.
Andrews couldn't say much more over the phone.
Not even that he actually worked for the CIA.
But Dr. Hoffer picked up on his sense of urgency.
I knew he wasn't just calling me because he had nothing better to do on a Friday.
I had enough information to know we had to move quickly.
That weekend, Andrews and Adam flew down to meet him.
Hoffer and his team work out of the Miller School of Medicine,
a vast complex stretching over several blocks of downtown Miami.
And they cleared their schedule for me.
When I was done with one, I got brought to the next and they were ready and waiting for me.
And so we went through hearing testing, like a calorex testing where they push hot water into ear and make you really fucking dizzy.
And then they tracked your eye movements.
I eventually did some vestibular testing with a vestibular guy.
And like, there's a lot that happened that day.
Meanwhile, a small handful of those other Americans from the Havana Embassy who'd heard the same sound as Adam
were quietly flown to Miami and were put through the same process.
Hoffer began to see a pattern.
And then we saw testing abnormalities that were universally pointing to one part of the balance system.
How do you see that?
It presents in individuals as feeling off balance, having difficulty maintaining stability.
Right now, you and I are dedicating about 5% of our mental energy to staying upright.
Imagine if that's 95%.
Imagine how poorly you process everything else you have to process.
Imagine that by 3 or 4 in the afternoon, you're totally knocked out and fatigued.
OK.
But it's something that you kind of gather through doing a series of tests.
It's not something that you can kind of look into their ear and see.
You can't look into the ear and see.
But we have two different balance tests that very clearly and objectively show these abnormalities.
The patients also scored poorly on the tests for eye motion.
By the way, it's a very important cognitive skill to be able to follow direction and move your eyes a certain distance.
We're not talking about, you know, having to do 100 push-ups.
It's your eye movement.
If you can't do it well, that's a problem.
Hoffer didn't know what he was looking at.
Rather, it felt like something he almost recognised.
Hoffer came to specialise in hearing and balance problems when he was dealing with battlefield injuries during two tours in Iraq.
What he saw in the Havana patients looked familiar.
Many of the symptoms were like head injury individuals.
Hoffer wanted to bring in someone with different brain expertise.
A doctor who worked in the same hospital, who he regularly consulted on brain injury patients.
Dr. Hoffer called me up and said, I need you to tell me whether you think this is real.
Bonnie Levin is a neuropsychologist, which in this case means she would test for things like language and memory.
The first person that walked in, I evaluated, and he said, what do you think?
And I go, I think this is real, but I don't know what it is.
Can you send me a few more?
And they were shaken and very anxious.
I think not knowing if something was going on was contributing to that.
And their complaints were vague and had these odd-looking signs and symptoms.
There's like a fog that's, you can't see your way to the other side as easily and quickly.
And one person described to me that when he went to get in his car to put the key in, he couldn't put the key in the car.
He was so disoriented.
Levin says it's not that the patients couldn't complete tasks.
They weren't failing across the board.
But the results were wide of the mark for a highly trained CIA agent.
It was a reduced level of functioning.
It was below expectancy.
And it bothered them because in some cases they had high-level responsibility and that was going to suffer because of it.
So in answer to Hoffer's question, was this real?
Levin certainly didn't think they were making it up.
You know, I've been doing this for 40 years.
I see people all the time that are malingering or people that are exaggerating or people that have a combination of both.
An injury where there's also a great deal of emotion on top of that.
But this looked different.
I was very concerned from the beginning.
The other important thing to understand is at that point, the individual thought this was going to be a self-limited problem.
That's Dr. Hoffer again.
They thought they were just sick and they were going to go back to Havana and be fine.
So they had no reason to want to embellish or anything.
In fact, they had every reason to want to try to perform better than they should.
So they, you know, get back up in the fight.
But what had caused these symptoms?
A head injury usually involves some force colliding with the victim, like a steering wheel or a boxer's glove.
The Havana patients had not had a blow to the head.
But again, Hoffer was reminded of cases from the battlefield.
I had studied blast injury.
So I was very familiar with the concept of not having to be actually struck in the head to have a head injury.
Hoffer's talking about injuries that can result from exposure to the waves of pressure caused by an explosion.
We started discovering early on that the number one complaint they had was balance disorders.
So I was somewhat satisfied that this looked a little like a blast injury.
Somewhat satisfied.
As in a brain injury caused by some invisible force.
Some things were off, but, you know, not every disorder reads the textbook.
We thought this was MTBI.
MTBI, mild traumatic brain injury.
Which is a bit of a kick in the nuts, really, because that's not what I was expecting at all, because no one's touched me.
You know, with a TBI, you usually whack your head or you smash something.
So to get a TBI diagnosis was a bit jarring.
Adam stayed in Miami to undergo rehab at Hoffer's clinic.
When Dr. Andrews flew back to CIA headquarters, he told his colleagues that something really was going on in Havana.
He met with his superiors to report Hoffer's findings.
And how were they received?
I think at times they frustratedly would say something like, oh, it's ridiculous.
Or, wow, this is serious, or whatever.
But in terms of what they discussed when I wasn't there, I have no idea.
What he did hear, however, was that some people had issues with the term brain injury.
Some of the government physicians wanted that diagnostic term not to be used.
Yeah, nothing formal.
It was the usual.
Someone came and said, this is terrible.
They're using the word brain injury.
Can't you do something so that it's not as upsetting to people?
Whether you called something a brain injury or concussion, it's the same thing.
But concussion was a much more common term that didn't frighten people as much.
And sort of swapping out those phrases, brain injury with concussion, seemed to dissatisfy people.
It seemed to.
Back on December 30th, 2016, when Adam made his first report, another clock began ticking on how and when to broach these strange sounds with the Cubans.
Cuban ambassador Jose Gabañas says that at first the Americans had seemed completely tongue-tied about it.
You know, taking a coffee, they started to mention about things that were happening in Havana, diplomats that were not comfortable, something strange things.
Quite frankly, I can tell you that sometimes I felt it was like a joke or something.
And we kept asking them, what are you talking about?
Could you come forward with any specifics?
Then on February 17th, the U.S. sent a diplomatic note of protest to the Cuban foreign ministry, like a formal way of saying knock it off.
They avoided to use the word attacks.
How did that feel?
Because even though they weren't using the word attack, there was a sense of accusation, right?
Indeed, there was a sense of accusation.
Days later, there was a meeting in Havana.
During a visit from a high-level American delegation, Cuba's president, Raul Castro, pulled U.S. Ambassador Jeff De Laurentiis aside.
Raul Castro said that he wanted to speak to me privately about a matter.
And so that was the time we had a conversation about it.
Presumably his request was generated because we had already gone to the foreign ministry and said, what the hell is going on?
And the reaction directly from our president, without any other further details, was, we are a friendly country.
We don't do that kind of thing.
I mean, complete assurance that we were not involved by any means in any activity to harass not only Americans, but any diplomat coming from any other country.
A research will be conducted and you're invited to participate immediately.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, the guy who'd been so pivotal in the thaw, was in the room for this interaction.
Castro went directly to him and said, look, we're going to open this up.
And also reiterated that later to me.
He said Castro told them that America could send down whoever they wanted to look into this.
I told everybody in briefings back in the U.S. afterward, there is no way you could hide something like this.
It eventually would show. And they're saying, bring in all these kinds of people and spies and everything else that they would never allow in there.
It's got to say something.
Still, as Leahy put it, De Laurentiis wasn't the kind of guy who got buffaloed by anyone,
that would allow the Cubans to think he was going to simply take them at their word.
We gathered some allies to brief them on what was going on.
I had wanted the Cubans to see all the cars with the little flags lined up in front of the embassy and that we were taking this very, very seriously and were consulting with our allies.
But to Adam, any such signals were way too subtle.
They're so lost in the diplomatic niceties and what things mean.
Castro would make good on his offer to allow U.S. investigators into Cuba.
But Adam was convinced that Castro had things wrapped up so tightly that any show of transparency would be a charade.
While he remained in Miami getting rehab, most of the others tested by Hoffa returned to their posts in Cuba.
Adam was able to stay abreast of developments in Havana, and he couldn't see anyone taking action to protect his colleagues.
What he saw instead, he thought, was a weak response by people who'd been left starry-eyed at getting such intimate access to the Cuban president, something that rarely happened.
Like, what? How? People are injured with fucking brain damage, and just because this dickhead comes over and talks to you and goes,
Oh, well, we're going to look into it. That's a win for you? That's a win?
You've got to pull your head out of your ass, mate.
Then they would use that to go, well, if Raul stepped in, clearly they didn't do it because Raul would never do this and he's never talked to him.
He's just feeding you lines of shit.
Castro gave De Laurentiis his word that Americans would be safe in his city, even promising to increase security around the enclave of houses used by the diplomats.
And for a while, it seemed like it might be over.
But more Americans heard strange sounds in Havana and began to get sick.
And they started talking to each other.
Ex-CIA agent Suzanne Matthews told us that the world for spies and diplomats in Havana is compacted.
The Diplo Club, those cocktail parties with exploding glasses, where every conversation might be overheard by Cuban spies.
Now into this tense environment came whisperings that those people watching them might be attacking them.
We contacted numerous people who were based at the U.S. embassy in Havana back then.
Some didn't want to talk at all.
Others shared their experiences but weren't willing to go on tape.
It remains a sensitive issue.
But one thing is clear about the mood on the ground at the time.
There was an increasingly vocal group who felt that something big was going on and they weren't being told.
My view is that there were meetings called at the appropriate times.
And that's all I'll say.
That's Ambassador Jeff De Laurentiis.
And is there a balance to be struck then between wanting to tell people within the embassy,
not being able to because of certain security clearances,
and also not wanting to create a panic among people?
I will say there are difficult decisions to make along the way in an experience like this.
Can you tell me what they are?
No.
Generally?
Generally you would try and find out if it's real, who is being affected.
Is it specific?
Is it more general?
And obviously you seek the help of headquarters of Washington in making those determinations.
On March 29th, De Laurentiis and his deputy brought their staff to a secure room at the U.S. Embassy.
Once inside, they were told about the strange goings-on.
If they found themselves experiencing the sound and pressure themselves,
they were advised to move out of the way as soon as possible,
and to try to make audio recordings.
De Laurentiis offered those who were concerned a way out.
My view was whoever wished to leave, please, with no punishment or...
Judgment.
Thank you is the better word.
Or people should be comfortable, and if they're not, they should move on.
We would help them do so, and so forth.
That's all I can say on that.
But they go, well, here's what's going on, and you can't tell anyone.
At this time, Adam was awaiting medical clearance to return to Cuba.
He heard about the meeting.
Specifically, that the people there were asked not to share what they'd been told with anyone.
They go, well, what about my spouse and my children?
What about the nanny that's at the house?
Can my kids sleep next to windows?
So people started having their children sleep in hallways, away from windows,
because they didn't know what was happening or how bad it was or what it could be doing to people.
So there was a bit of a panic that was happening,
because they weren't getting information that they should have been getting from the start.
Cases piled up, not just among intelligence officers and diplomats, but even their family members.
It left them disorientated, like walking, having just taken off roller skates.
One said their dizziness got so bad they would vomit.
The apparent attacks seemed to be different for everybody.
For some, the sound and pressure seemed to follow them as they moved.
Others said it was static.
There were cases where people heard no sound at all, just an unsettling pressure.
One such victim said it was like being in the grip of an invisible hand.
Dozens got permission to travel to Miami for testing with Dr. Hoffer.
They tried to maintain some kind of discretion,
aware that if there were an enemy behind these incidents, they would likely be watching.
Hoffer told us there was a system.
They come up from Cuba a lot to go to Costco,
because you can get a lot more groceries, whatever stuff.
And so initially, when the first couple of patients saw me,
they had to go to Costco and at least have a bag when they left Miami.
Like we were fooling anyone, but, you know, we thought we were being clever.
U.S. officials from Havana would encounter each other in Miami,
at the hospital and in the hotel elevator.
Back in Cuba, some felt they had to talk about what was happening to them.
One diplomat told us that when his parents came to visit from the U.S.,
he took them to the beach, leaving his phone behind
so he could fill them in without risk of Cuban eavesdropping.
That same guy told us he spoke to a family of Canadian diplomats living next door
and learned they too had been hearing sounds and getting sick.
One way or another, more and more people were learning about the outbreak.
On April 17th, almost three weeks after that first meeting,
De Laurentiis called in the spouses of staff
to tell them what was going on.
Looking back on that time, would you have done anything differently?
No. No.
As the crisis unfolded, Adam established a back channel to Havana
via his colleagues who were still at the embassy,
spending his evenings on the phone after work.
So I was trying to talk to people in Havana
to get an understanding of what was happening down there.
It was all starting to take a toll on Adam.
I was a zombie.
And then I was working, you know, 16, 18 hours a day.
Then you fall asleep for an hour and then you're up maybe an hour,
maybe a half hour, if you can sleep at all.
And then you just pray for the sun to come up.
Adam told me he was beginning to lose perspective.
I mean, you do have hallucinations because you're so sleep deprived.
Yelling at his bosses.
That spring, the agency revoked Adam's medical clearance
for overseas work, meaning he couldn't return to Cuba.
We don't know what they were thinking.
It might have all come down to health concerns.
But they may have also worried that this outspoken employee
would become a central point of dissension and rancor
in the Havana embassy,
where De Laurentiis was managing an increasingly delicate situation.
At the end of April,
the ambassador requested the CIA send someone down
who was familiar with the situation
and the medical effects of the sound.
They picked Dr. Paul Andrews.
Adam says he blew up about it,
trying to get management to see
they were putting Andrews in harm's way
by sending him to Havana.
He says his immediate boss instructed him to take a week off.
Like they didn't want to hear it.
It was strictly a business trip
and the schedule was very full.
Andrews had agreed to the trip despite his own reservations.
He welcomed the opportunity to investigate on the ground,
but he worried the whole thing was just a PR exercise.
If it meant people were not going to receive a medical evaluation
because we came down and assuaged their concerns,
I wasn't happy.
I wanted as many people evaluated as possible,
which was not easy.
After a rocky flight and bad weather,
it was late when he and his two colleagues landed in Havana.
He says he understood that they'd be given cell phones
that worked on the island
and that security personnel would provide them with a communications plan.
Instead, they were driven to the Hotel Capri,
a few blocks from the U.S. Embassy,
and left to their own devices.
It was about 10.30 p.m., but still humid out.
And like a lot of Caribbean hotels,
they had a welcoming cold drink.
I started to drink it and I said,
no, no, no, no, wait a minute.
And I put the drink down.
Andrews understood that their rooms had been assigned
by the Cuban government,
three rooms high up.
He observed the room and didn't find anything out of place.
Bathroom, place to hand clothing.
There were some things on the walls
that I didn't know what they were,
but that's not unusual.
I can go to Europe and Asia and other places
and see electronics I'm not used to.
There was no building, you know,
like directly across the street
or anything at that height whatsoever.
I didn't see anything where I thought
someone could beam something into my room.
I had gone to bed wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt
in case there was some emergency
and I needed to get out.
Just a few minutes before 5 a.m.,
woke up with severe pain in my right ear
like I've never had before.
Headache, which I never suffered from headaches at all.
Nausea.
I had previously ringing in my ears,
but it was totally, totally different now.
It was much more intense.
And I just couldn't understand what was happening.
Was I dreaming?
No, I sat up and realized I was awake
and I began to hear the noise
that I had heard previously from recordings
that people experienced.
Tried to use the phone to call for help
and the phone was dead.
I thought of leaving the room,
but to run out at 5 o'clock in the morning,
where was I going?
I had some earplugs and headphones
and I put them on right away
and got out of the room and went into the bathroom
and stayed there for the better part of an hour.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness,
he started focusing on the bathroom vent.
He could see that there was a light back there
and what looked like a shadow moving in front of it.
And it wasn't periodic,
like some fan motor that was rotating,
and it wasn't only in one direction,
it was back and forth.
I have no idea what it was,
but one explanation could be there was a person back there.
I have no idea.
It was just a shadow.
At 7am, Andrews made his way down
to meet his colleagues in the breakfast cafeteria.
I got off the elevator and almost fell.
My balance was so off.
I tried to tell my colleagues that I was sick,
that I thought I'd been hit,
and I don't know whether they understood
what I was telling them.
When they got to the embassy,
Andrews recalled not being able to find his ID card.
He had trouble counting out money
to exchange it for local currency.
He couldn't even focus on what people were saying.
I remember talking to myself and saying,
Paul, he's asking you a question.
Try to pay attention to what he's saying.
You're going to have to respond.
And it was really difficult.
Andrews struggles to remember much about that day.
There was the embassy staff meeting,
a tour of the homes where the attacks were reported.
But the details are hazy.
He does recall asking his colleagues,
neither of whom reported anything unusual themselves,
whether he should return to the hotel
or find somewhere else to stay.
And they said, oh no, no, go back to the hotel,
get your car in the morning.
And stupidly, I just went along with it.
I wasn't thinking.
I don't know if I was hit the second night or not.
I have no idea.
I know that I woke up Saturday morning feeling even worse.
The following day, he flew back to the US
and went to see Dr. Hoffer.
I remember being stunned by it.
Hoffer had met Andrews several times at this point,
including just before he went to Cuba.
I saw him physically in these hallways
the day before he went down.
And he was fine.
Andrews was no longer simply a CIA physician.
He was also the latest victim of whatever was happening in Havana.
He was already disturbed by the attitudes of his bosses.
But now their apparent indifference felt personal.
No one in my management ever sat down with me,
called me into the office and said,
we're so sorry, Paul, that this happened.
What can we do?
What can we do in your job?
Or to try and make it easier for you?
Nothing like that.
Andrews says that even when he later raised his concerns
with some of the most senior management at the CIA,
it didn't help.
I made the statement that I thought that some of my colleagues
were misleading people and other government entities
about the severity,
and that they were misleading people
about the risks of going down to Cuba before they went.
I wanted to see what would happen.
Nothing.
And my office never, ever spoke to me again, basically.
Within months, Andrews would be medically retired.
Whatever had befallen him in Havana was going to cut short his career.
But he says that raising the alarm in this way
had already destroyed his standing in the CIA.
At that point, you kind of outed yourself as a kind of troublemaker,
like as a whistleblower or whatever you'd call it.
Oh, absolutely.
I felt that what they had done was totally unethical at that point.
It was continuing.
This is all exactly what Adam had worried about.
He tried to stop the CIA from sending Andrews to Cuba.
Now the agency was so keen to get Adam out of the picture,
he says they suggested reassigning him to Peru.
Those early days were ugly.
Very, very ugly.
Adam says he wasn't well enough to travel anywhere for work.
And what's more, his medical care was in chaos.
It's funny because other people have come back
from other countries and they've been injured
and doing their jobs and they come back, you know, like a hero.
And me and some of my colleagues came back
and initially we were treated like we'd done something wrong.
Which is very confusing, you know, because we're sold on this.
We're a family and we take care of each other and all this stuff.
And, you know, you come back and you go,
well, I've got brain damage now.
And people didn't want to hear it.
They didn't want to fix it.
They didn't want to help us.
They didn't want to do anything.
Adam says it had become hard to get approval to travel
to see the doctors in Miami.
He believed the CIA cooled on Dr. Hoffer.
They didn't like what he was telling them.
Hoffer himself couldn't give us any reason.
Though he did confirm that the appointments dried up.
I think every one of them left here with a follow-up appointment.
Very few of them were allowed to keep that appointment.
Well, kept the appointment.
I never know why people don't keep appointments.
Either way, with Hoffer out of the picture,
Adam was left without a doctor.
He asked for permission to seek his own private care
and threatened to quit over it.
They just dragged it on and on and on and on and on.
And so eventually, I saw a big begging email saying,
I need help and I'm leaving on this date.
You can't just up and leave the CIA.
Without clearance, it would be breaking the law
for Adam to even tell a doctor he was in the agency,
let alone to speak about his experiences in Havana,
which remained a state secret.
Adam knew the email he was sending was almost mutinous.
You know, the people that were on that email
were incredibly senior, some of them.
There was a lot of big people that I put on that email,
to the point that I was kind of wincing when I clicked send, frankly.
Adam envisioned a flurry of replies.
He says he even pictured armed police
banging down the door to his apartment in D.C.
He says that no one wrote back.
Adam was 33 years old.
Just the year before, he completed his CIA field training
and was preparing for his first overseas posting.
Now it felt like his entire career was in the rear view.
He had no idea where he stood with his superiors.
Then weird things started happening.
One day, Adam found his car window smashed.
Another time, he picked up surveillance.
People were not pleased with me because I wouldn't let this go.
I've watched the same movies you have.
And I know if you become a problem child,
which I'm a problem child,
I don't know what is possible.
When I started having people smash out the windows of my car
and following me and all this other stuff,
you start questioning then,
you know, who's doing this and what's the end game?
What message are they sending and should I stop?
You know, emotions have been tied up in this from day one.
This is Dr. Charles Rosenfarb,
the former medical director of the State Department.
And fear.
We had no idea what this was.
Was it something that would go away in a week, a day, a month?
Who knows?
It triggered a lot of emotions.
Understandable.
Rosenfarb was in charge of the State Department's
medical response to Havana syndrome.
But he told us that the CIA took the lead in those early days,
when Andrews and Adam say they were being ignored.
Rosenfarb says his team over at the State Department
followed behind like the back of a slinky.
What he could tell us was that in July,
at the CIA's urging,
he flew Dr. Hoffer up from Miami.
To present his findings to a group of outside medical experts.
I think there was probably some skepticism
about Dr. Hoffer's conclusions.
There was no test at that point,
and there's still no test at all,
that says, yes, this person has this,
no, this person doesn't have it.
Hoffer told us that he wasn't giving the patients
from Havana any formal diagnosis.
He just saw a pattern of injury.
The other doctors in the room
didn't think the pattern was as clear as all that.
Even the symptoms,
there was a whole different degree of seriousness.
A lot of symptoms reported were subjective stuff.
I mean, feeling dizzy, feeling nausea, have headaches.
Still, they did agree that they were being presented
with something out of the ordinary.
But there was a consensus in that meeting
that this is something not natural.
Rosenfarb says that the doctors were unanimous.
We went around the table,
and everyone felt that it was a non-natural event,
that his findings and the history
was not consistent with a virus,
not consistent with a toxin,
not consistent with any other naturally occurring process
that could have affected them.
The doctors heard case studies
detailing the patient's experiences.
Some people reported being able to move
in and out of the sound and pressure,
and others said people nearby were unaffected.
These things stood out to the doctors
in Rosenfarb's office that day.
It gave them the impression of some kind of focused beam.
This was a bunch of folks
who were seeing data for the first time
and hearing stories,
and were opining that this was something
that was out of the ordinary,
could not be explained easily.
While Adam believed the government sidelined Hoffer
because they were trying to cover up
the health problems in Havana,
Rosenfarb says they switched teams
precisely because they were taking the issue so seriously.
It was felt, I know from our staff,
that Hoffer had limited resources
to take this on himself.
We were looking for kind of a major centre
that could basically handle a number of patients,
and preferably, you know,
fairly close to the Washington, D.C. area.
Adam didn't know that the State Department
shared his concern,
and was actively looking for a new team.
As far as he was concerned,
he was out in the cold.
A problem child.
Adam felt he and the other patients
had no choice but to make their own plans.
There's something very empowering
about being in that place
when you don't care anymore.
It's even more empowering
when the people that you don't give a shit about,
that are trying to screw you,
learn that you don't care anymore,
and that you can do more damage to them
than they can do to you.
And that's when it changes.
Adam maintains that it wasn't him
who went to the press,
and he won't tell us who did.
What we do know is that at the beginning of June,
a journalist from CBS
got a call from inside the government
about a cover-up in Havana.
This was, on the surface,
a ridiculous story.
There was talk of blacked-out vans in Havana
secretly targeting, with sound waves, U.S. diplomats.
I mean, that's crazy.
Next time on Havana Helmet Club.
Can you remember feeling anxious at all
about the press getting hold of it
and what that might do to your efforts
to try and figure things out?
Obviously, it would complicate things,
but we viewed it as serious enough
that we hoped it could get resolved
before it splashed all over the newspapers.
None of it really made sense to me,
but people were rushing to judgment,
blaming the Cubans.
We had to deny it.
We were involved in something
that no one proved that it was happening.
Every person the CIA sent down got hurt.
That then asks the question,
how tenable is this?
Because we're just sending lemmings off a cliff.
The State Department was just consumed
with this whole Havana syndrome thing.
They didn't care what else was going on.
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
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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.
World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed.
And in this new series,
we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry,
following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school
only to uncover a world she never expected.
I feel that I have no other choice.
The only thing I can do is to speak about this.
Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs
leaves people vulnerable to exploitation.
You just get sucked in so gradually
and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise.
World of Secrets, The Bad Guru.
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