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June 7th, 2017.
Beyond the walls of the U.S. Embassy, only a few people knew about the strange goings-on in Havana.
Across the Florida Straits in Little Havana, Miami, a crowd of Cuban-Americans gathered for a political rally.
They were angry that Obama had made peace with Cuba.
And less than a year and a half ago, an American president landed in Havana, greeted by a regime.
Senator Marco Rubio, arguably the most powerful figure in Trump's present cabinet.
He's the son of Cuban immigrants and grew up in this part of Miami, which is filled with anti-Castro Cuban-Americans like him.
His hardline views help bring about a rapid rise to power in Florida.
A year and a half ago, a president, an American president, landed in Havana to outstretch his hand to a regime.
Today, a new president lands in Miami to reach out his hand to the people of Cuba.
A year earlier, the idea of Marco Rubio and Donald Trump working together on anything would have been faintly comical.
Things had got really personal during the election campaign, with loose talk about big ears and small hands.
And anyway, back then, Trump said he was fine with the concept of open relations with Cuba.
He said the time had come to bury the hatchet.
But he and Rubio had since found a way to scratch each other's backs.
I am so thrilled to be back here with all of my friends in Little Havana.
Rubio had helped deliver Trump the Cuban-American vote in 2016.
I love it.
Now he was helping deliver President Trump to this crowd in Little Havana.
Trump was exaggerating.
There was no way to instantly wipe out all of the new policy that Obama had agreed with the Cubans.
But Rubio, who was helping to shape Trump's Cuba policy, wanted to make a statement.
Regime change was back on the agenda.
And history will say that perhaps the key moment in that transition began on this day, here in this theatre, with each of you,
and with a president that was willing to do what needed to be done so that freedom and liberty returns to the enslaved island of Cuba.
Outside this small pocket of Miami, America paid little mind to these speeches.
Most either supported Obama's reconciliation or didn't care much about Cuba at all.
No one really thought of Cuba as the bad guys anymore.
Rubio wanted that to change.
But he would need something to work with.
Then two months after this rally, a gift fell into his lap,
when a story took shape in the press that Cuba was up to no good.
Has Cuba been bombarding U.S. diplomatic facilities on the communist island with a sonic weapon?
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
I'm Jennifer Ford.
I'm Sam Bungie, and this is Episode 4, Sound and Fury.
This was, on the surface, a ridiculous story.
Yeah.
OK.
I mean, there was talk of blacked-out vans in Havana,
secretly targeting with sound waves U.S. diplomats.
I mean, that's crazy.
Steve Dorsey is a Washington journalist.
Back in May 2017, Dorsey was contacted about a potentially explosive story.
He was put in touch via a go-between with a source in the State Department.
Like in all good Washington thrillers, they met on a park bench near the Capitol building.
I remember it was a very foggy, kind of like misty evening,
where we took a look at some documents that they had.
The source gave Dorsey what appeared to be an official State Department briefing note
for press aides, should they have to field any questions from journalists about sick diplomats in Cuba.
Dorsey was confused.
As far as he knew, there hadn't been any press briefing about sick diplomats in Cuba.
It's one thing when you're given a document.
It could even say White House on it.
It could say classified.
But how do you know?
And how do you know when it's such an unusual story?
I mean, you want to make sure whatever you're given is real.
Dorsey was in his 20s at the time, just starting out in the competitive world of network news.
And national security was a new area for him.
So it felt unfamiliar to me and I think scary because there was so much of my own career on the line here.
Dorsey learned that the source was one of a number of officials who'd recently come home injured from Havana.
An extraordinary tale unfolded of life in the U.S. embassy there.
I'm just looking at my old notes here and I'm seeing reports of vehicle vandalizations, constant surveillance, break-ins.
Dorsey was learning about the long-standing practice of harassing U.S. officials posted to Cuba.
And this person that I interviewed saying, quote, it's a horrendously miserable post.
Even with, again, a quote, even with the warming of relations, nothing changed.
It got worse.
And now Dorsey's source told him about a new and far more disturbing level of harassment.
Namely, that people were reporting getting sick after being attacked in their homes by a mysterious sound.
They were going around the back of the State Department to bring this to you.
What was your impression of why that was going on? Why was this happening?
Because then they were frustrated that they didn't get answers.
It was all kept so hush-hush.
The source also told Dorsey that many of the victims in Cuba were actually American spies.
And then when we started discussing national security issues, I think that kind of elevated it to another level.
Because, yes, something weird happened.
A, if it happened to a group of school kids, that's one story.
If it happened to undercover CIA agents, which the reporting kind of got deeper and deeper into, that elevates it, right?
But it also made it even more challenging to substantiate.
The CIA don't typically admit to having a presence in foreign countries, let alone discuss what happens to them there.
Right now, Dorsey only had the word of his State Department source.
Did you spend any time thinking about whether or not they seemed like they had health issues?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And whether or not they had mental health issues, right?
Not just physical issues that they claimed, but mental health issues.
What do you think? How did they come across?
A little eccentric. Jittery.
Yeah, I mean, the reliability was certainly in question.
Dorsey didn't have enough to publish.
So armed with the documents from his source, he decided to try to force an admission from the State Department.
Hi, everybody. Welcome back. Hope you're all having a good week.
A lot of stuff going on today, certainly.
This is a State Department press briefing on August 9, 2017.
So I had to go into that briefing, which was my very first one at the State Department.
I wasn't aware that the tradition is to call on the AP reporter first.
And the AP reporter had so many questions, and the clock was ticking.
And, uh, sir, your name is?
Yeah, Steve Dorsey from CBS News.
Hi, Steve.
Hi. Um, 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. Um, so we are certainly aware of what has happened there. Um, give me one second here.
The press secretary, Heather Nowert, rifled through a binder full of topics.
So some U.S. government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba, on official duty, so they were there working on...
Dorsey realized she was looking at the same briefing note that his source had sent him
almost two months earlier.
She read word for word from that document.
So that says to me that they were aware of it.
They didn't address it because they weren't asked of that.
You can hear other journalists in the room trying to figure out what they're talking about.
citizens down there. We take this very seriously.
Look, this incident, this incident, and that's what, that's what we're calling it. We don't know exactly, uh, what...
So it's 2016 and you don't know what this incident is?
What this requires is, uh, providing medical, uh, examinations to these people. Initially, when they started reporting what I will just call symptoms, it took time to figure out what it was. And this is still ongoing.
So now it wanted to signal that the U.S. was remaining completely neutral on the situation in Havana. But Dorsey pushed back.
On May 26th, after Adam and another officer had left Cuba, the State Department had told the Cubans to draw down two of their staff in D.C.
which, depending on how you look at it, was either just a question of evening up the numbers, or it was retaliation.
If the U.S. doesn't have a definitive answer on the cause or source of the incidents, why did it ask those two Cuban embassy officials to depart the U.S.?
Look, uh, our, some of our people have had the option of leaving Cuba as a result, uh, for medical reasons.
Uh, we had to bring some Americans home, or some Americans chose to go home, come home, uh, as a result of that.
And as a result of that, we've asked two Cubans to, uh, leave the United States, and they have.
After the briefing, the Cuban foreign ministry issued a press release denying any involvement.
They had not, and would not, permit this kind of action against diplomats or their families, they said.
We had to deny that we were involved in something that no one proved that it was happening.
This is Ambassador Jose Cabanas in Washington.
I mean, they talked allegedly about something that could have happened, but they never ever provided any evidence that something happened.
Cabanas felt it was pointless for the Americans to try to play the issue down in public.
They seemed to be taking care not to throw around accusations.
But to him, expelling the Cuban diplomat spoke for itself.
The cream was already in the coffee.
We, Cubans, we are educated in visiting the future.
I remember in one of my exchanges with the State Department, I told them,
try to keep this under control.
I told them, at some point, this whole subject will go out of your hands.
You will have no possibility to control the narrative.
I've never talked to any journalists.
I'd wondered where Adam was in all of this.
I used proxies.
Or I'd find other State Department colleagues that were willing to talk to journalists,
and we'd connect them to each other.
So my fingerprints were never on any direct journalist contacts.
Why is that?
I didn't want to be accused of going to the press and leaking anything, which I wasn't.
Adam says he and others at the agency were working behind the scenes.
We were like, OK, now we've got to step into the press arena
to help control the narrative a bit about what's coming out.
Adam wanted to be sure the press captured the full scope of the threat as he saw it.
Enemies of the US had got their hands on a state-of-the-art weapon,
and they used it to attack agents like him.
And the idea of an untraceable ray gun,
well, that was a story the media could get their teeth into.
United States employees in Cuba possibly subject to an acoustic attack.
It seems to have been inside or outside the homes,
or if it was some sort of sound weapon fired from outside into inside.
It's unclear, at least to us at this point, what it was,
and I think to the US investigators as well.
Reporters who regularly covered US-Cuba policy
seemed to be struggling to understand how this mystery fitted in with the thaw.
It was as if two storylines were colliding.
But it is like something out of the Cold War.
I mean, we thought these sort of incidents had ended,
but this is whoever did it very serious
and something that we didn't expect to see in this new US-Cuba relationship.
None of it really made sense to me.
But, you know, what was troubling was that, despite all of that,
people were rushing to judgment, blaming the Cubans.
Tim Reeser, the policy aide who'd been a key player in the thaw,
said that Washington hardliners were itching to publicly confront Cuba.
You know, I was kind of like in these briefings in the distinct minority
of those who were questioning how one could make such an accusation
without something to point to.
I just felt that if you're going to accuse someone of a crime,
which is what this would be, you know, you must have some evidence.
Well, actually, that summer, Havana was crawling with investigators
searching for a smoking ray gun.
The CIA had sent down more people.
The US had taken Raúl Castro up and his offer to open this up and send down the FBI.
The Cubans had an investigation unit, too.
Those detectives were trying to run a case while themselves being under the glare of suspicion,
even in the media.
I'll bet they're right on it.
I'll bet they got their best guys on it.
But in fact, they did have their best guys on it.
I'm Mitchell Valdez Sosa.
I'm director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience and member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.
In spite of its economic woes, Cuba has a strong international reputation for science.
Professor Valdez Sosa was heading up the medical side of the Cuban investigation,
and says that he first became aware of the incidents via the media.
And they said, sonic weapons, people being attacked with sound.
For sound to damage anything, it has to be a very loud sound.
And this is something that immediately anybody would have heard.
It would have been reported.
He'd been traveling in Mexico at the time.
When he got back to Cuba, he found that an investigation had been underway for several months.
He asked to join the team and wanted to take a logical approach.
Do sonic weapons exist? Well, yes, but the ones in use are typically designed for crowd control.
If you're in their direct path, they make you feel nauseous and dizzy.
From a certain range, they can damage your hearing.
They're cannon-like devices, and they work by blasting huge sounds over wide areas.
But it's a tremendously loud sound. It's impossible to deploy, you know, secretly.
Cuban investigators went around the neighborhoods where they knew the American officials lived.
They spoke to neighbors, people who'd been in the area at the time.
There was nothing, no loud sounds anywhere.
Perhaps, of course, there was something that Valdez Sosa hadn't been let in on.
But he told us that Cuba is a hard place to keep a secret.
I mean, Cuba, I've said it many times, is a very porous society.
Information moves in all directions. Everybody knows what's happening.
They talk a lot. They exchange information. And there was no inkling of this, no idea.
And we're talking about the neighborhood and the houses. Nobody saw nothing. It's impossible to imagine.
In Washington, Ambassador Cabanas was trying to press the State Department for information that he could pass on to the Cuban investigation in Havana.
But the lack of trust from the American side was making things near to impossible.
At one point, the State Department gave him a map.
A small-scale map of Havana City with large red dots pretending to tell me that in those areas,
these people reported to have noises or feedback.
This map don't show me anything.
I told them, you know, that this means nothing for our researchers and scientists.
The Cubans were not given access to the patients. They weren't allowed to speak to them.
None of them visited Cuban doctors, even though for years that had been the practice.
And when the Cubans set up a hotline in the wake of the incidents, Ambassador Cabanas says no one called it.
Every time they reported a so-called new case, we asked the same question.
Why you didn't use the phone line?
Well, I can hazard a guess. Even leaving aside the fact they suspected Cuba was responsible
for the incidents, there's the fact that many of those affected were working as undercover agents
in Cuba and would like to protect their identities. We know that US staff had been asked not to even
tell their family members. Seems pretty naive to imagine they'd be running to the Cubans' hotline.
And it sounds like the Americans said as much.
The argument was that, well, you know what? Our people don't want to share information about
what is happening because probably that information would be used. Nonsense. Nonsense.
Back in Cuba, Valdez Sosa searched through what little medical information they did have to go on.
The Miami doctor who screened the patients, Dr. Michael Hoffa, passed on a report to the Cubans.
It was brief.
And then there was a sense of frustration that this is all the information we get,
a small piece of paper with some symptoms.
But as Mitch read through those symptoms, he had a moment of realisation.
Difficulty with concentration and memory, balance issues. These were concussion symptoms.
Mitch couldn't say what was wrong with these patients. But if these symptoms were correct,
Valdez Sosa was convinced that they did not point towards a sonic device.
I've never seen, and I looked at the literature, I did searches, and never has sound been reported to damage the brain.
Others in the scientific community were beginning to make this point back in the US.
After all the early press coverage that sounded like the stuff of science fiction,
this was a more sober assessment.
Experts say it's looking less likely that a sonic attack is what's been causing health problems for
some US diplomats in Cuba. Joseph Pompei is a psychoacoustics expert. He says the symptoms,
including mild brain trauma and recall difficulties, are inconsistent with that line of attack.
The scientific debate was one thing. But Adam says that the reality on the ground for CIA agents in
Havana was quite another. He says they were dropping like flies.
Well, here's the thing. So every person the CIA sent down got hurt.
Is that right?
Everyone except their chief of station.
From the point in time that you arrived, everyone who came...
After. For the most part. Anyone that had a significant role in what we were doing there.
Yeah. Or people that would come to fill in, right?
Um, just simple support people or whatever. They all got hurt. Every single one.
We don't know precisely, but by now the number of affected CIA agents had reached about 15.
More than half of all the officials affected in Havana.
Over the summer, the CIA came to the view that they were the explicit targets
and the State Department staff collateral damage.
The fact that FBI agents were able to make multiple trips to the island without being affected themselves,
only strengthened a growing conviction at the agency that whatever this was was out to get them in particular.
And so that then asks the question, how tenable is this to keep going?
Because we're just sending lambs to the slaughter at that point.
Which we were. Lemmings off a cliff.
On September 13th, the CIA made a decision that a lot of people would come to think of as rash.
They sent a classified message to the State Department that in response to the incidents,
they were withdrawing all staff from post for the foreseeable future.
On September 29th, the State Department dropped the bombshell that the US Embassy in Havana would be
effectively closed, a hundred staffers reduced to a smaller presence than even before the thaw.
Just over two months since that first measured State Department briefing, everything seemed to have changed.
We cannot continue to allow our personnel to serve in Cuba when they are very clearly in harm's way.
Senator Marco Rubio saw his moment. With America no closer to solving this mystery,
Rubio and other anti-Castro hardliners waded in with a letter to the State Department.
For many pundits, it contained the kind of tough talk that had been needed from the start.
This is no joke. Get on it now. Which I think is absolutely appropriate.
Absolutely shocking. The Cubans or somebody who ought to be under their watch is torturing our diplomats,
causing them permanent hearing loss, neurological damage, nervous disorders, etc.
by piping in some sort of frequencies to torture them. Tell you what, God, there needs to be an
ass-kicking. The media became Rubio's bully pulpit. Republican Senator Marco Rubio calls the US response
weak. He tweeted today that it's quote, shameful that while the US is withdrawing most of its staff
from Cuba, the Cubans can keep as many as they want here. Rubio spoke to reporters from the Capitol.
Bottom line is, you cannot set the precedent that American personnel can be attacked and
severely injured abroad, forcing us to draw down our presence in that country. Yet the country
responsible for their safety and security gets to keep their full complement of presence in our country.
Now Trump himself was directly accusing Cuba.
Thank you, Mr. President. General Kelly said on just last week that you believe that Cuba could
stop the attacks against Americans. Do you believe that?
I do. I think Cuba do about it. Do you believe Cuba is responsible?
I do believe Cuba is responsible. I do believe that. And it's a very unusual attack, as you know,
but I do believe Cuba is responsible. Yes.
They came with a list of Cuban officials they wanted to expel from Washington. They said that
they felt sorry, that they expected the problem in the future, whatever. But the factual thing is
that they were expelled, and that's it. Ambassador Cabana says that the State
Department officials delivering this news were some of the same people he'd worked with on the Thor.
They felt they were part of something that we accomplished at the time. They have to leave all of
that behind because a group of guys are saying that they have dizziness and they are listening
to sounds that usually they don't do. Most people, I don't believe, wanted to go. They wanted to stay
and continue doing their jobs. Ambassador Jeff De Laurentiis says the diplomats left under his command
at the embassy had chosen to stick with the mission. That was one reason it was necessary to move from
voluntary to ordered departure. You know, on the one hand, I suppose it made sense. On the other,
it kind of felt like a convenient excuse to do what they wanted to do all along in any case.
De Laurentiis knew there would be personal repercussions. When he returned from his tour
in Havana in the summer of 2017, he knew he wouldn't be getting the hero's welcome he'd received
during Obama's term. I was stopped in the halls in the State Department. People I didn't know
congratulating me, people wanting to come and work at the embassy. They all wanted to be a part of this
enormous diplomatic change. I returned to the State Department early in the Trump administration.
The vibes were all just completely different and people were averting their eyes. For someone who
was so visibly connected to a policy that was being completely reversed, not only was it being reversed,
it was being criticized, condemned and so forth. But I remember that sort of sense of not knowing
quite what to do with me. You know, I guess I could certainly see that this was going to interfere with
the direction we were going. I'm not sure I fully appreciated how it would be so exploited.
Tim Reeser, the foreign policy advisor who helped re-establish U.S. relations with Cuba.
The State Department insisted they were not cutting diplomatic ties. But Reeser's whole approach had
been about improving dialogue. As far as he could see, there wasn't going to be a whole lot of diplomacy
going on now. You know, both embassies basically were reduced to a very skeleton crew.
And our ability to conduct diplomacy or consular affairs and all of that virtually dried up because
we had no people there and they had almost no people here. So I didn't really anticipate that.
That autumn, a devastating cyclone ripped through Havana and Lawrence Gumbana took up the post as the
head of the American presence in Cuba. We're just trying to keep the lights on and trying to plug the
holes from the hurricane and also just manage the staff. He was in charge of the few remaining staff
in the crumbling U.S. building. He was also there to implement U.S. policy. But that now came down to
a single issue. The State Department was just consumed with this issue. They didn't care what else was going
on. It was all Ivana syndrome. And he had his instructions. In any dealings with the Cubans,
Gumbana had to take the line that they were responsible and had a way of shutting this off.
You know, they were furious. They were furious. They thought we were completely making this up
out of whole cloth. Despite the official position, Gumbana admits to having his own doubts.
You know, personally, it was still up in the air as to what it was and whether or not it was real.
Of course, everyone left in Havana had read the stories about the health incidents.
Intrusive thoughts could be hard to stave off rattling around the embassy and ambassador's residence.
You know, psychologically, it's just human nature. Your senses are a little bit more heightened to
strange noises or some of the other, you know, descriptions of what happened to people.
I remember a couple of times, you know, waking up and hearing the air-conditioned
rattle. And then you're just a little bit more on edge because of it.
Yeah, you're like, is that the air-conditioning?
Exactly right. Is that the air-conditioning or could that be something else?
Maybe one of the reasons that other sounds could be mistaken for the thing
was that so few people had heard this high-pitched, grinding, somehow pressurized sound.
Then in early October, an Associated Press reporter got hold of a recording via a government source
and published it. The recording fired people's imagination, like a grainy Bigfoot photo. People
didn't know what to think. Was the recording itself dangerous? So little was known about the
potential threat, the idea didn't seem totally out of the question. The media outlets who aired the
sound seemed to be treating it as somewhere between a joke and a biohazard.
I hope I have this loud enough so you can hear it, or at least not too loud. I don't want to...
I'm not trying to attack anybody out there. Here we go. Take a listen to this.
All right, and that is it. That's the sound
that is associated with these sonic attacks. I hope everybody out there is okay. I will not be held
responsible for any symptoms anybody out there experiences. I just wanted to illustrate.
One online commenter declared this wasn't the work of Cuban spies, but an army of robot locusts.
Actually, even those reaching earnestly for the right words to describe what they were hearing
kept coming up with insect comparisons. High-pitched, cricket-like sound.
It was impossible to tell from the recording just how loud the sound had been from those Americans who
heard it in Havana. But we know they believed they were documenting something shocking and unnatural.
That's the sort of thing the Cubans say they'd been going door to door in Havana for months asking
locals about. Had they heard something out of the ordinary, overpoweringly strange? No one had.
But maybe those were the wrong questions. Maybe the senses of someone recently arrived to this
Caribbean island are differently attuned to those of Havana city dwellers used to the same sounds day in
and out. Cuban investigators told us they heard something pretty ordinary in the recording.
The press began to sound a little giddy. Sonic weapons, Cold War spy games are now deafening insects.
Some Cuban scientists have looked into this and they've ruled out that it's anything to do with
sonic booms, etc. And it was due to a cacophony of crickets. This is incredible. You couldn't make the
news up at the minute, could you? No, you couldn't. So you could argue, well, it's Cuban experts and maybe
they're just coming up with this, but it's been validated by some US scientists as well. Now,
the FBI have refused to comment, but I just think it's amazing. Actually, it seems the FBI took this
insect theory seriously too. Could a bug create a sound as grating and ear-piercingly loud as what
the Americans have described in Cuba? They went to meet Professor Alan Sanborn, an American entomologist,
who'd written a paper measuring insect sounds back in the 90s. It was out for 20 years before the FBI
came knocking on my door. Sanborn had actually had a close encounter of the cicada kind,
doing his own field recordings. To hold the sound pressure level meter at half a meter from the
animal, I kind of had it next to my head. So it was less than an arm's length away from my ear. When it
got up to the 106, 107 decibels of the full song, my ear was literally ringing. It was so loud, the
vibrations in my ear. Sanborn said that up close, insects like the cicadas he measured could sound
as loud as a jet engine. It's hard to imagine that something so small could make such a din.
What's more, cicadas have their own inbuilt amplifier which can throw the sound, making it difficult to
figure out where it's coming from? If you weren't used to them, sounds like this springing out as if
from nowhere would surely be strange and alarming. Still, Sanborn was clear with the FBI that insect
noises could not explain the medical symptoms these Americans had experienced. At the end of 2017,
Lawrence Gumbana, the head diplomat left in Cuba, got a visit from those FBI agents.
You know, they were professional. They knew what they were doing. They were there to see if what evidence
they could find. Now, evidence gathering in that kind of environment, by nature, very difficult.
They didn't conclude that there was no directed attack. They concluded there was no evidence of
a directed attack. So it was not the popular result. A lot of people had already, you know, convicted
the Cubans of doing this. Between the Cuban haters, you know, and the Obama haters and the victims,
you know, who have suffered, there's a lot of interest validating that this was an actual series of
attacks. What the FBI found did not support the accusation made even by the President of the United
States that Cuba had attacked Americans. It was particularly concerning for the CIA, whose lead
everyone had been following all along. According to the people we've spoken to, the CIA once downplayed the
health concerns. But they had since swung all the way over to the other extreme, triggering a mass
exodus from Havana. They closed down their shop in the embassy. They removed all their people and left.
You know, they were there for a foreign policy reason. And now they're just kind of taking their
toys and going home. Because other people said, you guys are being precipitous and completely departing.
You know, you can reduce presence and you could lay low. And they just decided, no, we're getting out.
So there's a lot of egg on their face for them having taken such drastic measures.
Of course, no one was more all in than Adam. His view was that the FBI had taken the easy way out
of a complex investigation.
So because we can't figure it out, we're going to say it's not real and you're crazy.
He was frustrated that the recordings had become so central to everything.
So the phone was never meant to be this calculated, complete capture of anything. It was the only
thing I had available to me to try and prove, hey, there's some weird shit happening.
Why don't we do try this, look at it and see if there's anything there?
Yeah. Adam says that earlier in 2017,
an official analysis had picked up a man-made signal buried in the recordings he made.
Another US official posted to Havana told us the US Coast Guard examined his recording
and also found a man-made signal. But in the spring of 2019, American and Cuban scientists
would actually prove a match between the AP recording
and the mating song of a rare species of cricket found in Cuba.
It's an interesting recording because, you know, I still don't know if that's crickets or not.
It is quite possible that those are actually crickets. There's what you could hear and there's
what you could feel. They were happening at the same time, but I don't know if they were connected.
There's so many questions. I just don't, I don't think the sound, the sound is not the issue.
The sound is not what's causing harm. The sound is a byproduct or it's a cricket. I don't know.
But it's not the problem. The problem lies in the inaudible aspect of things.
The stuff that was causing nosebleeds and all the other trauma, you know, that was all non-audible.
So, again, I just, I wonder is, did we go down the wrong path because we're wrapped up in the audible aspect of everything
versus the non-audible, the inaudible? And time will tell, you know.
One thing he was sure about, just like the expert Alan Sanborn had made clear to the FBI and to us,
it wasn't the mating call of some crickets that had given him his life-changing health problems.
I read this headline a couple days ago. It said, FBI rules out sonic attacks and saw some other things out there about it.
This is Senator Marco Rubio.
In essence, you know, I saw at one point the Cuban government said that it could be crickets or some insect noise, cicadas, is that what they're, yeah.
I didn't even know their word. Cicadias. Well, I don't know. We don't have that problem in Miami, but...
As soon as the U.S. Senate resumed after the holidays, in January 2018, Rubio decided to put himself front and centre of the Havana syndrome issue.
You have him? Yeah.
A lot of concussive effects after? No?
All right. Well, yeah.
But my point is that you could read that headline and conclude that that means that nothing happened.
Since that strange summer of 2017, no American in Cuba has reported an incident like Adams.
But Rubio believed a foreign power had purposefully injured American officials.
And an attack like this required a full-throated response.
We can say that we don't know how it happened. We can even say we can't know for sure who did it.
But two things we know for sure. People were hurt and the Cuban government knows who did it.
They just won't say for some reason.
Just maybe this whole drama in Havana could help Rubio convince the Trump administration once and for all that the Cuban regime had to be squashed like a bug.
If you are a Florida politician, it's much better to be a Republican.
And it's much better to be anti-Cuba, anti-Castro.
Number one is keeping the pressure on Cuba and making it stronger.
And if you can find a way to make it stronger, such as through the Havana syndrome, then you're going to do it.
It's unfortunate that since the news of these bizarre and vicious attacks broke late last summer,
we have not seen more public outcry against the Cuban government for whatever scope of ownership it has over these attacks.
Our parents' life was destroyed.
Our grandparents' life was destroyed.
All our countrymen's life was destroyed.
And that is a cause we carry inside that we will never leave behind.
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.
I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger.
The most beautiful mountain in the world.
If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain.
This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2.
And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive.
If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore.
Extreme Peak Danger.
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