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When I was first in touch with Adam, he sent me a photo.
We were communicating on a cloak-and-dagger messaging app called Wicca,
which is partly funded by the CIA, and even features a setting called Burn-On Reading.
The photo shows Adam standing with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, holding a certificate and a medal.
He looks back on the few months around when this photo was taken as a special time.
It was very strange to have all the support finally.
It felt like we had this golden window of, like, six months where everything was really going in our favour.
On January the 9th, 2018, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
Pompeo presented Adam with the Extraordinary Service medallion, along with a certificate.
The certificate stated plainly that Adam had been targeted by unknown forces and subjected to unprecedented, damaging attacks.
The certificate even seemed to thank him for pushing the agency to take notice by managing the situation in Cuba
and stepping up into roles far beyond his pay grade and experience.
His parents came and got a tour of the private CIA museum.
The agency says this museum charts its rich history and commitment to the art of intelligence.
They keep various spy gadgets, a model of the compound where bin Laden was killed.
There's also a large wall remembering the CIA's great failures in Cuba.
All actions ordered by presidents who prized the CIA's ability to keep secrets,
to do work in such a way that they could deny it ever happened.
All along, Adam has felt people trying to deny the truth about what happened to him,
people trying to gaslight him,
even down to those foreign agents he believes were following him
and rearranging things in his apartment in Philadelphia.
What does that do to us?
Someone's been in my place and they've moved my shit around.
Well, you just look crazy again.
Now you've said you're crazy.
You know, people say you're crazy.
You've come out with a far-out claim of some sort.
You've already got shredded out.
Now you're saying people are following you and someone's been in your house in the US.
It just, all it does is it just pulls away from your credibility.
In children's stories,
sometimes the hero wakes up and wonders if everything had been a dream
until they find something.
A nutcracker toy,
a bell from Santa's reindeer,
a silver dollop with a bullet lodged inside.
Some talisman that reassures them that at least some part of it must have really happened.
Adam sent me that photo from this day to prove his identity.
But I wonder if he returns to this photograph and the medal and the certificate from the CIA
because it proves something to him, too.
He might have been suffering from a life-changing illness.
It's a very inconvenient document that they've handed us that says we were victims of attacks.
I bet they wish they could take that shit off me now, but they can't.
I'm Sam Bungie.
I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is Havana Helmet Club, Episode 7, America's Backyard.
For State Department Medical Director Charles Rosenfarb,
2018 got off to a rocky start.
He felt Cuba hardliners had attacked him in the Senate over his handling of the crisis in Havana.
And though he thought doctors at UPenn were superb and the problem in Cuba appeared to be contained,
he did worry that they hadn't seen the last of Havana syndrome.
We kept wondering if it's something that's going to happen elsewhere.
And we started to put in mechanisms to capture that, you know,
reach that information to our medical people around the world.
Anything unusual, you get back to us, let us know.
In April 2018, a report came in.
A government worker in Guangzhou, China, complaining of symptoms like the patients from Havana.
We knew we'd better take a close look at this right away.
Catherine Werner began hearing strange sounds in her apartment in late 2017,
after the story in Havana became public.
At first, she dismissed the symptoms, but eventually her mother convinced her to seek help.
The State Department flew Werner back to the U.S.,
where the UPenn doctors could examine her along with the patients from Havana.
And the head of the team at Penn, I remember taking the phone call from him,
and he said, you know, her story and the MRI findings is exactly like those other people.
I said, well, OK, now we have a second location.
Adam, patient zero, remembers that when she arrived at UPenn, it was all very secretive.
I got word about a week and a half after she'd arrived, and they said, no one can talk to her.
She has to go through all of this battery of exams.
She cannot know anything from any of you, because they didn't want us to sway any of her tests.
And it wasn't until the day that they had finished everything,
and they were meeting with the government to confirm her case,
that I got introduced to her when we went to lunch, and I was like,
first off, you're not crazy.
This is real.
I know exactly what you're going through.
And she just broke down.
And it's a relief, you know.
This had not been the experience of that CIA agent in Moscow, Mark Polymeropoulos.
He says that earlier that same year,
agency medical staff disagreed with his theory that he'd been attacked,
finding more mundane explanations for his symptoms,
and they declined to refer him to UPenn.
But the US government seemed to be on board with this new case in China.
We had an incident in Guangzhou that was,
that the medical indications are very similar and entirely consistent with
the medical indications that have taken place to Americans working in Cuba.
On May 23rd, Mike Pompeo went before Congress.
He'd just left the CIA for a new position as Secretary of State.
We announced it to the workforce while we slept here last night.
We have medical teams that are moving to be on the ground there.
We are working to figure out what took place,
both in Havana and now in China as well.
The Chinese foreign minister didn't just deny any involvement.
He called the attacks themselves inconceivable.
But the US issued a health alert,
warning staff in China to beware of strange noises and unusual symptoms.
And officials speculated,
was this China?
China working with Russia?
Russia has also denied any involvement in this story.
To Democratic Senator Tim Kaine,
the new case suggested they were looking for an enemy
with the means to inflict damage on American personnel anywhere in the world.
And again, happening in one country leads to a set of hypotheses,
you've got to run down.
But now happening in a second country really raises the stakes,
I think, in terms of trying to get to the bottom of it.
Guangzhou is classified as a super city or megalopolis.
Its airport can handle 80 million passengers a year
and it's one of the richest places in China.
In Havana, it takes all morning to download Western news
over an unstable internet connection
and there are hours-long queues for groceries.
In contrast, for State Department employee Mark Lenzi,
Guangzhou felt like the future.
We had a great life there.
In late 2017, Lenzi was one of Guangzhou's 14 million residents
and part of the tight-knit staff of around 130 at the U.S. Embassy.
He was living with his family in a high-rise apartment building.
His infant son slept in a crib
next to a large picture window overlooking Guangzhou.
And it was there, standing by the crib
and looking out over the vast city,
that Lenzi says his wife first heard the sound.
He says his wife was puzzled by this sound
and couldn't figure out where it was coming from.
She said, yeah, I texted the upstairs neighbour.
Are you dropping something, like, over our bedroom?
She's like, no, no one's been in there.
I haven't dropped anything, like, you know.
And my wife's like, what the hell could it be making that sound?
Soon, Lenzi began to hear it too.
I heard that same sound probably on three or four different occasions.
Really kind of sharp.
Lenzi and his wife's new headaches and waves of lightheadedness crept up on them.
And at first they put them down to Guangzhou's crisis-level smog.
But then, to their horror, strange things happened to their children.
My wife was giving my two kids a bath.
But at the same time she heard the sounds, instantly, okay, imagine this,
both of my kids had bloody, blood just started streaming from their noses.
He began sleeping late and sensing he was off his game.
Working on something technical at the embassy one day,
Lenzi's colleague teased him about word recall.
He said, oh, well, you, yeah, you just turned 40, right?
I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's because I'm over 40, ha, ha, ha.
But inside I'm thinking, this is not right.
That's when I knew that this was more serious than just smog.
Like, wait a minute, something else is going on here.
What is going on here?
It turns out that Lenzi has a very particular set of skills.
Much of his job is classified,
but he describes himself as a foremost American expert on Russia.
He's also an engineer.
Months before the idea of a Russian microwaves attack
was being discussed widely in the media,
Lenzi came to this view himself.
To get my badge, my federal badge
for the Diplomatic Security Service who I work for,
a large component of that four-month training
is microwave detection and methods and things like that.
It's what I do for a living, Sam.
So yes, if it sounds like I know what I'm talking about here,
it is because I know what I'm talking about here.
He'd been thinking about those strange sounds
that he and his wife had been hearing over their son's crib.
They struggled to describe them.
Finally, they took a trip to a hardware store to buy materials.
I got a sheet of glass and I got these kind of lighter weight marbles,
if you will, that wouldn't break the glass.
And then kind of we replicated as best we could with the sound.
To me, this recording sounded quite a lot like what it is,
a marble rolling around a funnel and dropping on glass.
But this was Lenzi's attempt to recreate what he believed was the Frey effect,
those sounds that occur only inside your head,
that Alan Frey himself called sonic delusions.
It would explain why Lenzi's neighbour heard nothing,
just like Adams in Havana.
To Lenzi, it suggested his apartment was being targeted with pulsed microwaves.
And if that was true, he had a suspect list of one.
The government of Russia.
And you don't have to be the wizard of id to figure that out.
Over the following weeks, Lenzi says his symptoms got worse
and people at work told him he was acting testy.
Truth of the matter was, I was irritable at that time.
I absolutely was.
That's a classic post-concussion symptom.
This mirrors Adam's story too.
Lenzi got pulled into a meeting to address this strange behaviour.
He says it's called a written counselling session.
Kind of a big deal in the diplomatic world.
You know, if that's in your file,
you have a hard time becoming ambassador and things like this.
What Lenzi didn't know was that just days earlier,
Catherine Werner, that first victim in China,
had been flown home after complaining of her own symptoms.
When he finally did hear, about six weeks later,
Lenzi was hopping mad.
I was just telling anyone that would listen.
I was firing out these email blasts to my colleagues saying,
you should have been warned too.
I should have been warned.
This wouldn't be the first time Lenzi felt let down by the State Department.
Twice, he felt, they'd shrugged off leaks of his personal data.
But he says what made things worse about China
was that he believes Catherine Werner had been trying to get word of warning
back to him and his family.
My neighbour, on three different occasions,
went to the government and said,
notify, please, my neighbours, but especially the Lenzi family.
They live right next to me.
They're in danger.
Please let them know.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, we will.
We'll let them know.
And they never did.
I wondered, had Lenzi done anything
to run down his microwave attack theory
while he was in China?
Did you ever get anyone
to come and check for radiation or anything like that?
No, I tried.
I begged.
But just because my bosses didn't do it
doesn't mean that it was not done.
He's cryptic about who took this alleged reading
and what was done about it at the time.
It's important to the story
because of what he will do with it later.
But while still in China,
Lenzi gave an interview to the New York Times.
In the article, published on June 7th,
the Times shared details from an all-staff email
Lenzi sent around the Guangzhou embassy
in which he accused the State Department
of knowing full well that his neighbour,
Werner, was not an isolated case.
Had I been medevaced in a halfway timely manner,
my kids, especially my kids' injuries,
but my injuries as well and my wife's injuries
would not have been nearly as bad as they are.
Lenzi told us doctors in the US
would eventually find that his youngest child,
the son who slept in that crib,
suffers nausea during certain balance exercises
and that his eyes track differently.
There is, of course, no way to know for sure
whether this would still be the case
had his family got out of China sooner.
But we do know that when the State Department
sent out a medical team,
they screened more than 100 staff
flying 15 back to the US for further tests.
Among that 15 were Lenzi and his wife,
who arrived at UPenn almost two months
after the State Department found out
about Catherine Werner.
How would that make you feel?
It's outrageous. Out-rageous.
But it's here that the story of the China cases
runs aground.
For all the uncertainties surrounding
a possible cause of the illnesses in Cuba,
Adam was followed to Miami by many others
and the doctors began to see
what they thought was a pattern.
The China patients never got that kind of reassurance.
The State Department sent the Cuba patients
to UPenn only after triaging
and identifying them as what they believed
to be genuine, unexplained cases.
Rosenfarb says the China situation was messier.
And we kept pressing pen, like, so is it the same?
Do they have something similar?
In the end, we found what we believe were explanations
for the symptoms of all that could not be treated
to Havana syndrome.
Our process, in our minds,
eliminated those people as having,
being victimized by the same thing.
On reflection, Rosenfarb wonders
whether sending the patient straight to Penn
was such a good idea.
One of the big regrets I have
is that we sent these people
directly to the location
where they knew, they'd heard
that colleagues from Havana had gone to
who had this, you know, non-natural event
that caused some potential brain injury.
So that, of course, is what they were thinking they had.
And Penn is a brain injury center.
So this is what they were focused on.
He worries, too, that it gave the team at Penn
the impression that the State Department
had already drawn conclusions about these patients.
And gave the doctors at Penn,
thought, well, if these guys,
they're being referred to us,
just like the Havana people,
the State Department must know
that this was the same thing.
Rosenfarb says that in reality,
the State Department had not made hard assumptions
about these patients.
He says there'd been a low threshold
for bringing people back from China.
He didn't think it was the time to be picky.
We're trying to manage a tough situation
where people are scared,
and it wasn't a time to sort out.
So we're very inclusive.
If there's any suspicion that they've had something,
they're part of the cohort.
Out of those 16 cases,
the State Department only ever confirmed one as genuine.
that is, China patient zero, Catherine Werner,
which left the other 15 in limbo.
They could not be convinced
that they did not have Havana syndrome.
So that led to a lot of discontent among patients.
Mark Lenzi doesn't buy it.
He thinks it's all political.
Now this had become a hard problem to handle,
the government was trying to shut it down.
Cuba was always much easier.
It was always much easier for the U.S. government
to blame Cuba,
to kick out some Cuban diplomats,
to posture and act tough.
But with China,
it's a completely different beast.
You can't just close our embassy in Beijing and Guangzhou.
These are literally the most important missions
for us in the world, right?
Our relationship with China
is one of the most important,
if not the most important,
bilateral relationship in all of the world.
Adam felt the same way.
He was suspicious of this new two-tier system.
But that's the thing.
If you weren't hurt in Havana,
it doesn't seem like care is forthcoming for people.
You know, they're getting people care,
but they're not getting access to these programs
that I pushed for and helped set up,
which is there for these people.
That was the reason for doing it.
And, yeah, I don't understand why it's falling apart.
As far as Adam was concerned,
they'd been building a case.
More incidents in another country with ties to Russia.
Talk of microwaves.
It all seemed to be moving in the right direction.
Now, disagreement within the government
was throwing everything off track.
But as we know from Marco Rubio,
the former senator from Florida,
who grabbed hold of the Havana syndrome issue
while commentators quibbled about cricket sounds,
uncertainty often makes way
for a leader filled with conviction.
I don't think anything accidental
happens to American diplomats in hostile countries.
In April 2018, Ambassador John Bolton
became Trump's national security advisor.
You may be familiar with Bolton.
For decades, he was one of the Republican Party's
most hard-line foreign policy thinkers.
He says when he came in,
Havana syndrome was one of several items on his desk
that he wanted to prioritize.
This was potentially a direct attack
on American officials.
It caught my attention immediately,
that's for sure.
By reputation,
Bolton doesn't always work well with others.
But Trump regularly watched Bolton
on Fox and Friends
and described him as one tough cookie.
Why do you think he picked you for the job?
Well, I thought at the time
that it was because he agreed
with a lot of what I was saying.
Presumably, you don't hire somebody
that you don't agree with.
And are you smiling
because it didn't work out that way?
Well, I don't think he believes in anything
except the greater glory of Donald Trump.
He doesn't have a philosophy.
He doesn't pursue policies
in the way most decision-makers
and academics would construe that.
Apparently, Bolton's independent streak
was a problem
because Trump fired him
after a little less than 18 months.
Some sources cited Trump's dislike
of Bolton's moustache
as a contributing factor.
Bolton denounced Trump
as a useful idiot for Putin.
By the end,
Trump was calling him a sick puppy.
And as I said in my book,
working in his administration
turned out to be like
living in a pinball machine.
Looking for stability
in the Trump White House,
Bolton hired a trusted deputy,
his old work pal,
Charlie Kupperman.
Friendship and commitment
goes back to the Reagan days.
And, you know,
it was clear this country
had some national security challenges
and that Donald Trump
was a different kind of president
than Ronald Reagan was.
Kupperman and Bolton
personally helped Reagan
spread the world view
that was in style
back in the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan believed
that the Soviet Union
was an evil empire
and that, you know,
the only outcome was,
as he said,
we win, they lose.
These two Cold War warriors
still keenly perceived threats
associated with that era.
They suspected Havana syndrome
came out of that world
and they wanted to deal
with it head on.
Was it being taken pretty seriously
when you came in?
No, no, because I think
they don't want to,
because, you know,
they would just as soon
brush it off.
Adam, or Patient Zero,
had felt that he'd finally
got through to the top floor
at the CIA.
The director, Mike Pompeo,
had awarded him
that certificate.
But Pompeo's time
as director was now up.
On his way out the door,
he gave Bolton a heads up
about where things stood
on Havana syndrome.
And he said,
in general terms,
I can describe the conversation,
that we have this disagreement
within the government,
uncertainty about what
caused the attacks,
which is how he and I
both viewed them.
And he just felt
the bureaucracy,
both the CIA
and the State Department,
was not making progress
toward resolving
what had happened.
Kupperman says he told
the new CIA head,
Gina Haspel,
that they wanted
intelligence updates
in as close to real time
as possible.
I don't think they had
the same sense of urgency
that we had.
But the truth is
that over the following year,
they struggled to stay
on top of Havana syndrome.
In the West Wing pinball machine,
there were a lot
of other things going on.
The first week I arrived,
we had to deal with
a chemical weapons attack
in Syria.
So I arrived on Monday
and we were bombing Syria
by Friday.
So I was a little bit
occupied the first week
and there were a number
of other things
that had also piled up.
Ambassador Bolton
had a vision
on how he wanted
to run the NSC.
So it's non-stop though.
It is non-stop.
As far as Mark Lenzi
could see,
nothing was happening.
He says he was trying
in vain to get medical care
for his family.
He says he's maintained
secrets on behalf
of his government
for his whole career.
But in this case,
he felt secrecy
was no longer an option.
He decided to go public
in a big way.
My neighbor, me,
these aren't the type
of people that want
to go to the press.
That's the last resort
thing to do for us.
We love doing what we do
in the shadows.
That was our last resort
to do that, right?
They forced us to do that
and we had no other choice.
On March 17th, 2019,
CBS network show
60 Minutes,
the highest rated news show
in America,
aired a special
titled Targeting Americans.
Until now,
the alleged victims
had been shielded
from the public.
60 Minutes put a face
on Havana Syndrome
for millions of viewers.
Over many months,
we have been collecting
evidence of what appears
to be a hostile
foreign government's plan
to target Americans
serving abroad.
The evidence presented
in the show
was far from definitive.
It consisted largely
of first-hand accounts
of strange experiences.
Lenzi appeared
wearing tinted spectacles,
which he said helped
with balance issues
and light sensitivity
brought on by the attacks.
His former neighbor,
Catherine Werner,
described a sound
coming from nowhere,
a pressure on her temples,
her pet dogs
coughing up blood.
It was like a scene
from a horror movie.
I started to get hives
all over my body,
really bad hives.
I woke up with headaches
every day.
I started to feel tired.
The simplest things
would just make me
very, very tired.
Then, that summer of 2019,
Havana Syndrome
struck at the heart
of the very team
taking this most seriously.
In late May,
Ambassador Bolton
flew to London
with the President
to visit the Queen.
On that trip,
two of Bolton's staff
on the National Security Council
believed they were hit
in their London hotel room.
When they returned
to the U.S.,
one of those two staffers
believed she was targeted again
while she was out
walking her dog.
She was outside
a Trader Joe's
in the Washington area.
Over the next year or so,
there were several more
incidents in the U.S.,
including one that involved
a senior member of the NSE
who confided to Bolton
that he'd been stricken
while walking down
a flight of steps
by the West Wing.
Obviously,
something very serious
is going on.
The same individual
being struck
on multiple continents,
attacks on an Allies' territory
during a presidential visit,
and even on American soil
within striking distance
of the West Wing
and to Bolton's own staff.
To some observers,
incidents like these
took the story
of Havana Syndrome
into a realm
that stretched credulity.
To them,
it was outlandish
to believe an enemy
could attack Americans
on their home ground
with an invisible ray.
But Kupperman,
who personally dealt
with the staff,
saw it differently.
And they came to me,
I said,
you should have come in here
the first day you got back.
We take this seriously
and we know that
something happened to you
if you said it happened to you.
It seemed to Kupperman
that Havana Syndrome
was striking
at the very heart
of American power.
I mean,
these people were marked.
It's not accidental.
Why did you think
they in particular
might have been targeted?
Because of their jobs
and where they were
and who they were with.
You know,
these are people
who have some of the
most sensitive
national security clearances.
The American incidents
in particular
convinced Kupperman
that this was the work
of his old nemesis,
the Russians.
So they're signaling
the United States
that anybody
is reachable
by a Soviet-Russian target.
And basically saying,
we know who you are,
we know where you are,
we can reach out
and touch you
and do things to you
that you can't control.
We know how Putin behaves,
you know.
He puts out operations
against foreign individuals
all the time.
Looking down the pike,
Bolton saw a grave
and growing
national security threat.
Just as the great inventor
Nikola Tesla
had a century earlier,
he envisioned a weapon
that could take out
an army in an instant.
If you had a directed energy weapon
that could immobilize
thousands of people
at distance,
you could incapacitate
a government's
decision-making capability
in the middle of a crisis.
You could incapacitate
large numbers
of its troops.
With these sorts of stakes,
this would ordinarily
be a question
for the president.
Trump had apparently
been all for punishing
Cuba over the issue.
But now that Bolton
suspected Russia
was behind
Havana syndrome,
it was trickier.
Kupperman felt
that the disjointed
response from the government
was giving people
valuable cover
to duck an issue
that no one wanted
to tackle head on.
Once we make a conclusion
as to where
and who is responsible
for it,
the next question
is going to be
what are you going
to do about it?
And that's back
to the arms control
philosophy.
If you find somebody
that's cheating,
what are you going
to do about it?
So it's a lot easier
to say,
I couldn't find anybody
cheating.
Because if you make
that determination,
what do you do about it?
Trump seemed not
to share their view
about Russia's threat
to the US
and the world order
and was attempting
a different,
more friendly approach
with President Putin.
I did worry
that if I said
we've got a hypothesis
there's a Russian
directed energy weapon
that's harming our people,
we want to do
more research on it.
He may well have said,
oh, come on,
I'll just talk to Putin
about it.
We'll get that
straightened out.
And that would have been
the end of the whole thing
because Putin
would go to ground
for a considerable
period of time
or conduct their experiment
somewhere else
where we wouldn't
find out about it.
Years later,
when Adam heard
of Bolton's decision
not to approach
Trump to discuss
a Russia connection,
he would be furious.
You don't get
to dictate that.
That's not your job.
Your job is not
to withhold information
from the president,
whether you like him
or not,
or whether you think
they can handle it
or not.
That's not your job.
At the time, though,
Bolton felt it would
be premature,
admitting that they
were still working
on a hunch.
If we had had
more evidence,
if we had had
the ability to come
to a clearer conclusion,
obviously we would
have to go to
the president.
But in the ambiguous,
amorphous situation
we were in at the time,
I felt that it was
both premature
and potentially dangerous
that the whole thing
would be shut down.
So under Trump,
there would be
no aggressive investigation
of this alleged
Russia connection.
But what happened next
might surprise you.
Bolton and Kupperman
might have seen
Havana syndrome
as a rapidly evolving
global threat
orchestrated by a world power.
But they wanted
to bring the focus
back to that small island
in the Caribbean.
Wouldn't surprise me
if the Cubans
had helped the Russians
out.
That hypothesis,
I felt,
was consistent
with their past behavior.
When it comes
to suspecting Cuba
of having covert weapons,
Bolton has previous.
this.
Bolton Armstrong,
that former CIA analyst,
told us about it.
Believing is seeing
for somebody
like a John Bolton.
I believe it,
therefore I see it.
And I'm damned
I'll find it.
17 years earlier,
back during the war
on terror,
Bolton accused Cuba
of using its drug companies
as a front
for making bioweapons
such as anthrax.
And he warned
that Iran and Cuba
might get together
and bring America
to its knees.
But all of us
who know Cuba
said,
wait,
time out.
There are much
more plausible
explanations for this.
And by the way,
there's no evidence
at all.
The germ warfare claim
didn't stick.
But in April 2019,
Bolton launched
a fresh attack
on the Cuban regime
using Havana syndrome
as the starting pistol.
To justify its policy
of normalizing relations
with Cuba,
President Obama
said Cuba,
and I quote,
poses no genuine threat.
Tell that
to the American diplomats
who were attacked
in Havana.
On the anniversary
of the Bay of Pigs,
Bolton said
that America
was ready
to finish
what they'd started.
And by destroying
the Cuban regime,
Russia's old foothold
in the West,
they threatened
to kick
their Cold War nemesis
out of America's
backyard once
and for all.
The destinies
of our nation
will not be dictated
by foreign powers.
They will be shaped
by the people
who call
this hemisphere
home.
Cuba is a huge failure
of American foreign policy
going back 70-plus years,
and trying to fix it,
I think,
should be a priority
for any American president.
What do you see it fixing it as?
How would you fix it?
Eliminating the regime
and allowing the Cuban people
to pick their own government.
It's not always an invasion.
You know,
if you believe in the people,
you believe in, you know,
representative government,
the legitimacy,
sovereignty flow
from the people,
then empower the people.
This time,
Bolton wasn't talking
about an invasion.
Instead,
they would starve out
the regime
through crippling
economic sanctions.
At that dinner,
Bolton boasted
of their achievements.
We have imposed
even further sanctioned,
tightened restrictions,
and scaled back
U.S. personnel
at Embassy Havana
in response
to the vicious attacks
on American diplomats.
From now on,
no regime
will target
American citizens
with impunity.
Under this administration,
we don't throw
dictators' lifelines.
We will take them away.
Bolton and Kupperman
scoured the books
for every last remnant
of Obama's policy.
They stopped
Cuban Americans
from sending money home
via Western Union.
They cancelled
baseball contracts.
And Kupperman says
they began the process
of reinstating Cuba
on America's
most noxious blacklist
for foreign enemies,
the state sponsors
of terrorism.
Being on this list
ushers in a whole host
of new sanctions
and restrictions.
Cuba would be
a pariah state,
along with just
North Korea,
Iran,
and Syria.
Obama had removed
Cuba from this list.
Trump put them back on.
Sanctions take time.
They're not a foolproof tool,
but you can use them
to impose pain
without using
a military option.
But how does...
What I'm saying is...
So, you know, this...
So keep Cuba
out of the banking system.
That's what that does.
It does.
Over time,
people can't send money.
The country can't trade.
Things run short.
The hope was to make life
so intolerable
for the ordinary Cuban
that it would trigger
an uprising.
The Cuban people
would overthrow
the regime themselves.
You isolate a country
and, you know,
pretty soon
you had people
in the streets.
On July 11th, 2021,
protests erupted
across Cuba.
There was an anarchic feel
to the initial news reports.
Videos shared on social media
show protesters chanting
with some overturning
police cars
and looting shops.
Hundreds of people
have joined protests
against Cuba's
communist government
in Havana
and several other cities.
Once the protests began,
Cuban Americans
piled on,
organising sympathy protests
in Little Havana.
The Miami Herald newspaper
ran articles
calling for the new
president Joe Biden
to force out the regime.
Senator Marco Rubio
used the media
to push the government
to seize the moment.
What is it so hard
about coming forward
and saying,
we're not going to
tolerate brutality,
we're not going to
tolerate bloodshed,
do not step forward,
Cuban military,
and attack and hurt
your own people.
If you do it,
you're going to be
held accountable.
Fulton Armstrong,
that CIA analyst,
says he even emerged
that Cuban exiles
working in the U.S.
may have helped
spark the riots
with a targeted
social media campaign.
They did Facebook things
with pictures of
President Diaz-Canel's
head on a platter
and they said,
come to the plaza
or never come again,
you're chickens.
It was very provocative.
Parts of it
were pretty sophisticated
on very dry kindling,
so it became
a mass thing.
So that was all,
that was orchestrated?
It was originated.
Yeah.
But most of the people
who went out
were obviously spontaneous,
normal people.
It's a dirty game.
It's rough.
It's a rough game.
Before things
could escalate further,
the Cuban president
got on the radio
to call for members
of the public
to come out
and block the protesters,
which eventually
brought them under control.
Reporters tried to make sense
of these unprecedented scenes.
What do you read
into the president's response?
Do you think
he's rattled by this?
I do, yes.
I definitely think
he's rattled
and I think
this is their
absolute worst scenario.
They're hugely significant
in the sense
that we so rarely
see any protest
of any description
that isn't government
sanctioned
or government organised
in Cuba.
So to have something
that wasn't just
spontaneous,
apparently organic,
but happening
in a whole series
of parts of the island
at the same time
was truly breathtaking.
If this was
another attempted coup,
it failed again.
But these forces
would keep trying.
Cuba's resilience
is endlessly triggering.
It's like that
old American ambassador
said,
Cuba has the same effect
on US administrations
as the full moon
does on werewolves.
Havana Syndrome
might have been a weapon,
but whose weapon was it?
The way the Cubans
we spoke to saw it,
the answer was clear.
They want to strangle Cuba
and grind it
into the earth.
That's what the US
policy is doing.
Next time
on Havana Helmet Club.
This ignorance
of what's happening
inside Cuba
and of what was
in the Cuban minds
that has led
so many people
to believe that
this whole Havana
Syndrome story
could have been true.
Where's the evidence?
Science is made
with evidence.
Where is your evidence?
The new syndrome,
where is it?
They thought
that I might potentially
be held physical hostage.
But they're all
in the pocket of the Cubans.
Explain that to me.
These are just like
scientists, right?
Like, uh...
Yeah, every scientist
is for sale.
Russians.
Russians, no.
Communists.
I am not a communist.
From BBC Radio 4,
this is Havana Helmet Club.
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