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Late one evening, talking with Adam, CIA patient zero of Havana syndrome,
I noticed he was holding his index finger up in front of his face.
How are you doing?
As I get more fucked from the day, mentally, I can tell by how my eyes tick how far gone I am.
Does that make sense?
But how do you know how they tick?
Because, well, watch here.
If you watch my eyes now.
Oh yeah, I can totally see it.
Adam's eyes don't sweep smoothly, they jump.
And when they reach the side, they bounce back and forth like a faulty water sprinkler.
It's the kind of eye movement cops look for at drunk driving stops.
But mine do it because of the brain injury.
I've just learned over the years, given how smoked I am,
sometimes my eyes will tell me before my brain tells me where I'm at.
If that makes sense.
Adam loses balance, can't concentrate, suffers sensory overload, especially when he's tired.
His doctors at UPenn attributed these symptoms to whatever happened to him in Cuba,
and they devised ways to help him manage during regular checkups.
But then, in December 2019, the government took UPenn off the case.
CARE was being moved to Walter Reed, a highly respected military hospital in Washington.
UPenn told us that they felt blindsided, wondering why break up the study and start all over again somewhere new.
It was closer to headquarters, but it was also a government institution, and it made Adam suspicious.
And frankly, after my one visit, I was like, I don't think I trust these guys.
I didn't trust that, you know, that I would go to Walter Reed and not have someone get in their ear and write,
oh, he's fine, just to throw a wrench into everything.
Almost since the moment that Adam first heard the sound in his bedroom,
it seems like he's divided the world around him into people who are either with him or against him.
He believed that shifting the patients to a government hospital was an effort to better control the narrative,
a move stage-managed by non-believers in government.
Adam's distrust only grew when he began to hear of colleagues briefing against him.
One of the docs at work, he helped write a report saying that I was,
that all of this stuff was predicated on me having a panic attack in Havana.
Let's just call this a panic attack so we can make it all go away.
Did you have a panic attack?
No, I don't have a fucking panic attack.
Do you think of cricket as going to make me have a panic attack?
I was having the time of my life, so no.
I don't think going scuba diving down the street from my house
and going salsa dancing and drinking rum and smoking Cuban cigars
was the epitome of stress when it comes to living situations.
As far as Adam was concerned, there was no debate.
He had the proof.
Months before UPenn were taken off the case,
they published a second paper with those brain scans
they said showed clear changes in the Havana patients.
Adam couldn't point to shell casings or blood on the wall.
Sometimes there was so little to hold on to,
he even questioned himself.
These scientific papers, with their brightly coloured images,
they were a life raft.
The receipts for all his claims about a weapon in Havana.
The problem was, a growing, very vocal group of scientists disagreed.
From BBC Sounds, this is Havana Helmet Club.
I'm Sam Bungi.
I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is episode 8,
Cart Before the Flying Donkey.
They want to strangle Cuba and grind it into the earth.
That's what the U.S. policy is doing.
That's Michel Valdez-Sosa, a Cuban neurologist
who had been brought on to lead the Cuban investigation into Havana syndrome.
He was fed up with American policies cooked up
by people who, he says, really know very little about Cuba as a country.
They have no idea of what Cuba was like inside and what was happening.
And it's 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.
We couldn't travel to Cuba to meet him.
Our visas were turned down on the grounds that Cuba was just weary
of how this story has been covered by the international media.
So we went to Padua, Italy, where he was attending a science conference.
Good morning.
Have you been to Padua before?
No, this is my first trip.
And I sent this also.
Valdez-Sosa was born in the U.S.
Before the revolution, his parents left Havana for Chicago,
where his father worked as director of a maternity hospital.
After Castro took power, his family returned to Cuba,
passing waves of people going the other way.
His parents wanted to help build a new health care system,
and Valdez-Sosa went on to co-found Cuba's Center for Neuroscience.
When reports emerged that American diplomats
had suffered brain injuries in Havana,
the Cuban government wanted him to lead the investigation.
But it was a difficult assignment.
The Americans had already airlifted all suspected patients off the island.
So they mounted this big military kind of operation,
whisked off the patients, and we never saw them again.
The first real information he got was in early 2018
when UPenn reported their findings in the scientific journal JAMA.
Valdez-Sosa read it, and he had some questions.
He wrote to UPenn, hoping they could talk them through.
But he says UPenn didn't reply.
So in the summer of 2018,
he and some other Cuban scientists traveled to Washington
to the State Department, hoping to meet UPenn there.
But when we went there,
we spoke to staffers from the medical department,
you know, doctors, but they had not seen the patients.
He says those doctors just took turns
in reading out sections of the UPenn paper.
They would read it aloud, and then we would make our objections,
you know, and that was the conversation.
In the coffee breaks, they were ashamed.
I think they were really ashamed.
But he tried to make the most of the visit.
He did high-profile interviews with American media,
doing his best to sound like the voice of reason.
If we're sharing data more openly,
we could get down to what's really happened.
And because all the rest, I think, is speculation.
But after this interview with NBC,
another guest sounded like she didn't buy it.
This is a good thing that these doctors and scientists are here today.
Though I must say, watching Dr. Valdez,
he couldn't look you in the eye
as he was saying the things he did,
because I think they probably know a little bit more
than they're willing to put on the table.
You know what was the problem?
They didn't have a microphone,
so they put a recorder in my lap.
And I was speaking to the recorder.
So that's why I wasn't looking at it.
It was classic American paranoia over Cuba, he said,
just like this mysterious ray gun
that no one seemed to be able to produce.
In fact, Marco Rubio said,
and you can look that up,
that the fact that no evidence had been unearthed on the attacks
showed how diabolical and how sophisticated
was the Russian approach to this.
Sophisticated technology that, quite frankly,
is so sophisticated, we don't understand it.
And that reminded me of the Salem witch trials, remember?
Precisely, if there was no evidence,
that was evidence that there was a witch.
Valdez Sosa believed Havana syndrome
had turned into a witch hunt,
and he was determined to call it out.
He would hold his own conference in Cuba
for scientists willing to speak openly
about this so-called syndrome.
Of course, for all Valdez Sosa's complaints
about America's reluctance to engage with Cuba,
it seems fanciful to think the Cuban government
would allow a bunch of scientists on their own turf
to conclude there'd been microwave weapon attacks in Havana.
What this conference would turn into
was a giant pile-on over the UPenn science.
Once it got off the ground, that is.
Based on the reception he got in Washington,
he figured the approaches would be better
coming from an American,
so he called up his friend Mark Grasnick,
a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois
in his hometown of Chicago.
You know, you either want to try and figure out
what it was, and if you are, get serious about it
and allow multiple people with expertise
to look at the data,
or you want to sweep it under the rug.
You know, in the case of the CIA,
we don't know because we don't know anything
about what they do.
Rasnick's been to Cuba many times,
and when Valdez also reached out about the conference,
he was sympathetic.
I was, you know, acting as a scientist.
I was playing it straight, you know,
as someone who was trying to help them
figure out what's going on here,
and, you know, how do we fix it?
I do think the Cubans have been treated shabbily,
and I say that without, you know,
without any compunction.
The two first met back in the 1980s at a conference,
and since then, Rasnick was always looking
for more ways to collaborate
because he respected Cuba's attitude to science.
You know, the three great successes of the revolution
are science, healthcare, and education.
And the three great failures are breakfast,
lunch, and dinner.
He began calling around to all the scientists
who'd been involved in the medical response to Havana.
He was asking them to come to the conference
and discuss their findings.
I was shut down.
Were you?
I thought it was fascinating.
I mean, they should have wanted to come
and talk about their data.
My impression was that someone had talked to them before me.
One person said, basically,
I've been told not to talk to you.
And one CIA agent in particular
was against American scientists
venturing to Havana for this conference.
Here's the thing, these scientists and doctors
are brilliant people,
but they're not trained in intelligence matters
or counterintelligence matters,
nor do they understand the risks
that are involved in going to something like that.
Over the Christmas that I met him on his visit to the UK,
Adam and I took a walk through the English countryside
with the service dog that helps him with balance issues.
We're okay to go in this field, are we?
Yeah, yeah.
You're fine.
I didn't bring one.
Go.
But she went aboard.
Yeah.
It's a chance to be a dog.
He's the one.
Is that car coming?
No, I imagined it.
Oh, sorry.
No, it happens all the time out here.
It's hanging around with you too long.
Adam believed there was a very good reason
that the scientists shouldn't be going to Cuba.
If you're invited to Cuba by the Cubans,
they will wine and dine you
and treat you up and down the wazoo.
And not only that,
they're not above doing the honey pots
that the Russians do on you as well.
What's a honey pot?
When they put like an attractive woman
or something like that
or man or whatever you're into
and then film it from your room.
And so that's why oftentimes they have to come to us
and go, hey, this just happened.
And we go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You don't understand what the bigger picture is for,
what the personal ramifications are.
Or they might target you in the hotels
the same way they did other doctors
and you come back one of us.
And they don't see that all the time.
As for the scientists
who were supporting this conference,
especially those who helped arrange it,
Adam says they were not to be trusted.
But they're all in the pocket of the Cubans.
100%.
Why do you explain, like, stop.
Explain that to me.
How do you mean?
Every scientist is for sale.
Now these are pretty wild claims
and Adam's not offering any evidence.
But in his mind, he sees how it all works.
That's kind of...
The Cubans couldn't reach out direct to these people
because they would immediately call the FBI or the CIA
and go, this is happening, what do we do?
So they used these nebulous middlemen.
Adam didn't think of them as professors.
He described them as cutouts.
Facilitators in espionage parlance
doing Cuba's dirty work.
He comes from a closed world
that usually the rest of us don't have access to.
But we spoke with the scientists
that Adam tells me are proxies
or cutouts for the Cuban government.
And they didn't seem that way to us.
People like Mark Rasnick,
who told us he was merely acting as a scientist.
Or Mark Cohen, a neurologist at UCLA,
who was very clear about where his allegiances lay.
Let me just state, I'm a serious patriot.
This is an incredible country that I live in.
And I would not, under any circumstances,
choose to do anything that would compromise this country.
I mean, I wouldn't do so.
I just want you to understand
that this is my little attempt
to bring what I can in terms of my own integrity to this thing.
Cohen is a professor and an inventor
who holds many patents in the field of neuroscience.
He says if he was a proxy for anyone at the conference,
it was for the team at UPenn.
Self-appointed proxy.
Penn didn't respond to the Cuban invitation.
So the organizers contacted Cohen.
He had pioneered some of the cutting-edge
neuroimaging techniques used in their research.
So they asked Cohen to come and explain them.
He began to prepare as best he could.
Then he says he got a visit.
These three gentlemen showed up in my home,
well-dressed young men carrying briefcases.
They looked like a stereotype of what you might expect
a, you know, CIA operative to look like.
The men had seemingly come to dissuade Cohen
from attending the conference,
running him through a list of reasons
for him not to go to Cuba.
That I might inadvertently leak information
that would be potentially useful to our adversaries in Cuba.
that I might be used as a pawn in some sort of a public relations effort
on the part of the Cuban government
to whitewash their potentially nefarious involvement
in this entire process.
He says they suggested that Cuban intelligence
might take sensitive files from his laptop
or find something on there
that might compromise him personally.
You know, they thought that I might potentially
be held physical hostage.
You know, I asked
if any of them had been to Cuba,
had experienced this sort of thing,
had Cuban colleagues,
had direct interaction of any sort with this.
And of course, they hadn't.
It was a really interesting conversation
in so much as, to me,
these people seemed entirely earnest in their concerns.
While also, from my perspective,
it was laughable.
We don't know why exactly the CIA
would have been so against these scientists
travelling to Cuba.
Adam himself worried that the sands
were shifting away from his way of thinking.
But Havana syndrome had been used by the US government
to drive through hardline Cuba policy.
If there was going to be a reckoning,
perhaps they didn't want it happening in public,
on Cuban soil,
and given legitimacy by eminent American scientists.
It could also be that they did genuinely believe
Cuba posed this threat.
Either way, Cohen's response was straightforward.
I was quite eager in those conversations
to present to my visitors
that there was actually very good reason
to go there.
In fact, the best antidote we have
for misinformation
is open-minded investigation.
In the end,
not a single American scientist
involved in the investigations
into Havana syndrome
agreed to attend Valdez-Sos' conference.
But against the odds,
on March 2, 2020,
the conference in Cuba got underway.
The title,
Is There a Havana Syndrome?
It was at the Cuban Neurosciences Center,
an imposing Soviet-style building
in central Havana.
It was a balmy day
and the organizers
had the blinds drawn
and the windows open
to let a cool breeze in
and perhaps to accommodate
growing COVID jitters.
A dozen scientists
were hunched over their laptops
around a large conference table.
Some were accompanied by their teams
who took up rows of seats
lining the walls behind them.
Then there were the journalists
and Cuban medical students
who come to watch the event.
It was standing room only.
Michel Valdez-Sosa
thanked everyone for coming
and stressed the importance
of the task at hand.
We'll have a lot of opinions.
I know there are a lot
of different positions,
but only through frank
and open scientific discussion
can we reach the truth.
Over the course of two days,
the conference would hear
from speakers
who put forward theories
involving natural
and non-natural causes
from microwave and laser technology
to viral infections and pesticides.
But we need hard evidence,
not speculation.
We need science.
We need discussion, verification.
If you were Adam
or any of the other patients,
this would have all seemed
faintly ridiculous.
They believed they did
have hard evidence
in the form of multiple studies
published in JAMA,
one of the world's
most respected journals.
But the reality was
the science in those papers
was not settled.
From the beginning,
it was highly contested.
Some at the conference worried
that key steps
in the scientific process
were being skipped.
As scientists,
we trust our sources
as other people
trust their neighbors.
This is Sergio Della Sala,
an Italian neuroscientist
based at the University of Edinburgh.
We trust scientific outlets,
journals,
mighty journals.
JAMA is one of them.
I need to trust
what I read.
The first paper
had talked of
directional phenomena
and directional exposure.
The media read this
as code for weapon.
Since then,
the speculation
was around
the type of weapon used
and who wielded it.
Della Sala felt
that everyone
was skipping ahead.
He wasn't convinced
that a crime
had taken place.
Were the patient's symptoms
a definite sign of injury?
We first met Della Sala
back at that other conference
in Italy
and he put it like this.
So,
all this discussion
about the causes,
the sound,
what is causing
this syndrome
starts with the assumption
that this exists.
Right?
So,
you see
somebody claiming
that a donkey flies
and you start debating
how does
this donkey fly.
Is it because of the wing?
Is it because of the motor?
How does a donkey fly?
But the question is,
does it fly?
Show me
a flying donkey
and we start discussing.
Because otherwise,
you get lost.
Okay,
it cannot be
a sound attack,
it cannot be
a microwave.
And the onus
of evidence
is on the people
who are proposing.
It's not,
show me it's not true.
Yeah.
You have to show me
that it's true
and share the data.
UPenn did not share
all their data
in the paper.
It was like submitting
an exam paper
without showing
your workings.
Della Sala wondered,
how could you publish
a paper like this?
Well,
there's an interesting
story there.
Before scientific papers
are published,
they go through
a process called
peer review,
where a paper gets sent
to other scientists
for scrutiny.
Usually,
reviewers are anonymous,
but Professor Robert Bailow,
a neurologist
who'd been sent
the UPenn paper,
spoke out to share
what he thought
when he read it.
It should be rejected.
I said,
if this is published,
there's going to be
a backlash
from the scientific community
because I think
their conclusions
are just incorrect.
Bailow had read
about the story
of Havana Syndrome
when it broke
in the news.
I read an article
that was rather
fantastic.
In fact,
I thought,
wow,
this is more like
science fiction
than science.
And I thought,
why?
I'd like to know
more about it.
So he was excited
to get asked
to review UPenn's
findings.
But like Della Sala,
Bailow was surprised
to read the authors
were holding back
information.
They said,
interestingly,
which was unique
in my experience
and I've reviewed
hundreds of papers,
that they could not
give us all the information
because of government secrets.
So in the scientific journal,
this type of thing
was just unheard of.
What's more,
he felt they were
over-interpreting
the results
that they did publish.
There was not really
a clear pattern
to the patients.
Some had primarily headaches,
some had primarily dizziness.
Something had trouble
concentrating,
brain fall.
There was a whole
group of new symptoms.
So there was not
really objective evidence
of either ear
or brain damage.
Yet they were
suggesting it was
something like
a concussion
or a concussion
without a concussion.
The patients
had called it
immaculate concussion.
The paper endorsed
the theory
that the cause
of this concussion
could have been
the thing,
the sound and pressure
they experienced
in Cuba.
But Bailo said
there was no convincing
evidence of that either.
We don't have any
clear evidence.
What was the exposure?
Was it a weapon?
And what kind of weapon?
So you'd expect
to see either
a pattern
in a particular
group of people
or, on the other hand,
an undeniable
attack
or exposure?
Absolutely.
And in this case,
you don't have either?
Absolutely.
And then you're
sort of trying to,
you would ordinarily
have at least one
and you're trying
to match it
with the other,
but without either,
you're sort of wondering
what the conversation is.
That's the problem.
We met the team
at UPenn.
Dr. Ragini Verma
made it very clear.
Their focus
was patient care.
The first primary need
was how do we get
these patients healthy?
Everything else
was secondary.
It seems to us
they were handed
a poison chalice.
The idea of publishing
came out of left field
from the U.S. government.
There's lots
they would have done differently.
So if it was
a research project,
what you do
is you start
from scratch
and no matter
what symptoms
you present,
you're given
a standard battery across.
That is the only way
research will be
done correctly.
If you did
a clinical study,
you would have
actually gotten
exact healthy controls
that matched
their job profile.
Through somebody
would have asked
the controls
the right kind
of questions.
Did you hear this?
Were you deployed there?
Blah, blah, blah.
We didn't do
any of that.
But when people
read the papers,
they were like,
why didn't you do it?
That's not possible.
You started
after the fact.
Retrospectively,
you can only
do that much.
It was the U.S. government
who insisted
withholding data
in the name
of operational security,
leaving the team
at UPenn
to then deal
with the fallout.
One of the authors
told us that people
have misconstrued
their paper
as hardcore science
and that while
they felt it did
carry significant
public interest
and they stand
behind their work,
it says right there
in the title
of the paper,
Preliminary Findings.
Here's Dr. Randall Swanson,
that paper's lead author.
Yeah, I think
the criticism
of our efforts,
I think,
appropriately holds
to a high
scientific standard
if you're trying
to assert that
you are identifying
a completely novel
disease entity
or injury mechanism.
I think absolutely
that requires
a high level
of skepticism
and a high level
of burden of proof.
But if you theoretically
are among the first
to try to describe this,
you start with
the clinical signs
and symptoms.
The second paper,
the paper that showed
the results
of advanced brain imaging,
also came in
for criticism
at the conference.
The group was too small,
the techniques
too cutting edge,
there were problems
with the control population
and again UPenn
withheld data.
Ragini Verma
was the author
of that paper.
She insisted
they did the due diligence.
But at least
the three of us
have had infinite
conversations
to make sure
that the results
we were seeing
were not fictitious.
But so much
of this process
was out of their control.
She wanted to ask critics,
OK, what would you do?
Many at the conference
saw the U.S. government
getting in the way
of that scientific process.
And American medical sociologist
Robert Bartholomew
flew to the conference
all the way
from his home
in New Zealand
to call them out.
I am here today
as the voice
of mainstream science.
We are here today
only because
Havana syndrome
continues to be portrayed
by elements
of the U.S. government
as a mystery.
To me,
the real mystery
is how poor science,
vested interests
and superficial news reports
have created
an unfounded belief
that the Cuban government
or its proxies
have tried to harm
foreign diplomats.
Bartholomew
wanted people to understand
just how unlikely
this talk of weapons was.
The evidence
for a sonic weapon
or microwaves
is far-fetched
and would defy
the laws of physics.
Is it impossible?
I would put it on par
with the evidence
for Bigfoot,
alien abductions
and chupacabras.
This is a guy
that was a nobody.
Suffice to say
that Adam
is no fan
of Robert Bartholomew.
This is a guy
that was a part-time professor
in New Zealand,
right?
And all of a sudden now
he's the world expert
on Havana syndrome.
I've engaged with him before.
Oh yeah?
Yeah.
It didn't go well.
But what's interesting
about him
is if you start
looking at his research now,
all of a sudden
he starts popping up
in research papers
with Cubans.
Why don't you start
looking at who
he's talking to
and you start realising
that this dickhead
is a mouthpiece
for the Cuban government?
Bartholomew did work
with Cuban scientists
on this topic.
To Adam,
that meant he was
collaborating with the enemy.
But Bartholomew says
his motivations
were purely academic.
So for the record,
you're not a
counterintelligence operative
for the Cubans.
Is that right?
No, but I'm very sympathetic
to the Cubans
because I think
their economy
was hurt badly
unnecessarily.
And I think
that's a real shame.
And no one
from Cuba
ever approached you
to say,
you know,
you're on the right track.
You've got to keep,
you've got to kind of
keep writing
these articles.
No.
Bartholomew wrote a book
about Havana syndrome
with Robert Bailow,
the dizziness expert
who peer-reviewed
that first pen paper.
Adam accused Bailow
of being a cutout too.
We asked him
the same question.
Obviously not.
I'm as American
as American can be.
Have you ever,
do you know Cuba?
Have you been?
I've never been.
And I,
I mean,
only what I've seen
on TV,
that's my exposure
to Cuba.
and I have
no connections
with anybody in Cuba
or any Cuban
officials.
Russians.
Russians?
No.
Communists.
I've got a,
I am not a communist.
This attack
on Bailow's patriotism
was reminiscent
of the 1950s
when U.S. politicians
were on a wild crusade
to hunt out
communist links
at the top levels
of American society,
including prominent scientists.
When Mitch Valdezosa,
the organizer
of the conference
in Havana,
said that Senator Rubio
was conducting
a witch hunt,
he was recalling
the McCarthy hearings
from that time,
implying that American
fears about Havana syndrome
were a throwback
to Cold War paranoia.
And just like
Arthur Miller had
with his play
The Crucible,
he connected it
to a real witch hunt
that happened in 1692
in Salem, Massachusetts.
That year,
Massachusetts Bay Colony
tried and executed
14 women,
five men,
and two dogs
for witchcraft.
It was a time
when many did believe
that their neighbors
could be in league
with the devil.
Others used the witch trials
to settle old scores.
But it wasn't just
the demonizing
of the innocent in Salem
that reminded Valdez Sosa
of Havana syndrome.
He thought there was
a parallel
in the origins
of the story too.
The Salem witch trials
had begun
when the daughter
and niece
of a pastor
reported strange symptoms
like fits
and bites
and pinches
by invisible agents.
The symptoms
soon spread
to other teenage girls.
Researchers have come
to think of the episode
in Salem
as a classic case
of hysteria.
The girls' symptoms
brought on by the fear
of living in a frontier
of wilderness
they knew
as a devil's den.
At the conference,
the sociologist
Robert Bartholomew
put forward
a similar case
to explain
Havana syndrome.
That Adam and the others
had just been unable
to handle the stress
of life as an agent
in Cuba.
U.S. embassy staff
in Cuba
were a close-knit group
sharing a common
work environment
in an atmosphere
of high stress
in a foreign country
where everyone knew
that their movements
would be monitored.
And new staff
who went over to Cuba
under the Obama administration
were all told
they were told
about the past history
of low-level mischief
that had taken place
to U.S. diplomats
decades earlier.
You might wake up
in your house
and find that
your bookshelf
had been rearranged,
cigarette butts
on your kitchen table
and you don't smoke.
And that sends a message,
you know,
that we own you.
This is our house,
not your house.
It is within this backdrop
that rumors began
to circulate
that Cubans
or their proxies
using a sonic weapon
were harassing them.
Embassy staff
were scared.
To Adam,
this conference
in Havana
was always going to be
about challenging
the claim
that he'd been attacked.
But in many ways
it was worse than that.
Not only had
the UPenn science,
which Adam so relied on,
been publicly undermined,
but several of the scientists
in the room
dwelt on the idea
that what happened to him
was psychosomatic,
hysteria,
or as Adam heard it,
made up.
I actually had written
the word stigma.
I think that there is
indeed a reason
that this possibility
really has been
probably the most
under-considered
or the most controversial.
The scientists believed
that because of this stigma,
one of the explanations
for the Havana crisis
had not been getting
a fair hearing.
Thank you,
Dr. Valdez-Sosa.
I don't like the term
hysteria
because of all the
connotations it has.
And then that place,
as people know,
they're, you know.
So I think that we have
a problem of terminology
that has to be done carefully,
which may cloud the issue
if we're not careful.
Ever since Adam
first raised the alarm
in Cuba,
he's worried about
not being believed.
He says that he fought hard
to have his experiences
taken seriously
by the CIA.
We heard that
in the early days
within the CIA,
some were saying
that Adam and his colleagues
were just a bunch
of little girls
who needed to man up.
But at the conference,
Mark Cohen stressed
that even though
he was critical
of the UPenn papers,
he was not writing
the patients off.
This is not the profile
of a group of people
who are healthy.
Cohen reminded those
at the conference
that whatever was going on,
these patients were sick.
And he called on the people
in that room
to help figure out why.
It's very clear
that these individuals
are truly suffering.
And so I think that
we as a community
and certainly the people
who first saw
these individuals
have an obligation
to do everything they can
to take care of
and understand this illness.
Vados Sosa
had pitched
the Havana conference
as a beginning
of a new dialogue.
And the scientists there
were full of ideas
for future meetings
and plans
to coax the American
medical investigators
into sharing their data.
But then another illness
got in the way.
Unfortunately,
when we got back
from that meeting
was when COVID happened.
And then, you know,
by the next week,
the world was shut down.
All efforts towards
open dialogue
seemed doomed.
But as for that theory
about hysteria,
well, that had legs.
Next time
on Havana Helmet Club.
I learned about
Havana syndrome
because, like a weirdo,
I have a mystery illness alert
on Google.
Mystery illnesses
are Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan's thing,
a neurologist based in London.
She'd been following the story
of the Havana syndrome patients.
And O'Sullivan thought
they seemed similar
to some of the patients
she's dedicated her practice to.
People who have had to fight
against the stigma
that their symptoms
are all in their head.
If you have to fight
against a diagnosis,
nothing will reinforce
your symptoms more.
You know,
so if you have to prove
that you're sick,
then how are you ever
going to get better?
From BBC Radio 4,
this is Havana Helmet Club.
Listen to the latest episodes
first on BBC Sounds.
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when the latest episode drops,
make sure you're subscribed
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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.
Jesse Baker
is our editorial advisor.
Additional editing
by Simon Pearce.
Original music
by Tom Pintons.
Sound design
by Meryn Royards
and mix
by Joe McDonnell.
Commissioning editor
for the BBC
is Dylan Haskins.
Assistant commissioners
are Sarah Green
and Natasha Johansson.
Havana Helmet Club
is a yarn production
for BBC Radio 4
and BBC Sounds.
From BBC Radio 4,
the Russians will be
launching a satellite
sometime in the next
three weeks.
I'm Kim Cattrall,
back with a new series
of Central Intelligence.
This is a CIA covert op
top secret.
The drama podcast
that tells the history
of the CIA
from the inside out.
Starring Ed Harris,
Johnny Flynn,
and me,
Kim Cattrall.
Miss Page,
such a pleasure
to meet a real American.
Listen to Central Intelligence
Series 2 first
on BBC Sounds.