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More than 20,000 people work at the CIA, and as many have collected a paycheck from that tell us, the agency doesn't speak with one voice.
Adam reckons there's always been some who just wanted this whole thing to go away.
It was more than a month after he first raised the alarm in Havana that one CIA physician, Dr. Andrews, took it upon himself to help.
He was the first one that got me out of Cuba, and I say he saved my life.
Then he was sent to Cuba, was hurt.
So then they brought in a younger doctor, and he told me his job was to make this go away.
He looked at me, couldn't do it, then became our advocate.
So then they brought in a guy above him.
His job was to make it go away.
We called him the squeaky fan guy, you know.
Oh, they're hearing squeaky fans, or the fans causing cancer, or whatever.
The theory that American officials were being targeted with a secret weapon required massive action.
But if it turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, then you might be able to get away with doing, well, nothing.
In the beginning, agency cynics waved away the problem in vague terms, saying the Havana agents were being dramatic or paranoid.
But then they gravitated towards a more specific explanation.
The explanation floated back at that controversial conference organized by Cuban scientists in 2020.
But Adam and his fellow victims were like the young girls of Salem.
At one point, one of these doctors was walking around with Salem witch trial papers to convince the seniors at the CIA that we were crazy.
That's how far it was going, to the Salem witch trial papers, to say that this was mass psychogenic illness as their proof.
You know, it just, it got so laughably egregious.
Adam says this talk of hysteria was spread by Cubans as part of a disinformation campaign.
But now his own people had latched on to the idea, apparently beginning to wonder whether the answer to Havana syndrome mightn't require a thorny confrontation with Russia,
or a hunt for a mystery weapon after all.
The fact that that ended up getting pushed in the press, I mean, we knew it was coming.
It just, it took longer than I think we thought it would.
I'm Sam Bunky.
I'm Jennifer Ford.
And this is Havana Helmet Club, Episode 9, Squeaky Fans.
The problem is, you look at these people and they are indifferent as far as how they look.
They look like you and me.
This is Mark Zaid, the Washington, D.C. attorney who'd come to represent many of the victims of Havana syndrome.
And most of them remain high-functioning up to a point.
2021 was a busy year for Zaid.
It's the year that Havana syndrome went truly global.
There were cases in Kyrgyzstan.
Vienna.
India, a suspected case in Australia.
Bogota's on the list.
Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Vietnam was delayed because of a suspected outbreak on the ground in Hanoi.
I mean, I don't think there's any place that I know of as a potential attack that I don't necessarily represent clients from at this stage.
Havana syndrome was affecting more branches of the U.S. government.
The NSC, the DOD, the Chamber of Commerce.
Invariably, a ton of them are all working on issues that relate to Russia.
That year, Politico reported that Havana syndrome had been detected on every continent except Antarctica.
I think the most urgent and important issue facing the workforce today are the terrorizing attacks that are happening globally.
This is Congressman Eric Swalwell at a congressional hearing.
This is going to be a response that is beyond, if it's a foreign country, just closing down a couple of consulates.
That it is going to have to be a very, very severe response.
After the diplomatic confusion of the first Trump administration, with some officials blaming Russia while the president seemed to have a strange affection for Putin,
a Biden government offered new hope for the Havana syndrome victims.
A constellation of agencies was put to work.
Some were looking for the weapon.
Others were trying to figure out a medical diagnosis.
The new director of the CIA, Bill Burns, declared he had assigned the case to one of the agents who hunted down bin Laden.
There was an unconfirmed report that Biden had even raised the issue with Putin at a conference in Geneva.
But some had picked up on a subtle shift.
In official documentation, the government had stopped using the word attack.
Even the Havana Act, a bill brought in to provide medical care for the victims, seemed unclear about who it was actually for.
Some of these folks are being sent to different military medical institutions for treatment,
but they are not being acknowledged as real victims for a variety of political, institutional reasons.
Cover your ass, protect my reputation CIA reasons.
It's a total mess.
Instead of attacks, the official term changed to anomalous health incidents.
The victims began to worry that alongside the tough talk of some officials,
others were trying to reframe this, not as a security issue, but as a health issue.
At a State Department press briefing, an NBC journalist challenged the official line.
With all due respect, with all that you say has been done,
there has been criticism from a number of victims of what they don't call anomalous health incidents, by the way,
because they think that diminishes and disparages what they are suffering.
There was a worrying trend on the rise in the media, too.
New agents and diplomats broke cover to speak publicly about their ongoing problems,
appearing on CNN and MSNBC.
60 Minutes ran another special.
But all this exposure had an unintended consequence.
In certain corners of the internet, these stories came in for ridicule.
Too many mojitos last night?
You may have Havana syndrome.
Yeah, I got Havana syndrome.
Having another cold beer.
That sort of thing.
The left-wing political podcast, Chapo Trap House,
spent a lot of time sarcastically analyzing the coverage of Havana syndrome.
The host sounded particularly suspicious of a story of a military officer
overcome by nausea and headaches in his car,
while his child began to cry in the back seat.
I don't know what more evidence you need.
This is invisible death race, clearly.
I mean, I can't think of any other thing that would account for having a headache
or being nauseous in traffic, or having a two-year-old child cry in a car.
The hosts, who were generally strongly anti the CIA,
wondered if these were the complaints of a generation
who just weren't as tough as their Cold War predecessors.
I like the idea that, like, these are millennial spooks who are just like,
I'm tired and, like, coming up with bogus diseases to get out of doing work.
Yeah.
I have a microwave syndrome.
I can't come in today.
That's the next Ferris Bueller's Day off.
You can't see any physical manifestation.
Here's Mark Zade again.
And that absolutely has contributed to the difficulty in getting people to believe
that these people are real victims.
Some of the victims have made public comments where they're like,
I wish I had been shot so I can show you the bullet wound.
We have witnessed enough of the pain and suffering of victims to tell you
their symptoms are life-changing.
I mean, I saw it recently with a client who was brilliantly articulate,
other than a few gaps in their statements.
And then, all of a sudden, it was as if they were a puppet
and the person holding the strings just dropped them.
I've never seen anything like it.
I never saw that transformation.
Literally, it was like a light switch.
These victims say they had to fight tooth and nail
for the medical attention they received.
Take Mark Polymeropoulos, the veteran operative affected in Moscow.
I remember, you know, sobbing in a hotel room with my wife.
I just, you know, and I couldn't, and then at that point,
I'd lost my ability to drive.
I lost my long-distance vision.
So I was really going down the drain in the toilet,
and again, the medical staff at CIA was not helping me at all.
It was almost three years between Polymeropoulos first reporting his experience in Moscow to the CIA
and finally being granted access to care at Walter Reed Hospital,
who were now handling suspected cases.
And he says those doctors diagnosed him with mild traumatic brain injury
caused by an external exposure event.
But his health had become so bad that back in the summer of 2019,
Polymeropoulos had taken early retirement.
I had a lot of adversaries over the years, whether it's, you know, Al-Qaeda or, you know, Hezbollah or,
you know, Saddam Hussein.
I mean, I was involved in so many different fights and conflicts.
Like you say, perhaps your luck had run out.
I think that's what, I mean, I really, it's, you know, it just is.
As he told us, he's been shot at and rocketed at many times over the years.
Maybe these symptoms were showing from injuries picked up during combat.
That's nonsense.
I mean, there's nothing on my medical records.
I've had physicals out the wazoo.
I mean, you know, I get poked and prodded all the time for every deployment.
So no, there's nothing there.
I wish there was a pre-existing condition because you could treat it.
Or there's, I don't know, there's, you know, there's some environmental thing.
Good.
Then you get treated.
I don't care.
I just want to feel better.
He loved his job.
He finds it hard to reconcile his situation with the claims that he and the other patients
might have somehow brought this on themselves.
So why would it, so what would it be?
A psychogenic, you know, reaction, this idea of kind of mass hysteria.
But I wasn't even thinking that when I went there.
The thing on all this is like it just, the entire debate misses the point that people are really suffering.
For a long time, it was officially known as hysteria.
But by 1980, that term was considered so toxic, it was dropped from psychiatry's diagnostic manual.
Instead, people called it conversion disorder.
There's also psychogenic or psychosomatic.
Many now prefer functional neurological disorders.
But all the name changes have failed to outrun old assumptions.
That functional illness is a delusion that affects only the weak, poorly educated,
or, like those in Salem, teenage girls.
It's nothing to do with education or being intelligent or unintelligent.
This is Dr. Susanna Sullivan.
She's a neurologist based at University College London Hospital,
who works with what people now call functional illness.
I do think it made a difference in the Havana subjects because they were educated,
well-traveled people, and not all young women.
And I think that made people think that they were less likely to be affected.
Whereas really, there's absolutely nothing protects you.
It can happen to absolutely anybody.
O'Sullivan talked to us about the struggle to agree on terms for these illnesses.
The changing of names in order to destigmatize these conditions has been done for a very long time
and has been done many, many times.
And in my opinion, it doesn't work.
So I stick with words like psychogenic and hysteria
because history suggests that sanitizing a name only works
for as long as people don't know what that new name means.
I think to destigmatize these conditions, we need to normalize the mind-body interaction.
If I'm nervous, my heart beats faster.
Now, you would not say to me that my heart was beating faster on purpose.
I have no control over that.
You wouldn't say I was imagining it.
And you wouldn't say to me you could stop that if you wanted to.
O'Sullivan stressed she hasn't met or examined the patients from Havana
or any of the other places caught up in this story.
It's just that what she read of the symptoms that people were experiencing
didn't seem all that foreign to her.
Problems with balance and concentration.
You know, our concentration is very, very easily disrupted by small things.
Our balance is very easily disrupted by small things.
Walking along a cliff edge or walking in some place where you feel like there's danger.
So paying attention to your body is detrimental to the automatic quality of movement
and detrimental to those filtered out sensations that are supposed to be filtered out.
I mean, I understand all that.
It's just how do you get from that to, you know, talking about these patients from Havana,
that they have to sit in dark rooms, they can't think properly anymore.
It is astounding, but it is also incredibly common.
Often there's a kind of a looping effect where symptoms are additive.
So you start out with one small symptom, which is, you know, that you feel dizzy.
And then you think, well, you know, am I okay walking?
And then you start noticing you're walking and your walking becomes unstable.
And you see a doctor and your doctor says, well, do you have any bladder difficulties?
Or I'm randomly picking symptoms now.
But doctors then put emphasis on particular things and say, now, now pay attention to this thing.
Next things are being suggested to you by doctors and by family members and by your own research
and by your own anxiety.
So all of these sort of internal and external looping factors often cause a progression of disability.
And it is usual for there to be lots of symptoms.
It's not usual for there just to be one.
O'Sullivan has her own story from when she broke her foot.
Even once the cast was off, she convinced herself it hadn't healed properly.
My foot was so wasted.
I just thought it looked more than it should be.
And I went through sort of a period where I thought, that can't be right, that can't be right.
And I limped down to my doctor and said, I want, you know, you need to x-ray that again
because there's something wrong with it.
And the x-ray was totally fine.
And I walked home normally.
So it doesn't matter if you're a doctor and you understand how bodies work.
If you have a sufficiently vivid picture in your mind of something happening inside your body
that doesn't seem right, then you're vulnerable.
In fact, we're all vulnerable.
We just need to meet the right circumstance.
Professor Simon Wesley is a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King's College London.
He's studied how symptoms like O'Sullivan is talking about can spread in a group and become an epidemic,
often known as mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness.
Like O'Sullivan, he's careful to point out that he doesn't know what happened in Havana.
But he says the elements of the saga seem to follow a pattern he's familiar with.
He can list the makings of an outbreak like a good recipe.
A good name is important.
That does seem to make a difference, I'm afraid.
Add a plausible explanation.
Absolutely essential.
And the more technological it is, it seems to have more traction than if it doesn't.
Throw in a tense environment and, crucially, he says, a good villain.
Like Putin, or indeed the situation in Cuba where, you know, there's a long history of tension, you know, between the Cuban regime and America.
So you need that setting.
If you don't have that setting, most of these things will probably just sort themselves out of their own accord.
But with a plausible villain, things can get much more intense quite quickly.
Wesley says looking at the context and background is often key to picking out cases of mass psychogenic illness.
He told us a story from the rural town of Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944, as World War II raged.
Many, many years ago, more than I care to remember, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this story called the Phantom Gasser of Mattoon,
in which in a relatively closed, isolated rural communities, rumours started to spread that there was a gasser or a phantom anesthetist,
who was called in the local press, on the loose.
Somebody reported that they'd been sprayed by a poison gas of some shape or form.
A local newspaper report told of the first victim noticing a strange smell in her bedroom.
What she initially thought was the scent of flowers drifting in through the window became steadily overpowering.
She tried to move, but found herself temporarily paralysed and screamed for help.
One theory was that chloroform had been sprayed in through the window in a fine mist.
This then caught on for all sorts of reasons, and more and more people started to report the same thing.
And then it became a big story, and vigilante groups went out looking for this Phantom Gasser.
Headlines in the local press, Mad Gasser yet to be found, etc., etc.
There were sightings of a possible assailant, a tall, thin man.
And there was speculation he might be the fugitive Nazi who'd recently escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Illinois.
But the people affected, you know, really believed they'd been attacked, and the symptoms they had were fits and faints, were noticed by doctors, so, you know, verified by doctors, who didn't necessarily agree with the cause.
But that they were sick and in real trouble could not be denied.
Wesley says, with the backdrop of the Second World War, the general public was primed for poison gas attacks.
You had to walk around with a gas mask in Britain, and also people forget in America as well.
So the thought that this was an early Nazi attack was there.
And people were very, very frightened of what poison gas could do with genuine reasons.
So this rumour had some cachet.
Wesley can reel off a list of these stories.
Illness spreads as word goes round a tight-knit community or a profession that you too may be at risk.
Sick building syndrome starting in Scandinavia, you don't hear much about that now, but was quite a big issue 30 years ago.
Concern over computer screens, so new technology, again.
Like mobile phones or wind turbine syndrome had a kind of flourishing for a while.
So, yes, we get these things.
Wesley says that what connects these events is that they're often reported in the press as mystery illnesses.
Because of the stigma, it's as if people have to relearn over and over that mass psychogenic illness could be an explanation,
even when no one can agree on another cause.
There's often a sort of a very strong sort of association with there must be something, there must be something.
And no matter how hard people are looking for the something, the something can never be found.
Suzanne O'Sullivan thinks it's important to put the possibility of functional illness on the table from the start.
I think an old-fashioned way was that it was a thing called a diagnosis of exclusion,
which means that basically you look for every other possibility and two years down the line when you've done 10 scans
and you found all of the tests were negative and therefore you're running out of options
and therefore you think, oh, it must be psychosomatic.
We now know that's a wrong approach because the sooner you treat psychosomatic symptoms,
the better chance they have of getting better.
In her clinic, O'Sullivan has come across people who've lived with the wrong diagnosis for many years,
starting out on a unit diagnosing difficult-to-treat seizures.
I expected to be working entirely with epilepsy and there were four beds in that unit
and, you know, at least 50% of the people I admitted to hospital on any given week
who came into hospital because they believed they had epilepsy,
they tried lots of epilepsy treatments and the epilepsy treatments weren't working.
Possibly for decades, did not have epilepsy.
O'Sullivan says seizures caused by psychological distress can so closely mimic those caused by epilepsy
that they get mistaken all the time, even by paramedics.
She also pointed out that they can be no less debilitating.
I'll give you an example.
So I met a young woman and she was actually having about 100 seizures a day,
which is unbelievable.
You couldn't possibly live your life that way.
Did you see her having seizures?
Yes, I saw her having seizures in the office.
She had multiple seizures during our conversation.
She did not really believe that the problem was psychosomatic,
but she didn't have to believe.
Something in the conversation I'd had with her that asked her to change her expectations
worked at the same unconscious level as the disorder.
And I met her a week later and the seizures had gone down to 10 a day.
And all I had done was have a single conversation.
There's a whole other dimension, which is that actually the commonest trigger for a functional disorder
is an identifiable physical illness.
This is Professor John Stone, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh.
Our brains have an amazing capacity just to get stuck at a certain moment in time.
And then they just can't get unstuck.
Stone says he was still a trainee neurologist when he first started coming across patients
with functional illnesses and found that most were being totally ignored.
So these are people in neurology who have problems like paralysis of their leg
or they have tremor or seizures.
And my experience was that they would be accused of being bogus
or he said it was all in their mind or it wasn't a problem for neurology.
The tests are normal, goodbye.
The patient might get referred to a psychiatrist who wouldn't deal with the physical symptoms
and they'd often end up falling between the cracks.
And I just couldn't understand why people weren't more interested in them
because they clearly had the problems that they were experiencing.
When Stone began to write papers describing these disorders and how to diagnose them,
he got pushback within his field.
Senior neurologists were coming up to me rather concerned
that I was putting these things in print,
which tells you something about neurologists' attitude to these patients as well.
There has always been a sort of ambivalence about whether they really had the things
that they were complaining of.
It was confusing to him.
He was finding it hard to square the large numbers of people with functional disorders
that neurologists see.
There's loads of these patients.
It's one of the commonest things, commonest conditions that we're referred.
With the widespread ambivalence in his field,
there hadn't even been anything about these patients in his training.
But he made a fascinating discovery.
It wasn't always this way.
If you opened a neurology textbook from 1890,
there was a huge section on hysteria with lots of information about how to make a positive diagnosis,
what caused it, and actually what to do about it.
The symptoms they had of their leg dragging or their hand clenched in a fist
or having a seizure are the same.
And when I read these books by a neurologist in the 19th century,
they're describing exactly the same problems that I see in my clinics.
And all of that knowledge just sort of disappeared.
So what happened?
How did this illness fall out of the neurology textbooks?
Well, you can make a good case that the turning point came in World War I.
You had doctors in 1914, from September, October onwards,
who were puzzled by troops coming back from the battlefields.
This is Edgar Jones,
a professor in the history of medicine and psychiatry at King's College, London.
Because they were coming back with fatigue,
that they weren't able to function.
They'd have aches and pains, difficulty concentrating,
poor memory, being confused, dizziness,
not being able to make decisions quickly.
So all the things that a soldier has to do on the battlefield,
becoming very vulnerable and not being a trustworthy soldier.
And yet they didn't seem to be suffering from an established known pathology,
an illness that they could put their finger on.
Some thought the men might have been exposed to a toxic gas.
Others thought it was caused by blast waves from shells.
That people were getting some post-concussive injury,
that this was a consequence of this new industrial war,
the intensity of the artillery bombardments.
People talked about it being like a concussion without a concussion,
and worried that with numbers on the rise,
whatever was going on was taking effective troops off the front line.
The fear was that it was something that hadn't been seen before.
So if they didn't understand what the processes were,
you would find that your army was being slowly eroded by casualties,
where mysterious symptoms, no obvious treatment,
and no way of thinking of how on earth would we prevent it
happening to troops that we're sending out.
The question of what to do with these soldiers became a national conversation,
attracting interest from doctors of all backgrounds.
You get physicians, you get surgeons, public health doctors,
all very interested in what is then beginning to be spoken about as shell shock.
British psychologist Charles Myers was the first person to document cases of shell shock.
He's clearly able to show that there's something going on in their minds
that's causing these symptoms, that they're not a direct effect of wounds,
that this is to do with the stressor that they've been through
and the impact that's had on their physical function.
The British opened special units for these men in London hospitals
with a brand new approach to treatment.
A hospital which treated psychological illnesses as a branch of medicine,
as a physical illness.
This work was challenging people's understanding of hysteria.
It was no longer an affliction just for women or troubled individuals.
Now there was a new possibility.
The possibility that even the most robust, highly trained individual,
the best soldier, you know, you could possibly have,
if you put them through extreme repeated trauma,
they will ultimately suffer from shell shock.
But this presented a threat to the war effort.
The army couldn't have large numbers of men taking long spells in hospital,
and they worried that it would become an escape route from the front line.
It was at this moment that the British army committed what should perhaps go down
as the original sin of functional illness,
when they latched onto a new way of thinking in the hopes of shaming men back to the front line.
There's no sort of space in between for psychology, for psychological wounds.
So you're either a brave wounded soldier, or you're a coward.
So the army turns against shell shock as a term,
and they say, from now on, summer 1917, you can't use that term.
And so, instead of this being a breakthrough moment in understanding the connection between mind and body,
John Stone says everyone just stopped talking about it.
The whole episode was kind of a bit of an embarrassment, I think.
They were a bit embarrassed about the fact this had happened to all of these British soldiers.
And after that, you could see interest from certainly within neurology really evaporated very rapidly.
Freud picked it up, declaring he could fix all these problems with a good chat on the couch.
Freud had said on his theory that this is entirely about, you know, how you were brought up,
or your sexuality, or whatever.
So it was a classic disorder of the mind.
Simon Wesley again.
And so, and a lot of other things were swept up into, it is all in the mind.
And of course, that's not, it is rather more complicated than that.
If you concentrate purely on the psychological, or you concentrate purely on the biological,
you miss out the fascinating and extraordinary workings of the two.
None of these experts could be certain that functional illness explained Havana syndrome.
But they were concerned that misunderstanding and stigma had led others to dismiss the possibility out of hand.
When Susanne O'Sullivan read about the Havana patients in the first UPenn paper,
she found some of the language unhelpful.
For example, the paper said that the patients were different from many sufferers of group functional disorders,
because they were not faking their symptoms and they were eager to return to work.
So it really implied that people with psychosomatic symptoms don't want to work.
Most of my patients are incredibly hardworking and conscientious.
So it's, you know, it's pretty offensive to suggest that they're just lazy people.
This is a story in which experts, in weapons, security, politics, brain injury, functional disorder,
have to be careful to keep their professional bias in check.
To a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Well, I will say on, I want to say on your recording as well, that I've, I've not met any of these patients.
I don't know what's wrong.
I wouldn't, it'd be unprofessional of me to say that what's wrong with them.
Johnstone sees a way that functional illness can explain the lasting symptoms the patients are suffering from.
They're common in his clinic.
He even says that functional illnesses can show up on brain scans.
And so he thought it should just be in the conversation.
And he wrote to the paper's publishers to say as much.
I just wanted to highlight it, really.
The idea that they could have a functional disorder should be on the table.
What if there was no one outside Adam's apartment?
Or Mark Lenzi's Guangzhou high-rise?
Or moving in the service chase of Dr. Andrew's hotel bathroom?
It was a seductive idea, neat in its own way.
And this is precisely why Adam thinks those voices in the CIA were gravitating towards the theory.
Just as the specter of a weapon had been useful for anti-Cuba hardliners,
hysteria might be irresistible to those who now saw an issue spiraling out of control.
But if they were looking for a way out of a hole, as far as Adam was concerned, this wasn't it.
You're telling me that all these specialists across the United States can't tell the difference
between a psychosomatic episode and actual fucking brain damage?
It doesn't even pass the sniff test.
He does suspect in some cases there was other stuff going on.
So are there people that are in the field that have had a freakout?
As Havana Syndrome went global, all sorts of things were lumped in.
Probably, yeah.
Are there sight cases?
Yeah, 100%.
I know some.
Are there pre-existing condition cases?
Yes.
Pitti says there are core cases who had experiences that you can't explain away.
I'd get up on a chair and I'd look over the wall behind my house,
which was an empty U.S. Embassy home.
And the way I describe it, if you go to the ocean and you sit behind a seawall,
you know, there's no wind or very minimal, but if you pop your head up, it just blasts you, you know.
And that was the feeling when I was doing the recordings, is, you know,
down here, I'm all right, and up here, it's like, holy shit, something, you know,
this is very intense, whatever is hitting me.
As it turns out, this didn't make sense to John Stone either.
There seemed to be some very unusual experiences that people had,
which are way out of the domain of a functional disorder.
Someone saying, you know, I went behind a pillar and I didn't feel something,
and I came back from the pillar and then I could, there was a buzzing.
He began corresponding with Dr. Kenneth Foster, a microwaves expert in Pennsylvania.
At one time, Foster was a vocal skeptic of the pulsed microwave weapon theory.
Back in 2019, he told a reporter that for all the evidence of a brain-frying microwave weapon,
you might as well say little green men from Mars were shooting beams of energy.
But now he and Stone were having a more nuanced conversation
that allowed Stone to put forward another theory.
I said, you don't need to have a brain injury.
Is it possible to just make people, give people an unpleasant symptom?
And he said, oh yeah, you could give someone an unpleasant symptom.
I said, well, that's all you need to do to be a trigger.
So I think it's quite possible that somebody could have been pointing something at somebody.
Oh, I didn't expect you to say that.
All it had to do is cause a slightly alarming symptom
for it to have triggered in some people a persistent illness state.
So for all I know, people have been pointing something at somebody.
Classic cases of mass psychogenic illness revolve around an imagined boogeyman,
the devil in Salem, the mad gasser in Mattoon.
But in Stone's vision of Havana at the end of 2016,
hysteria struck, and so perhaps did the thing.
Next time on Havana Helmet Club.
I am convinced that the evidence that exists in the classified arena
directly contradicts the public conclusions expressed by federal agencies
as to the origin, cause, and scope of AHIs.
You know, there are things that I can't say because it'd be illegal,
but there's so much more out there.
It's like the iceberg, right?
You only see a third of the iceberg.
Two-thirds of it is below.
If you have video, if you have recordings, if you have evidence,
if you've got travel data, if you've got the medical data that backs up
what the recording data is, like, I don't understand.
What do we need?
What is the threshold that we need for someone to say this is real?
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.
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.
In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s,
the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers.
Men and women accused of passing information to the police and the British Army.
But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA
was himself an informer.
A secret British Army agent with the codename Steak Knife.
These were police agents, but that defined other agents.
Just how was one man allowed to lead a double life for so long?
It's not like James Bond.
It's not a black and white situation.
When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe?
I wouldn't even know where to start and I'm with the IRA.
Steak Knife.
Listen now on BBC Sounds.