Hey, Anna, it's me.
I wish I could talk to you.
Something's wrong with me.
I started feeling bad about an hour ago.
I don't have a sense of balance, and...
Basically, for the last hour, it felt like I'm having a stroke or something.
I'm having a hard time talking.
I can't describe feeling it.
It's mid-November 2020, and an official with the National Security Council,
who I'll call John, leaves these voicemails for his wife.
As John is leaving work that day, something happens.
Something that, to this day, he still can't explain.
It's around 5 p.m. on the grounds of the White House,
and he hears this ringing in his ears.
He's in pain, but he keeps walking.
His body goes numb.
He's having trouble moving his hands and fingers.
He's panicking, but he's still just trying to get home.
So he makes his way out of the White House gates into the park outside.
And that's where John collapses, falls straight to the ground.
Now, this is a young guy, late 30s, healthy,
and here he is, outside the White House, thinking he's going to die.
Hey, Anna, I just, I don't want to worry you, but I'm...
Somehow, John gets himself a lift, which takes him to the hospital.
An ER doctor rushes over to him, takes a look at him, and asks,
Are you on drugs?
John shakes his head no.
Doctors find three cell phones on him, and a White House ID badge.
A few hours pass, and John regains his speech.
The doctors suspect he had a massive migraine with aura.
In other words, a bad fucking headache.
He has no idea what's going on.
But eventually, a possibility presents itself.
One that even by his own admission is hard to imagine.
Because of his job with the National Security Council,
he has access to very sensitive information
about some of the most bizarre health anomalies of our time.
There has been a significant increase in reports of health incidents
affecting U.S. spies and diplomats in recent months.
What John realized was that what he experienced is eerily similar
to the symptoms reported by spies and diplomats in Cuba, in China, in Russia.
A range of debilitating symptoms, including headaches, nausea, vertigo, trouble seeing or hearing.
So he wonders, is that what this is?
Suspected cases have spread across more than half a dozen countries.
More than 130 possible cases now reported across the globe.
He and his colleagues begin to think maybe what happened to him wasn't a massive migraine.
Maybe it's Havana syndrome.
Some have even been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
But what or who is causing the symptoms is still unknown.
The first attacks happened in Havana, Cuba.
I'm Adam Entis.
And I'm John Lee Anderson.
From Vice World News, this is Havana Syndrome.
Episode 1, Get Off the X.
So, can we just start with, when did you first hear about Havana Syndrome?
I'd had a coffee with the source and he told me something was brewing in Havana.
But that was a week or two before the story broke.
So, some U.S. government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba,
they've reported some incidents which have caused a variety of physical symptoms.
Okay, so just to give the audience a little background here.
About a year after the news broke, in November 2018,
you and John Lee Anderson published a story together in The New Yorker,
which really becomes the definitive piece on the mystery of the Havana Syndrome.
How did you all start working together?
I knew I wanted to do this story.
The intelligence community in the world of spycraft is my wheelhouse.
But I had absolutely no connections in Cuba at all.
So I talked to my editor, David Remnick, about it.
And he told me to get in touch with John Lee.
I know of no reporter who knows Cuba better than John Lee.
He lived and reported in Cuba for years.
And he wrote the definitive book on the life of revolutionary Jay Guevara.
When Adam called me, I was excited at the prospect of working on the story.
He's obviously a phenomenal reporter in his own right.
Just the year before, he'd won the Pulitzer for his reporting on the Russia investigation.
I thought, great, with Adam's background reporting on espionage
and my knowledge of Cuba, it could be fun and we could make a great team.
When we started our reporting on this,
what we discovered is that there was a severe lack of understanding and agreement
among people within the U.S. government as to what the Havana Syndrome even was.
A lot of them had their suspicions concerning who or what was behind it,
but didn't know for sure.
What was clear was that the incidents had huge implications.
Could the U.S. no longer keep its diplomats and spies around the world safe?
But for the longest time, it was impossible for me to find a single victim of this mystery illness
who would talk to us about their experience.
Until I found Audrey Lee.
Long fucking day.
Man, you're just sitting in here in the heat without the window down?
You just really like the heat that much, Adam?
I don't mind.
Southern Californian guy, huh?
So, where are we right now, Adam?
We are in Roanoke, Virginia, and we're heading to the home of an American diplomat.
All the calls that we've had have been on the phone.
This is the first meeting we've had face-to-face.
Audrey Lee is a pseudonym that we used for the article.
She didn't even tell me her real name.
At first, she would only talk to me on the phone and wouldn't even tell me where she was.
I didn't really know much about her, other than she was a diplomat,
a consular official at the U.S. Embassy in Havana from 2015 to 2017.
But the secrecy around this story made me question whether she really worked for the State Department
or whether she was a spy.
Hi.
Hello.
Sorry.
Come on in, please.
We're double-vaxxed and everything.
Hi, I'm Adam.
I'd known her for three years before she agreed to meet with me.
Oh, yeah, we should also talk about names.
Along with our producer, Jessie Alejandro Cottrell.
What do you want to do?
So, I am in a much better place in terms of using my name now than I was the last time we spoke.
So, if you want, we can go with that.
And that's when Audrey, to my surprise, agreed to have us reveal her true identity.
I'm Tina Onifer.
I'm a career Foreign Service officer with the Department of State.
Okay, so not a spy.
But she is a very experienced Foreign Service officer.
Tina's in her early 50s.
Blonde.
Super friendly and welcoming.
But she's got this look about her.
Her eyes look tired.
When we meet her, she seems almost out of breath.
So, here we are.
That's my husband.
He's working.
He's in the middle of a work call right now.
So, please come on through.
In early 2017, Tina's living with her husband and 12-year-old twins in a quiet neighborhood in Havana, Cuba, called Cubana Can.
It's the neighborhood where many foreign diplomats, and also the spies pretending to be diplomats, live.
It's a leafy suburb on the west end of the city.
Lots of villas and comfortable houses.
And also some mansions built in the 40s and 50s, just before the Revolution.
Tina and her family get to stay in an even nicer home than some of her colleagues.
The Cuban police maintain sentry booths throughout the neighborhood to keep a close eye on the foreigners, as well as to keep the place secure.
There is extra vigilance wherever Americans live.
And so, in the second year of her posting, Tina and her family are living in this big house with a backyard full of tropical flowers and mango trees.
This is one of the most troubling interviews I've done, partly because Tina has had health problems for years.
And even though we'd spoken on the phone and I knew she was sick, I didn't realize how debilitating her condition was.
Now, if you could tell me the story of the event, you know, if I remember right, your husband was away on business at the time.
You know, you maybe start the story when you're coming home from work.
Sure.
Well, I don't remember coming home from work that day, unfortunately, but I must have come home relatively early,
because I usually did when he was gone, just so the kids had somebody there.
We had pasta for dinner.
Always a favorite for the kids, and it's an easy, lazy mama meal for me when my husband isn't there,
who's a much better cook than I am.
So we had pasta, and we had already eaten.
After dinner, the kids go upstairs to play, and Tina cleans up.
So it's probably a little bit after 8, not 100% sure, but just based on where the kids are.
Standing at the kitchen window, washing the dishes, and I know I'm washing the big pasta pox.
It's heavy in my hands.
I can actually feel it when I think about it.
So the water's running, which is the only real sound that I can hear.
Tina's at the sink.
The lights are on.
It's around 8 o'clock, so it's dark outside.
She can't see them, but she knows the Cuban police are stationed at the guard post in front of her neighbor's house.
And right in the midst of that pot washing is when I felt it.
I didn't hear anything except the water running.
The sensation that I felt was an overwhelming sense of inexplicable anxiety.
There was no reason for it.
I was not stressed at all.
And there was incredible pressure and pain in my head and my ears.
I'd never felt anything like that before.
I felt paralyzed.
And I think it's just sort of one of those, you're in a dream and you can't move.
That's kind of how it felt.
It was the most bizarre feeling.
It went on for who knows how long.
Maybe a couple of minutes.
But in the midst of it, in the midst of just standing there gripped in all of this pain and anxiety,
I did remember hearing the security officer.
His voice is ringing in my head.
Tina's now remembering how she had recently overheard a security officer warning her colleagues that if they ever thought something or someone was after them,
that they should immediately get off the X, meaning get away from the site, the X, where you think you're being targeted.
Saying, get off the X, move to a different part of the house, put something between you and the source of whatever's trying to harm you.
As soon as I recalled those words, I moved, and I moved quickly.
And I went into, maybe 15 feet away, into the family room, which has kind of oddly angled walls.
So I put sort of a wall and a half between myself and what I assumed was the source,
which was either the kitchen window or the open screen door next to the kitchen window.
And all of a sudden, it was like a spell had been broken.
The anxiety went away immediately.
The pressure reduced as well.
And I'm just trying to get a hold of myself, my thoughts.
I'm very confused, very disoriented still.
And in the midst of all of that, I remembered that the kids are upstairs.
And I freak out.
Because now all of a sudden, I realize my kids might have just gotten hit by that thing.
She runs up the stairs.
Turn to my left, and they're sitting in their bedroom on the floor, playing a board game together, of all things.
I have never felt such relief in my life as when I saw them there.
And so I'm trying to kind of calm down and collect myself a little bit.
Hey, that was weird.
Did you guys feel that?
Did you hear anything?
That was really interesting, wasn't it?
They looked at me like I was crazy.
They had no idea what I was talking about.
And I just walked down the hall and went into the bedroom.
And I lay down, and that was it.
I didn't sleep.
But I also just, I couldn't focus on anything.
I was just mentally adrift.
The next morning, you come down, and you're fixing breakfast.
I was wondering if you can tell me about fixing breakfast for the kids.
It wasn't so much fixing breakfast as facilitating.
My son is health-obsessed.
And so I think he was probably trying to torment his sister with the ingredients of the cereal she was consuming.
And he asked me if I wouldn't mind reading them off.
Day before, no problem.
I was kind of vain about my eyesight because I was, you know, in my late 40s, and I still didn't need glasses.
I could still read everything just fine.
And so I would laugh at my peers and be like, ha, no glasses for me.
And he asked me if I would read the ingredients on the side of the cereal box.
Sure, of course.
Took it down.
Looked at it.
It's blurry.
I can't read anything.
Why can't I read anything?
And I'm moving it around.
You know how older people do that when they're trying to focus on something closer, further away, this way, that way, blinking my eyes, adjusting my gaze, adjusting my head tilt.
Nothing.
It was a blur.
Absolute blur.
And that was when I realized something was wrong.
There's a backstory to what happened in Tina's kitchen.
A history here.
Two and a half years before that night, in December 2014.
Good afternoon.
Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.
President Obama makes a surprise televised announcement that he's ordering the full restoration of diplomatic ties with Cuba.
We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests.
And instead, we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.
At the same time, in Havana, on Cuban state television…
President Raul Castro informs the Cuban people of the news, one of the last standing vestiges of the Cold War is seemingly being pulled down in the Americas.
The world learns that the two countries have been engaged in secret talks for months, and now there are plans to fully reopen the Cuban embassy in Washington, as well as the U.S. embassy in Havana.
They shut the embassy in 1961, two years after the Cuban Revolution had dramatically changed the relationship between the two countries.
But since the 70s, the Americans had maintained a bare-bones diplomatic mission where people could do basic things like process visas, stuff like that.
But with Obama's announcement, the two countries would fully restore relations, the fancy term diplomats like to use for this international reunion is rapprochement.
When you heard the news that there was rapprochement going on, what was that like?
Hearing the news? It was pretty thrilling.
For a foreign service officer like Tina, the full restoration of diplomatic relations is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
A friend of mine texted saying, dude, turn your TV on now. It was on. It was being announced on television.
She'll be part of a staff that helps steer a historic opening. It will be hard work, but Tina's thrilled.
And I was shocked that this place I thought I was going to go to that was going to be super closed off and super isolated,
all of a sudden it's going to be an embassy and it's going to be a big deal and rapprochement.
And we're going to be best friends with the Cubans and everything's going to be great and everything's going to be wonderful.
Yeah, I can't wait to go. That was it.
As the number two consular official at the embassy, her job is to manage teams that help American citizens abroad.
Making sure visa adjudications are running the way they're supposed to,
making sure the American Citizen Services section has everything they need.
If there's an American citizen emergency, obviously everyone drops everything and focuses on that.
If you're a U.S. citizen who traveled to Cuba and lost your passport and need help getting home,
or if you just got arrested after a drunken fight at a rum bar,
Tina's team would be your one phone call from jail.
There is much work to be done.
With the loosened travel restrictions authorized by the Obama administration,
U.S. tourists are about to flood the island for the first time since JFK was in office.
It's an incredible about-face.
Because until this point, the state of U.S.-Cuban relations had almost been suspended in time.
In Havana, the U.S. embassy building itself had slowly deteriorated over the decades.
It's located on the city's famous waterfront promenade known as the Malecon.
I remember seeing six feet waves splashing into the building.
I was in the building. It was a Saturday because we were doing...
That's former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Jeff De Laurentiis,
remembering what it was like at the beleaguered embassy building in 1993,
during the so-called storm of the century.
And was literally stuck there overnight.
Fidel Castro was on the radio talking about how he was going to rescue folks in buildings
that were along the Malecon.
And, of course, we were all joking that the U.S. intersection would be the last building in Havana
that would ever get rescued in this circumstance.
Which means half a century of tensions and counterintelligence efforts
are also about to be brought to the surface.
For years, the U.S. and Cuba had not only been suspicious of each other,
they were enemies.
Short of war, they engaged in some of the most ambitious spy operations against each other.
Cuba could really get under the CIA's skin.
Cuban intelligence is legendary in the spy world.
They're particularly good at recruiting Americans
and preventing the CIA from recruiting Cuban sources.
I had a neighbor in Havana, where I lived for years,
who'd been sent to the U.S. right after the revolution as a counterintelligence plant.
She was a double agent.
One of the advantages the Cubans had was an ideological one.
There were Americans who were very critical of American policy and Latin America and elsewhere,
and felt admiration for the Cuban cause.
Some of these people felt such sympathy that they crossed the line and started working for the Cubans.
And a few ultimately reached very high levels within the intelligence community.
So that 2014 announcement of renewed diplomatic relations
was about to create some new opportunities for spies on both sides.
The CIA already had a station in Havana.
It was located within the U.S. Embassy building, but it was very small.
Only three or four officers,
who couldn't do much intelligence gathering on the island
because Cuban counterintelligence was so good at thwarting them.
The Cuban government also had the embassy buildings surrounded.
They handpicked the guards stationed outside.
The U.S. also assumed that the local janitorial and maintenance staff were informants too.
But the CIA tried the best it could to do its work without being discovered.
Almost all the CIA officers in Havana operated under diplomatic cover.
They would work at the embassy during the day,
then sneak through a back staircase that would take them to the station,
located behind an unmarked door with a special lock.
And no outsiders were allowed to go past the second floor of the embassy
without being escorted for fear that they would try to locate and bug the station.
We asked the CIA for official comment on their security situation at the embassy,
and they declined.
But Tina has nothing to do with any of that.
Her job is to make sure U.S. citizens are safe and having fun in Havana.
Her kids start school there,
she and her husband host parties
and make friends with other diplomats in the area.
It all feels quite normal.
Except for the parts that aren't.
Because if you're a U.S. spy, or even a diplomat in Cuba,
you know you're being watched.
We had heard stories of harassment, and we just hadn't experienced it.
We didn't have, you know, our dogs didn't get poisoned,
and we didn't find, you know, presents left behind in the toilet.
Turds in the toilet.
It's one of the most common forms of harassment from Cuban counterintelligence.
Because it's ambiguous.
Maybe your wife forgot to flush.
Or your housekeeper.
Or it's a spy letting you know we're watching you.
And we didn't have our tires slashed or anything like that.
And we had heard other people tell these horrible stories.
We had never experienced any of it.
In certain parts of the world,
this kind of harassment is par for the course.
Usually it's done in this ambiguous way
that leaves room for plausible deniability.
Oh, did someone enter my house through the window?
Or did I leave the window open?
But other times, it's unambiguous.
An FBI officer based in Israel once told me
that he remembers coming home
and finding that someone had strung up
a bunch of condoms across his apartment ceiling.
As if trying to say,
welcome to your new assignment.
It's juvenile, but effective.
It's the job of the spies to keep track of this kind of stuff.
That's not really something that Tina spends a lot of time thinking about.
But one day, she actually did have her own weird experience.
So it had to have been that last year, 2016 to 2017, that we were there.
Something that may have been nothing
or could have been a sign that the Cubans wanted her to know
that she was being watched.
We got home and something smelled just dreadful.
And we, of course, went straight to the fridges and the freezer
and the big standing freezer,
which is, of course, where we stored all of our meat
because you buy your meat whenever you can get it
and then you freeze it.
And it had been turned off.
It had been unplugged and turned off.
Tina takes it in stride.
Maybe one of her kids accidentally unplugged the fridge.
It's impossible to know for sure.
I think we just sort of chuckled and said,
oh, there it is.
We got one.
That was our one thing.
And that was the only time anything like that happened
until, you know.
So, you know, obviously in the podcast,
we're going to tell the story of the beginning of Havana Syndrome,
the first reported cases.
And I was wondering what you remember hearing at the water cooler.
Here's where it all goes downhill.
That's after the break.
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So, I honestly don't remember the first thing I heard.
But I knew that several people had been sent to Miami
for medical evaluations.
Um, it was all very unclear why.
One day, a few weeks before the episode in Tina's kitchen,
she remembers getting pulled into a private meeting
with the Consul General,
and a colleague who had just returned from Miami.
And this person described everything in pretty extensive detail.
This is Tina's first indication outside the rumor mill
that something is indeed amiss at the embassy.
At least two of her colleagues have suddenly come down
with headaches, nausea, vertigo,
and they had heard a strange buzzing sound before they got sick.
As we were sitting there listening,
he and I just kept looking at each other like,
is this, is this for real?
Is this a thing?
This doesn't make any sense.
Everything was going great.
Why? What? What is happening?
Tina and her boss agree to keep the information confidential
because they don't want to start a panic at the embassy.
Pretty soon, wild theories start floating around at the embassy,
especially amongst those with children.
A lot of them go to school together in Havana,
and it becomes a source of gossip amongst the parents.
Some people think that maybe this is just food poisoning,
while others are speculating that it could be something far more sinister,
that someone might actually be targeting U.S. officials
with some kind of secret weapon.
Were you scared?
Not at all.
I mean, scared for my colleagues, yes.
Personally or for my family, no.
Because at that point, I think we all had an idea in our heads
of who was being targeted.
And it was, you know, folks who were more on the security side.
Or not me.
Nobody's going to try to recruit me.
I'm not one of the people that has special information
that they're interested in.
Nobody really cares about my work or what I do.
And then the incident in Tina's kitchen happens.
Overwhelming sense of inexplicable anxiety,
incredible pressure and pain in my head and my ears.
I've never felt anything like that before.
But even though Tina has this lingering headache,
she doesn't link it back to the mass illnesses
and what her boss told her.
Her first reaction is denial.
So you had this experience and you have these implications
for your health that you clearly register.
What do you do with this information?
Nothing is the answer for a solid month and change.
Absolutely nothing.
I didn't say anything to anyone, not even my husband.
Crisis Tina takes over at that moment.
And I shut down completely.
I was just fine.
I'm fine.
There's nothing wrong.
There's nothing to see here.
Everything is fine.
Move along.
I told myself that I had imagined it,
that it was psychological.
I had heard the rumors.
I was clearly affected by them.
And so now my body is manifesting symptoms
that I don't actually have.
But she's tired all the time.
And of course I'm not sleeping.
Her headaches are getting worse.
And she's losing her memory.
I think my son even mentioned something.
You don't normally sound stupid, Mama.
You sound kind of, you know, slow.
Well, thanks, kiddo.
But yeah, yeah.
Mama's just a little tired.
And most unsettling for Tina,
she can't keep up at work.
I would read emails.
And by the time I would get to the end,
I wouldn't remember a single thing about what I had just read.
Words would kind of jump a little bit on the screen.
Things would move and shake.
And I think everybody saw how I looked.
My boss, the Consul General,
called it the elephant in the room
because I wasn't talking about it with anyone,
but I looked like a zombie.
I looked like absolute crap.
This goes on for weeks.
Tina's symptoms are getting worse.
But she still doesn't tell anyone.
I do remember thinking to myself
that I don't want to contribute to the rumor mill.
I don't want to let everybody down.
I just want to keep my head down, do my job,
and I'll be fine.
I will absolutely be fine.
I will mind over matter my way out of this,
and I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.
Behind the scenes,
the U.S. government is scratching its head.
In the two months leading up to Tina's kitchen incident
in March 2017,
U.S. intelligence officers stationed in Havana
had reported incidents
in which they felt pulsating pressure in their heads.
These were people who were pretending to be diplomats
working at the embassy,
but who were actually CIA officers.
These officers were prepared to get harassed.
But getting hurt,
that's against the unwritten rules of the spy game.
You can fuck with each other,
but you can't hurt each other.
The CIA officers also reported
that during their strange health incident,
they'd also heard a very loud sound.
Some said the sound was almost like cicadas.
In some cases,
the sound seemed to follow them
wherever they went within their homes,
and it would continue for a period of minutes at least,
until they opened a door to the outside,
at which point the sound would stop.
The CIA isn't sure what to make of the incidents
that the spies were reporting.
They got so sick that they had to seek treatment back in the States.
Then things get weirder.
When the CIA sends officers on temporary assignment to Havana,
even these new arrivals start getting sick
at their hotels.
Doctors cannot identify the source of the illness.
Some of them just start calling it the thing.
Privately,
top U.S. government officials hold Cuba responsible,
because even if Cuba isn't causing these illnesses,
they must at least know who or what is.
They control everything on the island,
but the Cubans say
they have no idea what the Americans are talking about.
By now, the Americans have a real medical mystery on their hands,
one that appears to be spreading.
Is it the result of some new illness?
Or is it the result of a weapon?
The U.S. government doesn't know,
and it's divided about how to respond.
It's 2017,
just a few months into a new presidential administration.
Obama is out,
along with the officials who pushed to restore relations.
And Cuba is dealing with its own change in regime
in the wake of Fidel Castro's death.
And so some CIA officers want to pull their people off the X,
meaning out of Cuba,
because they don't know how to keep them safe anymore
in this environment.
Eventually,
the press finds out about all the mystery illnesses in Cuba
and starts asking questions.
But the Trump administration doesn't have any answers.
And they're starting to get a lot of flack
for not keeping U.S. personnel safe.
So they make an unprecedented decision.
The CIA decides to close its station in Havana,
an extraordinary step.
Even in the most war-torn of places,
Baghdad,
Kabul,
the CIA station has stayed open,
but not in Cuba.
And at this point,
Rex Tillerson,
the Secretary of State,
has little choice but to do the same
and pull his diplomats out.
The U.S. State Department said today,
all but essential American diplomatic staff are going home.
They did some bad things in Cuba.
President Donald Trump seems to blame the Cubans today,
but there's no evidence Cuba was behind this.
It's always amazed me that they had no hard evidence
when they made this huge decision to pull off the island.
Talk about flying blind.
By the end of September 2017,
all non-essential embassy staff are sent home.
Then a month later,
in Washington, D.C.,
the U.S. expels an equal number of Cuban diplomats.
After all those efforts to restore relations
just a few years prior,
now the U.S. and Cuba are nearly back to square one.
And this is when things get even crazier.
Despite getting off the X,
leaving Cuba,
American officials report more incidents,
not in Cuba,
but in Russia,
and then in China,
then in Austria,
then in Colombia,
then in Vietnam,
then in Kyrgyzstan,
and more and more.
Around the world,
diplomats and spies
and members of the U.S. military
continue to report mysterious incidents
that get put into the same category
as the bizarre affliction
first reported in Havana, Cuba.
And then the list expands
to include White House staffers
who report incidents first in London
and then within steps of the Oval Office itself.
Yeah, it's me.
I wish I could talk to you.
Something's wrong with me.
It's supposed to change.
Tell me if I'm walking too fast.
No, you're fine.
All right.
Let's go over to the gate, I guess.
Yep.
So, we're outside the White House.
This is probably the most secure place
on the planet.
There are cameras dangling
from all of the light posts on the street.
If you look to the top of the White House,
you'll see occasionally snipers
with binoculars, you know,
looking out and scanning the crowds
that pass by.
So, obviously, not the kind of place
that you'd expect anything like
what he thinks happened to him here.
At first, it starts as sort of rumors
that there were incidents in Washington,
in the Washington area.
I'll be honest, I was quite skeptical.
It just seemed outlandish to me.
Because it's so brazen.
It would be so brazen
of a foreign intelligence service
to think that it can get away with it,
you know, on American soil.
The difference is when you talk
to the person who's involved,
and that sort of, you know,
convinces you that they are really suffering.
Honestly, I don't know what is going on, right?
But I have no doubt in my mind
that John experienced
exactly what he's describing,
that he is a completely reliable narrator
of what happened to him.
I do not know what happened to him.
For what it's worth,
John was himself skeptical at first
that what happened to him
could be Havana Syndrome.
But after discussing it with his colleagues,
it occurred to him that this could be it.
And that's been a running theme
throughout our years reporting this story.
There is still no definitive evidence
that any of these incidents actually happened,
except for the fact that people
are reporting these symptoms,
symptoms that these patients' doctors
have argued are very real.
And so, if the cause is some kind of weapon,
if this is the result of a series of attacks,
someone has perpetrated the perfect crime.
And so now,
we're trying to figure out
what is Havana Syndrome?
Is it even real?
And if it is,
who's doing it?
And why is it taking so long
for the U.S. to solve this?
Is there something
that the United States,
one of the most powerful countries
in the history of the world,
has been missing this whole time?
They've killed people's dogs.
They've urinated in mouthwash.
They put feces under your door handles
so you'd come and grab them.
They'd do some sort of damage to your car.
This was just part of this long game
of them always letting you know
that they're there,
letting you know that they can get to you.
But also,
they want to find what gets under your skin,
and they exploit it.
That's next time
on Havana Syndrome.
Havana Syndrome is hosted and reported
by Adam Entous
and me,
John Lee Anderson.
It's produced and reported
by Julia Nutter,
Jesse Alejandra Cottrell,
and Ramon Campos-Iriarte,
and edited and executive produced
by Annie Aviles
and Kate Osborne,
with original composition
and sound design
by Steve Bone.
Havana Syndrome Wong
and Kate Osborne Moore
and Kate Osborne.
We've got
the stuff he tangable
that's on.
I'm very excited
and the humbled