Guys, I want to, just before we get to the house, can we just do a little where, where, why, for here?
Of course.
I don't know, whoever wants to start that off.
Well, this is, I mean, we're on a, you're on a highway, of course, which is what all of Florida seems to be.
There's almost as many electrical poles as there are royal palms.
And there's, of course, there's a strip mall to our right.
And maybe, is that a former swamp over to our left?
Anyway, this is Naples, Florida.
Can I make a right on red?
I think you can.
This being Florida, you could do whatever you want.
You can shoot a gun while you're making a right on red.
Hey, there's another skillet.
We're about 200 miles from Havana, Cuba, in Naples, the ritzy town along the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Wealthy, golf-style retirement homes.
John Lee, our producer, Julia Nutter, and I are here to meet someone I've been talking to on Signal for a couple months now.
Just, Adam, maybe you've been speaking to him.
What are we calling him?
Um, you know, I mean, his real name is ******.
Yeah.
We just don't want to have that used in the podcast.
Yeah.
So I think we can call him ******.
You know, he's going to, you know, I don't know.
He's going to give us an alias?
Well, I mean, he wants it to be...
I'd had to negotiate a ton behind the scenes to get this interview.
I mean, this was weeks of work.
CIA officers rarely speak to reporters, much less on the record.
They don't want their identities revealed.
They don't want to put themselves or anyone else at risk.
There's a pride among CIA officers to keep things secret and protect each other.
Oh, God.
They probably win.
No.
All right, so the gate is open.
Yeah.
Great.
Okay.
I'm just going to get next to you.
The scheme.
Hey, man.
Great to meet you.
Yes, nice to meet you.
Come along here.
This is John.
Hey, how are you?
It's great to meet you.
Hello there.
Shoes on?
Uh, no, you can leave mine.
Yeah, seriously.
Adam Source is tall, mid-30s.
He's built and good-looking.
Leonardo DiCaprio could play him in the movie of his life.
He's casual in a black baseball cap, plaid button-down and gym shorts.
He offers to seat us poolside, but our producer, Julia, says no,
and insists that we move back into a small, stuffy room on the inside of the house.
There, we huddle with our Source and his older brother.
He's been his closest confidant for years, and especially since his time in Havana.
I think there will be times that there's going to be quite a bit that I can't say.
I'm prepared that this might be an awkward interview.
While I know that he used to work for the CIA, he can't actually tell me that.
The CIA won't allow it.
So my understanding is that he can't say much.
But his brother can help fill in some of the blanks.
His service dog is also there, quietly lying at our feet the whole time.
Good dog.
We would normally start an interview with like,
all right, can you introduce yourself to our audience?
Yeah, that's it.
Maybe that's actually part of this.
So can you please introduce yourself to us?
Sure. My name is, I guess, whatever you'd like it to be at this point.
He wanted us to identify him as Adam, which is confusing for obvious reasons.
So we've decided to call him Tony.
I was a U.S. government employee that was affectionately referred to as patient zero.
And I was down in Havana in 2016 when all the attacks started happening.
His path to Havana is not what you might expect.
Just five years earlier, he'd been a part-time cop in Maine, moonlighting as a wedding photographer.
Kind of spent, you know, the weeks being a police officer and sometimes arresting the bride.
And then on the weekends, we'd go and photograph different brides.
So it was a real, it was kind of an interesting dichotomy.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
The bridal parties, they get a little rambunctious.
Drunken disorderly.
Yeah.
But after a few years, Tony thought he needed a new challenge and decided to make a change.
In my core, I wanted to branch out.
I wanted to do something a little bigger.
And so I just started applying to every federal application that I could find online.
You name the acronyms, I applied to it.
From NASA to DEA to U.S. Marshals to all of them.
It can take years for these agencies to vet all these applications.
But in December 2011, Tony finally receives word while he's staying with his family over the holidays.
It was like day two of being there.
We were there for a week and a half.
When I got the message from FedEx, and I knew that this FedEx package was sitting at the house with either an offer or a rejection.
In that simple FedEx envelope is his invitation to become a spy for the U.S. government.
So, and I knew, you know, he was going to be moving away to D.C.
That's Tony's brother.
Before long, Tony heads to what they call the farm, the CIA's secret training facility outside of Washington, D.C.
He confides in his dad, but tells the rest of his family he'll be working at the State Department, not the CIA.
And they believe him, so much so that his mom does all this research to try to advise him on ways to grow his diplomatic career.
But at a Thanksgiving dinner, he breaks the news.
I remember when he told us, and he just kind of blurted it out after dinner.
Like, I think we were sitting in the family room watching TV, talking about something, and he's just like,
So, I really work for, you know, the CIA.
So, I was like, oh, okay.
But, you know, like I said, I was, I thought it was fun.
You know what I mean?
I mean, that's a cool job to have.
Not many, you can't.
Did you ask him whether he'd get to kill people?
Uh, no.
Probably.
No.
I'm Adam Entis.
And I'm John Lee Anderson.
From Vice World News, this is Havana Syndrome.
Episode 2, The Diplomat and the Specialist.
In 2013, around the same time that Tony is entering spy training, another young man in Washington, D.C.
has just begun his own assignment of a lifetime.
Without knowing it, their worlds are about to collide in the most bizarre way.
My name is Ben Rhodes.
I was a Deputy National Security Advisor for President Obama from 2009 to 2017.
Now I'm an itinerant writer and podcaster.
And, yeah, I negotiated the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.
I was somewhat dissatisfied in a way in that as we moved into the second term, a lot of my peers were getting their promotions.
You know, so my friend Samantha Power is becoming the Ambassador to the United Nations.
My friend Susan Rice is going to become the National Security Advisor.
And what everybody's telling me is, oh, Obama needs you where you are.
You know, Obama's very comfortable with you playing this role where you write his speeches
and you help make sure that the government's statements reflect what he thinks about things.
So you can't really go anywhere.
And my pushback to that was, that's not fair.
I should be able to do something different.
That something different for Ben would come in the form of a long-shot gambit for President Obama.
After the election, we had a meeting during which we kind of did this thing that I guess you can only really do
if you're re-elected as President of the United States, which is we were like,
what do we want to do in the whole world in the second term?
And I remember Obama saying, well, look, I want us to explore what we can do to change things in Cuba.
And it wasn't much more specific than that.
It was like, well, we know that we have to get Alan Gross out of prison,
but kind of come back to me with a game plan.
Obama was talking about a former USAID contract employee named Alan Gross.
Alan Gross is living a nightmare that's lasted more than two years.
He and a number of other American citizens were being held in Cuba on charges of espionage.
At this point, the U.S. was also holding on to a number of people it believed were spying for Cuba.
The imprisonment of these alleged spies was just one of a long list of unresolved issues
that had yet to be untangled by this point in Obama's presidency.
For decades, the United States has maintained that Cuba is a dictatorship with little concern for human rights,
while Cuba has railed against the U.S. as an imperialist power set on toppling its socialist government.
Throughout the Cold War, Cuba was also closely allied with the Soviet Union.
And still to this day, there are strong ties between the island and the Russian government.
And then, of course, there's the embargo.
The U.S. has made it near impossible for American companies to do business with Cuba,
which has choked the island, made it hard to import even basic goods like medicine and construction materials,
which has not helped the American image in Latin America.
You know, Obama would get frustrated when he'd go to Latin America and have to defend this Cuba policy.
I remember him saying something to me that always stuck with me.
When he had to defend the embargo and U.S.-Cuba policy, particularly in Latin America,
he had the same kind of reaction against having to do that internally
that he had started to feel on gay marriage.
Basically, that he was not being honest about what he actually believed.
And I saw my role, to some extent, as trying to make him be himself, you know.
One day, Ben is chatting with Dennis McDonough, the deputy national security advisor.
And I remember I went for a walk with Dennis, and I said,
hey, I'd like to take on this Cuba project, and I can work with Ricardo
to kind of run the policy on opening up to Cuba.
Ricardo Zuniga, the State Department's top Cuba expert.
And Dennis said, why don't you just do it yourself?
And I was, what do you mean?
And he said, well, this is going to require, like, a secret channel of communication with the Cubans.
Why don't you actually do the diplomacy?
I said, sure, I'll do that.
If Ricardo, obviously, will do it with me.
How did you feel?
That's our producer, Jesse Alejandro Cuttrell, who is always asking how people feel.
In that moment when, like, this thing you're asking for,
it seems like you actually might get this huge responsibility.
Like, how did that make you feel?
I felt, I'll be honest, I felt nervous.
I felt somewhat inadequate.
What I was told by Dennis was, like, Ricardo knows Cuba inside out.
You know the president.
And that combination is what's going to be necessary to get something done.
Now, I did come back from that walk and acquired several books about Cuba,
including John Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara.
I really did a crash course on it.
I was desperate to try to do something that felt like it was going to make a positive difference
on some piece of the world.
Ben meets up with his team, and they come up with a plan to tactfully and secretly reach
out to their counterparts in the Cuban government.
About the negotiations on the Cuban side, you know, at what point do you realize that it's serious?
They have to be discreet, because if anyone finds out about this historic attempt to reconcile
before it's public, the anti-Cuba community, particularly in the politically important
swing state of Florida, and their supporters in Congress, will likely go ballistic and attempt
to sabotage it.
So we initiated that contact.
We do it through, let's say, security channels, you know.
The two governments set up a meeting in Canada, which is friendly to both Cuba and the U.S.
We land in their Ottawa airport.
I walk off the plane, and there's a very polite, kind of beefy Canadian guy who says,
hey, how you doing?
Come with me.
So this guy drives us about 45 minutes outside of Ottawa.
I get out.
It's a gorgeous lake-side property, and you feel like nobody can see you where you are.
Ben is waiting for his Cuban counterpart to come in, the person the Cubans have handpicked
to meet with the U.S. team.
And then you could hear him come in.
So I hear, like, shouts in Spanish and kind of, you know, gregarious laughter.
And so this kind of, you know, force of nature comes up, and it's Alejandro with two guys.
Ben understands that Alejandro Castro is the head of the Cuban government's counterintelligence
service, and that he's the son of Cuba's president, Raul Castro.
And of course, he's also Fidel Castro's nephew.
But other than that, Ben has just a few biographical details.
One of the few things I've been briefed on is that he had lost an eye, or an eye had been
badly damaged in Angola, which I thought was such a...
They start out talking about political prisoners and the potential of doing a swap.
The Americans want Alan Gross, who was convicted of spying, that former USAID contractor we
mentioned.
And the Cubans want the members of the so-called Cuban Five, a group of Cubans convicted in
1998, of spying on Cuban exile groups in Miami and secretly funneling information on them
back to Cuba.
If we can make progress on this issue of prisoners, it can open up space for a new kind of relationship.
It felt positive.
If you don't already know who the Cuban Five are, they're incredibly important on the
island, where they're considered heroes.
Two had already been released, but the rest were still in jail.
For years, their return has been a top priority for the Cuban leadership.
And then he did the history lesson.
Turns out, Alejandro wants to discuss more than just the Cuban Five.
He wants to go way back.
The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
To one of the most consequential acts of American aggression against the Cubans.
Cuban army pilots opened the first phase of organized revolt with bombing raids on three
military bases, the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961.
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Cuban foreign minister Roa accused the United States of unleashing
a war of invasion.
Roa says the invading soldiers trained in Florida.
When the CIA trained and armed a group of 1,400 Cubans to try and overthrow the Castro government.
And so for hours, I got Bay of Pigs and the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
Of which there are many, because the CIA kept trying to kill Fidel.
They once tried to get him to smoke a poisoned cigar.
And another time, they tried to get his girlfriend to serve him a laced milkshake.
Neither attempt work, of course.
So Alejandro is reminding his counterparts of all this shady history of American spies actively
trying to assassinate and to overthrow the Cuban government.
More than that, though, I got Posada Carriles.
...cubano de pasajeros en 1976 es el delito más serio que presuntamente cometió Posada Carriles.
Posada Carriles was a Cuban exile suspected of organizing the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976.
It was, at the time, the worst airline passenger disaster in the history of aviation.
It killed 73 innocent people, including 24 members of the juvenile fencing team from Cuba.
This was an unprecedented act of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.
The first time a commercial airliner was blown up in flight.
Before he allegedly helped down that plane in the 70s, Posada Carriles had been trained by and was working for the CIA.
The suspicion is that the U.S. government protected him because he'd worked with them for years.
He was able to evade justice until his dying days.
How many hours did he think he was talking about?
I think it was like two, three hours.
If you're a state official, you kind of have to rebut some of the points and debate them
because you're not really authorized to agree with that.
I was basically like, look, I understand all that.
I understand that history. I think it's really important.
And I respect that it's really important to you.
And if I were you, I might feel that way.
But, like, I wasn't even born when the Bay of Pigs invasion happened.
Ben tells Alejandro that President Obama wants to move forward to get past this history.
And that's when things, surprisingly, start to look up.
We broke for lunch, and instead of kind of going into our corners and huddling,
we're just standing in like a sandwich tray.
Alejandro's a very demonstrative eater, you know.
So he's like shoveling in sandwiches, and we're chatting.
And then they start talking about fishing, and then I start talking about how I'd love to visit Cuba.
And it's so close. You know, what a shame.
And he seemed genuinely shocked that we were being nice, basically,
and that we felt comfortable being friendly with him.
And he said that.
I mean, Alejandro never failed to share a feeling.
You know, he's just like, I can't believe we're standing here,
and you guys were just chatting.
Like, this is great.
You know, like, it's not what I expected.
After a full day's work, both sides wrap up.
As they head back to the airport, Ricardo turns to Bannon and says,
I think maybe there's something here.
Like, even though we made no progress on anything,
just there was some trust building that was happening that was going to take time,
but it felt like it could lead someplace.
Over the next few months, the U.S. and Cuban delegations continue their secret meetings in Canada.
Though at one point, Ben starts to worry that maybe their meetings aren't as secret as they thought.
We did one meeting in Toronto at a hotel.
And I remember walking into this hotel to check in,
and I'd noticed when I'd come in two very conspicuous people who were a couple,
full of tattoos and piercings, and just they stood out.
And so I check into the hotel, and I turn around,
and these two people walked up right in front of me.
And they're standing, you know, as close as I am to you now, a few feet away.
And they just take out an iPhone and just take a picture of me and then walk away.
And my negotiating partner, Ricardo Zuniga, just says,
I mean, we don't know for sure they were Russian,
but somebody wanted us to know that they knew that we were meeting Cubans in secret in Toronto.
There's no other explanation for that.
Well, there are other potential explanations.
Maybe they're tourists taking a picture of something else.
But the reason they suspect Russian spies is because Russia would not be happy to learn
that the U.S. and Cuba are mending fences.
For decades, the Soviet Union used the island more or less as a listening post to keep an eye on the U.S.
Even after the Cold War, Cuban and Russian intelligence remained close.
We reached out to the Russian embassy in Washington
to ask whether Russian intelligence officers were involved in the events Ben described.
But they didn't get back to us.
Ben and Ricardo take the Toronto incident in stride and keep going.
Because when it comes to the negotiations,
they're encouraging signs that each side wants a deal.
In February 2014, the U.S. even allows one of the Cuban Five to go home.
And then we get to December 17th, it goes kind of miraculously well.
It was the best kept secret in the world until President Obama went on national television today to reveal it.
Doesn't leak.
Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.
Obama announces it.
Nearly 54 years after President Eisenhower severed diplomatic ties with the communist dictatorship,
President Obama said it is time to restore them.
Today, the president said it is time to cut loose the shackles of the past.
Each country has agreed to a number of things.
Cuba is going to release some of the political prisoners that the Americans want.
And the U.S. is going to ease up on that embargo and allow them to bring in more tourists and cash.
Cuba will expand Internet access on the island for its people.
The Americans will reopen a full-fledged embassy in Havana for the first time in over five decades.
And Cuba would do the same in D.C.
I don't know how much you guys give a shit about me and this whole story, but, like, you know, it was the high point of my life.
My daughter was born on December 11th, and this was December 17th.
So that was the best week of my life.
So while Ben is leading historic talks, Tony is preparing to start his assignment on the island.
Cuba hadn't been a CIA priority for a long time, but that had already started to change.
Yeah, it felt exciting to me. I was pretty pumped.
These two guys don't know each other, but Tony is aware of the secret negotiations.
So what were you told your job would be?
I can't discuss that.
Okay, so it wasn't a diplomatic job.
You know, and this is hard for me because I have to walk a line.
So I was a U.S. government employee stationed in Havana.
At a time when the U.S. and Cuba had restored diplomatic relations.
Correct.
But Ben and Tony have very different priorities.
That's after the break.
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Once the announcement is made that U.S.-Cuban relations are being restored, things start to move pretty fast.
Christ, even Obama visits.
Muchas gracias.
Thank you so much.
He makes an extraordinary public speech at Havana's Grand Teatro.
As president of the United States, I've called on our Congress to lift the embargo.
I was there, and it was quite a moving speech, soaring rhetoric about the promise of a new friendship between the two countries, and about bearing the last sword of the Cold War.
But Obama also makes a point of saying Cuba's still got work to do.
But even if we lifted the embargo tomorrow, Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba.
Within the U.S. intelligence community, the conversations were less about lofty ideals and more about the nitty-gritty business of spying, especially because you're dealing with some of the best spies in the world.
I had served in a number of positions at the CIA, which afforded me access to counterintelligence matters.
John Brennan, CIA director under Obama.
And I knew that the Cubans had been quite successful over the years to suborn individuals to work on their behalf.
We talked to Brennan in 2021.
The Cuban intelligence service, which has been trained by the Russians, is a very competent and a professional one.
During the Cold War, Russia had spent a lot of time and energy working with Cuban officials to improve their tradecraft as spies.
But since then, Cuban intelligence was said to become so good that they had outgrown their KGB trainers.
Now, the Cuban intelligence service was amongst the most talented in the world, and had spent decades focusing its efforts squarely on the United States.
A lot of folks were skeptical that the Cubans were ever really going to cooperate with the United States, that they were not going to change their stripes.
But on the U.S. side, for those skeptical of diplomatic efforts, the opening could offer a Trojan horse of sorts.
Just the way the CIA wants to get close to a lot of our adversaries around the globe, because once you have that up-close and personal access, it affords you new opportunities as far as your intelligence objectives are concerned.
What he means is, the opening could help the CIA with what they call the recruitment cycle, spotting future assets, assessing their value, developing them as informants, and recruiting them as spies.
So I think that certainly was a prevailing view within Langley.
We met on Monday with Ben Rhodes, and so just based on what you're saying, like Ben was, I mean, I think he himself would probably say he was maybe a little naive,
because he was looking at it purely from an opportunity to increase engagement between people to people, improve the lives of Cubans.
And the flip side that you're describing, the taking advantage of the opening to gain additional accesses, was sort of something that he wasn't really thinking about when he was going through the process.
You know, I don't know if I'm picking up on something there where, you know, because you've been in the business, the intelligence business for so long, you know, initially,
maybe didn't really understand the side that you're referring to of taking advantage of the opening for accesses.
Well, yeah, I don't know what Ben assumed or not, but an intelligence officer's objective is try to gain as much insight as they can into what's happening in other countries.
And if you have liaison relationships with foreign services, you try to exploit that in order to develop relationships that you can then cultivate into some type of recruitment effort.
CIA will try to leverage any increased access with adversaries to see whether or not there's a way to recruit individuals.
This is actually kind of shocking for me to hear, because I would have expected a no comment from Brennan.
But instead, he revealed what we thought was going on behind the scenes, that the CIA wanted to exploit a flip side to the opening.
Meanwhile, even critics of the opening with Cuba are starting to see it as a chance to push their own objectives.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio actually told me that he had to make lemonade out of lemons.
I asked Ben about this.
It served for him as the silver lining, right?
This is the idea that by expanding our presence, our relationship, it's more of an opportunity for us to expand our collection.
He was very seized with this idea that, you know, yeah, there was a possibility of expanding the relationship,
and China might be trying to get in there.
And we therefore needed to do something about that.
For at least the past 10 or 12 years, China's been looking for ways to expand its presence in the Western Hemisphere.
It has significantly increased its commercial and diplomatic presence in the region.
Trade is up 10, if not 20-fold in Latin America.
And in some cases, it's a senior partner edging out the U.S.
In fact, all the CCTV cameras in Havana were provided by the Chinese government.
And according to U.S. officials, they have access to that footage.
So China's been very involved.
My logic proposition is, if you don't want China and Russia 90 miles from Florida to have this massive outpost,
then why don't you flood the place with American tourists and business and Internet?
And his was like, no, we've got to beat them at the spy game, you know.
And I think he's wrong.
I think on both sides, there are people who love the game, the spy game.
At this point, for CIA officers like Tony, regardless of what's happening at the policy level or diplomatically,
the spy game in Havana is on.
I spent a lot of time having drinks with CIA contacts, and I know the routine.
After finishing his training at the farm, Tony would start taking Spanish classes,
and also what the CIA calls its hostile environment tradecraft course.
That's to prepare him to work in places where the foreign intelligence services
are the most aggressive against their American counterparts,
places like Iran, Russia, China, and Cuba.
For me, I was gung-ho.
I wanted to take the most challenging thing I could take, and those were up there, for sure.
His training would have focused in part on how best to evade the detection of Cuban intelligence services
while doing his job of collecting intelligence and carrying out other operations while on the island.
He also needs to train for his cover job at the U.S. Embassy.
Because once he arrives in Havana, it needs to appear to everybody,
including the Cubans and his own colleagues at the embassy,
that he is genuinely a State Department employee and not working for the CIA.
On the higher level, sure, they were talking.
There were all of those, you know, law enforcement, terrorism, the Coast Guard agreements.
All those things were happening at a higher level, and it looked great.
But on the ground, on the day-to-day, nothing changed.
The Cuba office, which Tony was part of,
has been something of a backwater within the CIA for years, a very low priority.
Partly because Cuban intelligence was so good, it made it hard for the CIA to do its job.
But that's changing just as Tony is getting ready for his assignment on the island.
The office is part of the Western Hemisphere Mission Center,
which recently got a new chief of operations.
He's a tough-talking veteran of Russia House,
the CIA office that runs covert operations in Russia.
And he wants the CIA to be more aggressive across Latin America, including in Cuba.
He tells case officers things like,
if you aren't getting surveillance 24-7, you aren't doing the job right.
He wants the CIA to take the gloves off in Havana.
We asked the CIA for official comment on this, but they declined.
In many ways, Tony is a perfect candidate for a job like this.
He's totally green, which you'd think in any other job disqualifies him.
But green CIA officers are often the best, because this is their first deployment.
Foreign adversaries haven't tagged them yet.
And they have something to prove.
So they go in Hungary, and they are willing to take risks.
And you can expect that if the CIA is now going hard on Cuba after not doing so for so long,
Cuban spies aren't going to like it.
We were still getting harassed.
We were still getting surveillance.
So as someone stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, what does that mean exactly?
When you talk about surveillance and harassment, I mean, that's not in the papers every day.
That's kind of an understanding in some of these places that are a difficult environment to operate in.
Havana has long been known to be a difficult place to live and serve,
because the government is hostile towards us.
Day one, you're prepared.
You know you're going to have surveillance.
You know they're going to break into your house.
It's just part of the game, really.
But usually there's a window where people, you get to know the area, you get used to it.
Tony says he knows that when he moves to Havana, for example, that the walls in his house are definitely bugged.
Did you check for mics?
You know, there's no point.
You can have tech folks come and sweep the houses, right?
And A, they see them coming, so they just deactivate everything.
And B, the sweep is only as good as until your house is left alone again.
So they can sweep your house, then you go, all right, let's go grab a beer.
Now your house is no longer secured to be free of things, because they would have gone in there when you were gone.
So there was really no point.
You just lived knowing that that was the case.
But Tony said he felt like they had it out for him from the start, which was bizarre, because he was supposed to be the green officer, the one they didn't know about.
I was hit pretty hard and pretty heavy right off the bat.
There was a guy that sat outside my driveway in a plastic chair 24-7.
They rotated with a radio.
Cuban counterintelligence officers would literally follow Tony and other Americans around the island.
But if Tony managed to lose them, to get in the black, as they say in the business, the Cubans could track their cell phones and find them.
They'd use your phone as beacons.
So any time I came and left from my house, they'd radio me and then car surveillance would pick up, or they'd use camera surveillance and do point-to-point.
Cuban intelligence would do other things to just mess with suspected spies and diplomats who they saw as a threat.
They'd defecate in your house, cut your internet lines.
They'd drain your water cisterns.
You only had water every couple of days.
I've been hearing stories like this for years.
Spies go to crazy lengths to tell their adversaries, we've got our eyes on you.
Before my 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 flatten your tires, or 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.
These particular details are new to me, but I'm not surprised.
The Cuban government has trained one of the most effective spy forces in the world.
But part of why they've been so fixated on the U.S. is because the Americans, and the CIA specifically, have a long history of trying to overthrow the Cuban government.
You know, with brothers, right, you find the one thing that's going to annoy each other, and then you just keep doing it until they lose their mind.
And, you know, we used to do that to each other.
So it's very, like, very sibling-esque.
Like, that kind of behavior, I would have a much harder time tolerating than he had.
That's Tony's brother sitting next to him.
They've got to be able to take this.
You know, it can be explained to you that, okay, this is going to happen to you probably when you're down there.
But being there week after week after week after week, and it's happening on a daily basis, like, I would be burning something down probably.
You know what I mean?
And relations with Cuba would be back to square one.
So, you know, it takes a certain kind of person to deal with it or get used to it.
Let's just remember here that Tony isn't on the island doing humanitarian work.
He's there to do spy work, which is against the law in Cuba, something that the government there obviously wants to prevent him from doing.
For someone like me, that level of harassment was awesome.
It made me happy because I felt like I had joined a club, they hated me, they knew that I was being good at my job.
Like, they would use the harassment and the surveillance to send you a message that they were upset with you.
If you played by their rules, they kind of left you alone and you got to do things.
If you weren't playing by their rules or you were pulling stuff and they weren't happy with it, they would let you know.
Tony's there for about two months when he experiences something new and frankly terrifying on December 29th, 2016.
We were on a skeleton crew at the embassy as a whole because everyone had cleared off for the holidays or for New Year's.
And I'd come home and my pattern was to come home and then go to the gym.
And I would usually come home and watch a few episodes of a downloaded show or something.
I'd sit on my bed and then I would go to the gym and work out.
What show?
Always sunny in Philadelphia.
No, it's so good.
It's very zany.
Yeah.
I'm just laying on my bed with my laptop, you know, like I'm, you know, next to me and I'm watching the show.
I'm in my dress clothes, you know, I'm in a shirt and my suit.
And then all of the dogs in the neighborhood started barking.
You know, they would bark periodically, you know, but that, I'd never heard them all go off at once.
And I think that struck me immediately as unusual.
And then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom.
I guess my gut reaction was that it was LRAD.
Long-range acoustic devices.
Ships sometimes use them to ward off pirates.
These days, police officers in the U.S. use them to ward off protesters.
They can blast loud sounds at distance that make it very uncomfortable for you
to the point that you just have to get out of the beam of what it is.
But he doesn't move because he thinks this is someone, perhaps the Cuban intelligence officers,
who are trying to fuck with him.
And so my assumption was that this was just the next iteration of harassment, right?
So it seemed like they were trying, in my mind, to get me annoyed.
And I'm incredibly stubborn.
And so my whole plan was to not do anything.
He doesn't want them to think that whatever they're doing is working.
So he's pretending that he's not affected by it.
But he is.
And it just ratcheted up and it got really uncomfortable.
It started very, very loud, like ear-piercingly loud.
And then I thought, OK, well, this is obnoxious because you can't hear, you know, the show anymore.
So you put captions on.
And you don't want to show any sign of discomfort because if there is video in the room, they're watching that.
This goes on for about 20 minutes.
But then there was the physiological pain.
And so the pressure started in the head and then the discomfort in the ear.
You know, I just picture those old wood vices in, you know, shop class in high school, right?
It just felt like someone was just turning that and my head was in it.
Then the severe, severe ear pain started.
So I liken it to, like, if you take a Q-tip and you bounce it off your ear, you know, like, you get that jarring, like, ah.
Well, imagine taking, like, a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum.
And so at that point, I then took a pillow and wrapped it over and around my head.
So my left arm had the bulk of the pillow up against my left side.
And then I was using my right hand over the top to kind of block the pillow on the right side of my ear.
And frankly, it did nothing.
Like, it didn't even start to mitigate anything.
Did you move from the bed?
So no.
Because you're thinking.
That would have been the smart thing to do.
And you didn't go to the window and look out either.
No, no.
I assume they're watching.
If not, they're listening.
And so I sat there and just stuck it out.
And I'm talking to my brother and by a text.
I've seen the texts from that day between Tony and his brother.
They show Tony explaining his experience in real time.
Kind of walking through it because I'm on my bed going, if this ratchets up and I die,
they're going to write this off as a heart attack or an aneurysm.
This is a recording of the sound that Tony heard.
He thinks maybe this will help the CIA figure out what's going on.
Tangible evidence that the Cubans have escalated the harassment to an unprecedented level.
Next time on Havana Syndrome.
I was at the top physical, psychological, emotional place I could have ever been in my life.
I mean, I was just a force to be reckoned with and I was gung-ho to do my job.
And within six months, I was a zombie and non-functional as a human being.
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.