Before we begin, we just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains references to suicide.
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.
Like, there's no, there's clearly nothing that's going to leave any signs or whatever it is.
I can't believe you've never been out of Philly, Charlie.
Oh man, man, what the hell?
It's December 29th, 2016.
Tony, whom we've learned was an undercover CIA officer stationed in Havana, is home, trying to catch up on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on his laptop.
Just started.
Really? You just fired me?
So why are you looking good?
When suddenly he hears a loud noise.
A noise that just won't go away.
He's in a lot of pain now, but he's trying to bear it.
Because he thinks that this is an attack and that whoever is doing it is watching him, and he doesn't want to show weakness.
I was starting to reach my limit at that point.
Now there's pain and stuff happening.
There may actually be something happening to me here.
And then I started blacking out from it.
What worried me about going completely unconscious is that if this thing kept going, I didn't know what I was going to end up as, or if I would even come to from it.
And so I rolled off my bed, hit the ground, kind of jolted me out of whatever it was for the most part.
Like I still could feel it.
I still hurt, but I wasn't in that like blackout tunnel anymore.
And I got out of my bedroom, ran down the hallway, and went into my kitchen.
Once I was in the kitchen, it was more of like, am I still in it?
I couldn't hear anything.
I would talk to myself, and I could feel the vibration in my chest, but I couldn't hear anything.
And so then you do a head-to-toe assessment, and you go, do I feel pressure?
Do I feel pain?
Well, there's residual pain, but my head's not in a vice anymore.
I must be out of it.
And so I decided at that point, well, I'm not staying in my room anymore, right?
Like I can't go to sleep in that.
And I spent the rest of the night on the couch, just in pain, not really being able to sleep,
and reading closed captions on the show as always sunny, just praying for the sun to come up.
The next morning, he's not feeling the acute pain anymore, but he decides to tell his bosses about the incident.
He's worried about what his bosses will think.
He's a rookie.
This is his first covert assignment.
And he doesn't want the more hardcore CIA bureau chiefs to think he was weak or soft or couldn't take the pressure.
I was still pretty new down there at this point, right?
And now I'm coming forth going, hey, some crazy sounds in my house and now my head hurts.
Like, it doesn't look great, frankly.
And so I didn't want to report it.
I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was report it.
But I'm also torn with my obligation to report what's happening.
So Tony sends his bosses in both the State Department and Langley a report detailing what happened.
But that doesn't stop the noise.
Every time he goes home, it starts up again.
And he keeps getting these painful physical reactions to it.
I would still wake up in pools of blood, like, gushing out of my nose.
Couldn't stop it until I was out and down through the house somewhere else multiple times.
Just, like, just pouring out head pressure, head pain.
Like, I never have bloody noses, ever.
But I would wake up just pools of it with this crazy head pressure and pain.
These debilitating events are all starting to have other impacts, too.
I could normally write a cable in an hour.
It would be a couple pages.
I would walk away, come back.
20 minutes later, edit, send, done.
That same thing would take me four, six, eight hours.
But you would come back to edit, and it would be completely incoherent.
Like, beyond incoherent.
I would ask the guys that I was working with to come in and be like,
Hey, can you read this?
What is this?
What was I even trying to say here?
And they'd be like, I have no idea.
Like, it's complete, nonsensical, words mashed together that didn't even make a coherent sentence.
I was at the top physical, psychological, emotional place I could have ever been in my life.
And I was gung-ho to do my job.
And within six months, I was a zombie and non-functional as a human being.
I'm John Lee Anderson.
And I'm Adam Entis.
From Vice World News, this is Havana Syndrome.
We'll be right back.
Episode 3, The Immaculate Concussion.
They're here for you, Matt Lee.
Okay.
Hi.
And, sir, your name is?
Yeah, Steve Dorsey from CBS News.
Hi, Steve.
Hi.
Just a quick change in topic.
Can you tell us about the incidents that have been going on in Havana affecting U.S. government workers there?
Yes.
So we are certainly aware of what has happened there.
Give me one second here.
August 2017.
Seven months after Tony's incident, the American government finally acknowledges for the first time that there's been a series of mysterious health incidents affecting their personnel in Havana.
They've reported some incidents which have caused a variety of physical symptoms.
And how long has this been going on for?
So we first heard about these incidents back in late 2016.
We asked the State Department why they chose to keep quiet about these incidents in those early weeks and months.
They told us our standing practice is not to discuss specific individuals or events due to privacy concerns as well as for security reasons.
My understanding is that it has only affected State Department employees.
And, of course, the State Department doesn't mention that any CIA officers are involved.
The U.S. government has a rule.
They don't talk about CIA officers overseas.
We take this very seriously.
What is this?
This incident.
What is the incident?
And that's what we're calling it.
We don't know exactly what…
So it's 2016 and you don't know what this incident is?
What this requires is providing medical examinations to these people.
Initially, when they started reporting what I will just call symptoms, it took time to figure out what it was.
And this is still ongoing.
By the time the news goes public, Tony has reached a breaking point.
After heading back to the U.S. to try to get better, he still has no answers.
You know, my health's deteriorating.
My vision's deteriorating.
I have migraines that just are permanent.
They won't stop.
You know, you look at yourself and you go, am I…
Is this…
Is this life now?
And I thought, how can I go from this pinnacle of a person that I was and within such a short period of time, within a year, have ended up crawling around with migraines in dark rooms, not able to drive, can't see straight.
How did I end up here?
He goes back to his supervisors at Langley, asks for help, but says he's still pretty much on his own at this point.
Tony says he's feeling like a pariah, ignored by the CIA.
We'll get into that more in a later episode.
But it's that combination of factors that brings Tony to almost do something drastic.
Everything went to shit.
And I said, all right, you're done.
That's fine.
Check it out.
Like, I think I'm done.
I think I've given it everything now.
I think that this part of my story is over.
And so, you know, I made plans to kill myself at that point.
And so, I started making plans.
You know, you write your letters to family.
I think I kind of sat there.
And before kind of making that ultimate choice, I kind of gave myself a chat.
You know, you do, kind of like in Havana, you do a head-to-toe assessment.
You go, all right, wait, like before you're here, before you make this that you can't come back from, what are you going to do?
And I gave myself an out.
I go, you have just a little bit left in you.
Push.
Use all that up.
And in a week, if you're still here, we're still on the floor, we're still fucked, you're allowed to go.
He hadn't told us everything.
That's Tony's brother.
You know, we knew it had been a bit of a shit show and they hadn't believed him.
And it was hard getting treatment and no one knew what it was and what have you.
But at that point, you know, we, like I'm learning a lot today, you know, so.
Did you know that he was thinking about killing himself?
No.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's difficult.
Yeah.
This isn't unique.
I've talked, like, I can't tell, like, there's been more than a handful of phone calls where I've talked to friends from pulling guns out of their mouths.
I've sent people over to homes to pull weapons out of people's homes because we've all been in such a dark place and we didn't get the support that we needed.
Multiple.
That's so fucked up, you know.
And so I gave myself a week.
And within two days after that moment, I got a call from one of the doctors at work and said, we've got you to into UPenn.
The whole team's going to see you.
I get emotional because.
Yeah, fair enough.
And so I went up to Penn and went through everything with them and they go, what the fuck happened to you?
Before the news of Havana syndrome goes public in August 2017, the number of U.S. spies and diplomats who've become afflicted has risen to almost two dozen people.
Almost all of them say they've experienced an incident at home or in a hotel in which they feel a directional pressure at their heads.
One that didn't go away unless they got off the X.
Many of the spies and diplomats that experienced this also heard a sound during their incidents.
Afterwards, many of them felt dizzy and foggy.
They're having trouble even keeping their balance.
And now they're having trouble keeping up at work.
Finally, in February 2017, the CIA and State Department reach out to a prominent ear, nose and throat doctor based in Miami.
After studying these patients, the doctor suspects that they're actually suffering from a brain injury, which ends up causing a lot of drama within the CIA.
We'll get to that later in the series.
But government officials soon realize they need a plan to help treat all these patients at once.
And so they reach out to another doctor who specializes in brain trauma.
So I'm Douglas Smith.
I'm a professor of neurosurgery and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania.
I was curious how you got involved in the first place in Havana syndrome.
Like, do you know the origin story of your involvement?
Yeah, to some extent.
So I got a strange email.
It's like I was wondering if somebody wanted me to, you know, accept $20 million for my bank account type of thing.
One day in the summer of 2017, Dr. Smith gets an email with a strange request.
Do you remember what the email said?
Did it suggest a phone call or did it actually say, you know, what actually was going on down in Havana?
No, it didn't mention anything about Havana.
And it just said, this is going to sound a little weird, you know, but we might need your help or something and give me a call.
I know that the person who emailed Dr. Smith worked for the CIA, but of course the CIA won't confirm that for me.
Did you realize that this was in, you were entering like a world of espionage or was it, were you oblivious to that until you got more involved?
Yeah, I really didn't know what it was about.
And, you know, people call me up a lot.
You know, anybody who's been around for a while, you serve on, you know, panels of, expert panels or whatnot.
And so I really didn't know what was up and I had some information.
Dr. Smith is well known in his field, particularly for his work studying professional football players with head injuries.
As the world is learning of Havana syndrome, he's starting to see affected spies and diplomats at his office.
Morale was definitely being affected. People were very nervous.
Back in Havana by this point, Tina has come clean to her husband and colleagues about her own incident in her kitchen the previous March.
Like Tony, she's still suffering from a variety of symptoms.
But by the time she comes forward, the U.S. ambassador, Jeffrey De Laurentiis, has already been dealing with the CIA cases for months.
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.
And De Laurentiis, by that point, was really, really worried.
He said, we're working on this. We're going to get you help. We're going to fix this.
And I remember him saying those words.
And that might be why I was the first one to end up at Pennsylvania.
It may have been a coincidence.
But on August 20th, I was in Philadelphia.
Before Tina and her cohort arrive, Dr. Smith gathers a team of specialists together to try to do a gut check.
What do they think is going on here?
They don't have a lot to go on.
Yeah, so right down the hall here, we met before the patients came.
At that meeting, we just had to kind of take out and we're just sitting around and everybody's like, what do you think this is?
And I think that at that time, I think the majority of folks really thought there was nothing here.
They're just like, well, we'll do this.
I mean, we're being asked and we want to, you know, do our part.
But this doesn't really make any sense.
When they walked through the door, did you say to yourself, oh, yes, this person has had a brain injury?
Or did they have a common look?
Did they look dazed and confused or was it not until you examined them and put them through your medical procedures that you could see?
Or did they look desperate?
Well, what a good word.
I think some of them were desperate.
You know, many of them, these are very high achiever folks who really want to do well at their jobs,
but, you know, often could not concentrate for very long, couldn't work a full day, had terrible headaches,
you know, just had this, you know, brain fog, you know, kind of, you know, word-finding issues,
you know, just be sitting there for a minute trying to think of that word.
Do you count yourself as one of the people who thought there was nothing there?
Before I met anybody, any of the patients, I had a sense that there could be something there.
They just seem like very believable patients.
These patients are very good historians about the symptoms and cause of that.
As far as any theory about what it was, that was completely unknown.
At first, the doctors really didn't have much information besides the symptoms the patients were reporting.
Dr. Smith had hoped he would get some blood samples.
Because when certain cells in the brain are damaged,
they release a type of protein into the bloodstream that can be detected.
This is how specialists can diagnose some types of concussions.
Hoping to collect physiological evidence to support the victims' accounts,
the CIA arranged for the medical staff at the embassy to draw blood from some of the patients.
And those samples were stashed in a fridge in the basement of the U.S. embassy
before they would be secretly flown to a lab in the U.S. for analysis.
The hope was that those tests would detect these special proteins,
hard evidence that the brains of the victims were damaged in some way.
Unfortunately,
The serum that was in Cuba, we were just in the process of having it shipped to Penn,
but a hurricane got in the way.
We never got it.
We asked the CIA about what happened there, but they wouldn't respond.
In any case, it's far from ideal for the U.Penn doctors.
There was no baselining done to the patients before their injuries
to assess if or how their conditions changed.
There was no physical evidence, at least on the surface, of a wound or an injury.
They didn't get the blood samples, so the doctors had to make do.
They talked to all the patients about their incidents.
Some felt like they had been in a beam of energy.
The majority of them heard a sound.
Some didn't.
It's pretty confusing.
Tony, after his incident.
This thing was 20-plus minutes of straight-line, singular, non-adjusting tone
that was either an artifact or a byproduct or was part of it.
I don't know.
Probably the majority who said they heard a sound.
It was more like a cicada-like.
But other descriptions of the sound really varied.
There were high kind of whine, like just before an alarm in your house goes off,
that high-pitched noise.
That noise when you have the back window of your car open,
you're going down the highway, kind of that baffling wah-wah-wah noise.
Others said there was like a grinding, low-metal grinding noise.
And then there was still some that heard nothing.
So it was a little bit all over the place.
So then they put Tony, Tina, and the rest of their cohort through a battery of tests.
What are they physically making you do or doing to you?
Yeah.
A lot of those initial tests had to do with movement and with eye movement.
So how is our balance?
Could we stand on one foot on the floor?
Could we close our eyes and stay standing without falling over?
Could we track a finger with our eyes?
Did our eyes work together?
Could they converge and diverge, as we know now, is kind of a big part of this.
The vestibular testing is probably the most interesting.
That's the system in the inner ear that helps with balance.
You're in basically a dark, a completely pitch-dark enclosed room.
Sometimes they're just following your eye movements with sensors.
Other times you're actually playing an active role.
You're trying to straighten lines with a little joystick.
You're trying to follow lines around the black interior.
And one other important thing.
The chair spins as well.
So just to add an element of vomit to all of this,
I have to have a spinning chair.
I've never thrown up so much in my life.
The most unpleasant test?
They flush this stream of water into your ear,
and it's super hard and super fast.
This is caloric reflex testing.
Rushing water spinning around in your ear.
Which checks for issues with balance.
And that was awful.
I thought I was, like, having morning sickness.
Am I pregnant again?
This is terrible.
I felt so sick.
And then somehow it magically drains out.
I just remember being so ill that night.
I just could not get my balance back.
I was staggering back to the hotel.
I wasn't walking right.
So if I didn't have vestibular problems, I did after that test.
All of the doctors involved made sure not to discuss with one another
what they were finding or hearing from the patients during the testing,
so as not to influence their independent judgment.
After seeing the first series of patients,
we met back in the same conference room down the hall,
and we call it kind of the reveal.
So basically it's like, so what do you think?
And one member spoke up and he said, this is real.
He said, I'm just kind of surprised,
but there really is a neurological issue here.
And then one by one,
everybody who had examined these patients felt there was something there,
that this was really a neurological issue.
So now Dr. Smith starts asking,
what could have happened to cause this?
We looked at things like insecticides.
There are certain types of toxins or poisons.
And, you know, you can absolutely get brain injury
from these damage to the brain,
but it does not seem to manifest this way,
and it doesn't quite look like this.
He also rules out that this is some kind of infection.
You know, that really wouldn't make sense to be directional.
The waxing and waning of symptoms as they duck behind a wall,
you know, I don't know many infections that go away
when you duck behind the wall and then come back, they come back.
So that history doesn't really fit for that kind of a toxin
or infection type of issue.
And as for the sound many of the patients reported hearing?
We, from the beginning,
didn't think the sounds had anything to do with brain injury
or hurting the brain because sound cannot hurt their brain.
So, Dr. Smith says,
The patient's symptoms couldn't be the result
of some sort of attack using sound.
Sound may have accompanied whatever happened,
but it couldn't be the cause.
Certainly, out loud enough, you know, volume can hurt your hearing.
So sound can drive people off,
but again, that's, you know, it wasn't a hearing issue,
and sound itself really shouldn't injure the brain.
Okay, interesting.
This felt like a revelation to all of us during that interview.
Personally, I had no idea that sound couldn't hurt the brain.
It also means that what these people experienced
could not have been caused by sound or some kind of sonic device.
But according to Dr. Smith,
the symptoms these patients have do all remind him of something,
something he's treated for a long time now.
This really sounds like concussion.
A concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
And what happens in a concussion is kind of fascinating and complex.
In part, it involves a particular component of neurons in your brain
called axons.
So axons are these really tiny electrical fibers, basically.
They're the electric grid of the brain
that connect one part of the brain to the other.
But they're so small and delicate,
you take about 100 of those side by side
to be as wide as a human hair.
So in a concussion,
the axons, the tissue that they're in, gets shifted.
So as your brain gets rapidly deformed,
kind of changes shape,
the axons get stretched.
Normally, they can tolerate a pretty big stretch.
But under something that's very dynamic,
something very rapid,
that pulls them very fast,
something inside actually breaks.
And what breaks
is really what transports the protein.
It's like the train tracks
inside this tiny structure.
And they can physically break
at the moment of injury.
So usually,
the way neurons in your brain
communicate with each other
involves a wave of electrical charge.
It's really fast and really intense.
This wave creates a spark of electricity
that then becomes an electrical current
that travels up to 100 meters per second
to the end of the axon,
which triggers the release
of chemical neurotransmitters.
And that's how you can transmit a signal
down the axon
from one part of your brain to the other.
But in traumatic brain injury,
this kind of acts like a,
think of like the toilet tank.
Dripping at night,
it's driving you crazy.
You open up the lid
and you see this flapper valve is open.
And the water just keeps pouring in.
When you have an injury,
instead of just laying the right amount,
the Goldilocks amount of sodium in
to create that spark and then stop,
it just keeps kind of pouring in.
So this makes it
so it cannot have another spark.
And so we think
that that's fundamentally
what causes individuals
to become that dazed and confused
that they can't get
the right electrical signals.
And then on top of that,
you get these swellings of these axons.
And they swell,
if they swell past a certain point,
they'll disconnect.
And once they disconnect,
they're gone forever.
You cannot grow an axon
across the brain again.
Okay, so that's what happens
in a concussion.
But usually something physically
has to happen to you.
Say you fall and hit your head
or have a 300-pound man
run full speed into you
on a football field.
And that didn't happen
to any of these
Havana Syndrome patients.
Right.
But Dr. Smith says
you don't actually have to hit your head
to have a concussion.
In a car accident,
if you're restrained with a seatbelt,
your head might rotate
and actually not hit anything.
But that's enough to cause
the brain to change shape rapidly,
just like if you hit your head.
And so you can have a concussion
with no blow to your head,
no bruises or anything.
But in the case of these spies
and diplomats in Havana,
Dr. Smith has no idea
what caused their concussion-like symptoms.
This really is a novel illness,
something that no one
on Dr. Smith's team
has seen before.
As they were being examined,
the patients themselves
kind of took on,
you know,
despite all this suffering,
they had a sense of humor
and they called it
immaculate concussion.
They called it themselves.
Immaculate concussion.
Can you see that?
Like, can the human eye
just looking at a brain,
would you be able to see
any of these things
you're talking about?
And if so,
what would that look like?
You actually can.
So this is something
that's so small,
you need a microscope
and you can't stuff
a microscope
into somebody's living brain.
But what we can do
neuroimaging,
we call it advanced neuroimaging
or diffusion MRI.
And the MRI allows us
to look at these tracks,
these pathways
that the axon form
in the white matter
and determine...
Dr. Smith used these MRIs
to peer into the patient's brains
and what he saw
was abnormal.
But again,
he had nothing
to compare them to.
These patients
did not have MRIs
before they left
for Havana.
So it was impossible
to know
how their axons
had changed.
The best they could do
is compare
the patient's MRI results
with quote-unquote
normal brains.
There was a change
in the tracks,
the connectivity
across these tracks
through a lot of the brain.
That doesn't tell us
that there's a bunch
of broken axons
there necessarily.
That just tells us
there's a change.
Which is important,
but this isn't
a definitive diagnosis
of anything.
You know,
I would predict
that there was damage
to axons,
a change in the axons.
But, you know,
fortunately we don't have
any of those patients' brains,
so we really don't know.
We just can only surmise
looking at the imaging
that the axons
were affected.
Even though
they aren't able
to make a specific diagnosis,
the doctors at UPenn
have no doubt
that they are dealing
with something real.
And in March 2018,
seven months after examining
their first set of patients,
Dr. Smith's team
publishes a peer-reviewed study
announcing their findings.
The doctors say
the patients in Havana
appear to have
a new kind of
brain network disorder
with symptoms similar
to traumatic brain injury
or a concussion.
As for what would cause this,
the doctors say
they don't know,
but that it appeared
to come from a, quote,
directional exposure
of undetermined etiology.
It's the first time
a group of medical professionals
is saying publicly,
hey, we studied this.
It's real.
Something happened.
They don't say it bluntly,
but because of the directionality
of the experience,
it implies that injuries
were caused
by some sort of device
that is being aimed
at the targets.
Which was huge,
but also still vague.
Ultimately,
the UPenn study
did less to solve
the mystery
and instead
created more questions.
That's after the break.
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So you wouldn't think
a straightforward
medical report
out of the
University of Pennsylvania
would stir up
a lot of controversy.
But it did.
But before we can
explain why this
finding from UPenn
upset people,
you have to understand
what had been going on
between the U.S.
and Cuba.
Keep in mind
that at this point,
March 2018,
we're still only
a few years into
the historic
restoration of ties
between Cuba
and the U.S.
The embassies
were reopened,
yes,
but things had
gotten complicated
in part because
President Donald Trump.
Donald Trump
was now president.
Thank you,
everybody.
Thank you very much.
Great honor,
and thank you to...
The first incidents
had been reported
during the transition
from Obama to Trump,
who during the campaign
sent mixed messages
about Cuba.
Privately,
he told Obama
that he supported
his policy changes.
And thank you
to Miami.
We love Miami.
But later,
publicly,
he slammed the deal.
Effective immediately,
I am canceling
the last administration's
completely one-sided
deal with Cuba.
And after Trump
took office,
he effectively handed
over U.S. policy
on Cuba
to Senator Marco Rubio,
who was an outspoken
critic of the opening
and of the Cuban
government in general.
And so there was
very little interest
on the U.S. side
in continuing efforts
to bring the two
countries together.
But as American officials
start to wrap
their heads around
the sheer volume
of bizarre health anomalies
their people
are experiencing
in Cuba,
they start to pay
more attention.
Early on,
Ambassador De Laurentiis
reaches out
to his counterpart
in Cuba,
saying,
you guys need
to cut this out.
But the Cubans
insist they have
nothing to do with it.
The president of Cuba
himself,
Raul Castro,
actually meets
with De Laurentiis
to try to convince him
not only are the Cubans
not fucking
with the Americans,
but that they want
to help solve
whatever this is.
Raul says,
it isn't us.
But the Americans
don't trust the Cubans
to be honest participants
in an investigation.
And they can't tell
whether it's true
that they know nothing
or whether they are
in fact perpetrating
the incidents
or possibly helping
someone else
carry them out.
An additional possibility
is that some kind
of rogue faction
in the Cuban government
opposed to the opening
with the Americans
went out on their own
on this.
And that the Cuban
leadership knows about it,
but can't tell the Americans
that they don't have
full control
over the island.
By the time news
of Havana Syndrome
goes public,
well, little trust
may have been there
has evaporated.
Until this point,
the Americans
had been trying
to secretly deal
with the mystery themselves.
But now that it was public,
they had to respond.
But that means
all the subtlety
is thrown out the window.
Now the Trump administration,
which has already
signaled politically
that they want to roll back
the relationship with Cuba,
has to convince
a domestic audience
that they're not only
taking it seriously,
but responding.
Which means that
they have to act
like they know a lot more
than they actually do.
Thank you, Mr. President.
General Kelly said
on just last week
that you believe
that Cuba could stop
the attacks against Americans.
Do you believe then
that Cuba is responsible?
I think Cuba do about it.
Do you believe Cuba is responsible?
I do believe Cuba is responsible.
I do believe that.
We hold the Cuban authorities
responsible for fighting
out who is
carrying out
these health attacks.
Hardliner sees on this,
saying Cuba needs
to be isolated.
We can say that
we don't know
how it happened.
We can even say
we can't know for sure
who did it.
But two things
we know for sure.
People were hurt
and the Cuban government
knows who did it.
But the Cuban government
insists to the U.S.
and to the world
that if something
were happening
on their turf,
they would know about it.
Cuba says
it has never used
nor allowed
its territory
to be used
to attack diplomats.
The Cuban government
decides to launch
its own investigation
into the matter.
They don't have access
to the patients,
though they do have access
to other potential evidence
from the island,
including a leaked audio recording
made public
by the Associated Press.
The Cubans say
that the sound
on the recording
is likely just a cricket.
And so when the UPenn study
comes out calling this
a brain network disorder,
Cuba pounces on it,
makes fun of the study,
and suggests
that it's full of holes.
We spoke to one
of the Cuban scientists,
Mitchell Joseph Valdezosa,
who said it's possible
these patients
had head injuries
prior to coming to Cuba.
And to be fair,
there is controversy
over this
because a lot of people
do have brain abnormalities.
They can be common.
He also argued
that some of these patients
seemed to become ill
after they'd heard rumors
of their colleagues
getting sick on the island.
Dr. Valdezosa
was hinting
that maybe this was not
the result
of any kind of attack
or illness at all,
but perhaps
a bad case
of gringo hysteria.
There's an actual term
for what the Cubans
are implying here,
mass psychogenic illness.
That's when a group of people
all hear about
an alleged threat,
like a poison or a virus,
and then they start
to feel like they're sick,
and come down
with real symptoms,
even if they haven't
actually been exposed
to any threat at all.
This is a condition
that's been documented
for centuries.
Psychologists used to call
this mass hysteria.
The word hysteria
comes from the Greek
for uterus,
and the Greeks
and Egyptians
had this thing
about how the womb
could cause women's
psychological problems.
Anyway,
it's now understood
to be pretty sexist.
Historians believe
that that is what
caused the young women
and girls
in Salem, Massachusetts,
to start violently
twitching and screaming
en masse,
which ultimately led
to the Salem Witch Trials.
But instances
of mass psychogenic illness
have been documented
more recently as well.
They're quite common,
especially in places
of high stress,
like schools
with strict rules
and repressive workplaces.
Recently,
some doctors found
that kids watching
TikTok videos
of people with the symptoms
of Tourette syndrome
started to feel
those same symptoms.
remember this is
a very closely knit
community,
largely isolated
from the Cuban community,
with very close ties.
People like Cuban doctor
Valde Sosa
point out that
some of these diplomats
in Havana,
including Tina,
may have been swept up
in the rumor mill.
And this gives you
all the conditions
for the psychogenic
propagation
of this sort of
amplification
of concern
about diseases.
And to be fair,
an embassy can be
something of a fishbowl.
Now, Dr. Smith
disagrees with those
who say that
the Cuban patients
were suffering
from mass psychogenic illness.
Unlike Tina,
most of the patients
during their initial incidents
weren't aware
that anyone else
was getting sick.
He also says
these symptoms
would be impossible
to fake.
In mass hysteria,
it's just like
you have to be
essentially kind of
contaminated or influenced
by somebody else
with the same symptoms
so that you can empathize
or subconsciously
take on those symptoms.
That doesn't work here.
It doesn't work at all
because many of these patients
had never met
the other patients.
they just independently
had the same kind of history
of some kind of exposure
and then they had
these symptoms
but independently
described
kind of the same type
of story
without ever
seeing another patient.
But it's not just
the Cuban government
pushing this theory.
So the details are sketchy.
I've been working
with a lawyer
named Mark Zaid
and we filed a lawsuit
seeking access
to documents
about the government's
investigation.
I've actually gotten
a lot of documents back
but almost all the pages
are so redacted
they're completely black.
What I really want to see
is a report
by the FBI's
Behavioral Analysis Unit.
They concluded
without having interviewed
any of the victims
themselves
that the patient
suffered from
mass psychogenic illness.
We asked the FBI
for a copy of the report
but they declined
to provide it.
And some American
medical professionals
have also questioned
the UPenn study.
And what really struck me
was how nonspecific
these symptoms were.
Adam Gaffney.
He's a pulmonologist
at Harvard Medical School.
These sorts of
symptom complexes
that are described
are very common
in the general population.
He studies lungs
not brains
but his criticism
is focused on
the scientific methodology
of the study.
As I said
there could be
many different things.
There could be
undiagnosed medical conditions
among some individuals
for all we know.
Right?
There could be
simply what we would refer to
as medically
unexplained symptoms
which are a very
common issue
in primary care
a substantial portion
of patients
you know
as any primary care
physician will tell you
often have symptoms
that can't easily
be tied to a particular
diagnosis.
It doesn't mean
the symptoms aren't real.
It doesn't mean
their suffering's not real.
It doesn't mean
it's not biological.
It just means
that we don't understand it.
Fair enough.
There are a lot
of unexplained
and undiagnosed
physical and psychological
ailments
that can affect
the human body.
With all due respect
though
these experts
who came out
against the UPenn study
had no access
to the patients
in Havana.
It would be like
me writing a story
about this
without interviewing anyone.
You have to do
some leg work.
I don't know
of any psychiatric
issues that kind of
look like what you have
with traumatic brain injury.
It doesn't mean
it could never happen
but this is kind of
a unique disruption
of the brain's networks.
You know
not certain regions
just you know
solitary regions
of the brain.
There's something
called curbside medicine.
You know
a couple of physicians
they see each other
on the you know
passing on the sidewalk
and they say
hey I have this patient
but if you didn't
examine the patient
or know whatever
it's just a
just a very vague opinion.
A famous quote
from Faraday
is that
there's no one
quite so frightening
as somebody
who is sure
they're correct
and just seeing
so many reports
quotes from individuals
who were absolutely
certain
that this was
psychological
for example
or something else
and that people
are just making it up
or that they were
making it up
for a political reason
I didn't understand that
I've never seen that before
and the harm
that it does
to the patients
just doesn't make
any sense to me either.
So we're a little
further along
it seems clear
at least as far
as the doctors
who examined
these patients
are concerned
that something
has happened
to these people's brains
but we still don't know
what did it
or who
which is why
we decided
to go back
to where this all began
my favorite city
in the world.
Next time
we head to Cuba
to follow up
on some leads.
Okay so
what just happened?
So we drove
into Tina's neighborhood
onto her street
which is
in a highly secure area
and when we
turned around
and went back
I think we picked up
a tail.
Havana Syndrome
is hosted and reported
by Adam Entus
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
as early PG&D
who
was
going toımız
from it
andognize
and everything
came to him
in a safer place
above their open
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and drone
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