I had a friend who used to live in that building.
You ever see, remember Roberto Salas, the photographer?
Yeah.
Last year, our team visited Cuba.
It was the first time John Lee and I had been on the island together.
For me, it was bittersweet, walking down the Malecon, Havana's famous waterfront.
I'd lived in Cuba in the 90s when I was writing my book about Che Guevara.
Havana's my favorite city in the world, and I hadn't been back in a long time.
The last time I was here was shortly before Fidel died, and I'd missed it a great deal.
The building that looks like a small castle, that was BRAC, the Bureau of Repression Against Communism.
It was the torture center and documentation center for the anti-communists' secret services before the revolution.
Yeah.
We'd gone to Cuba to revisit the ground zero of Havana syndrome.
Now that we had more information from the people who first reported these mysterious health incidents, we wanted to retrace their steps.
So there's the embassy.
Ah, yeah.
Looks like it's had some work.
It's looking good.
I noticed there's still the American flag flying.
Kate Osborne, the executive producer of this show, was with us.
Well, I mean, it's still functioning.
I just don't know what the capacity, you know, how many people are here still.
It's just not clear to me.
So the American embassy stands out.
It's a very prominent building in Havana.
You go along the Malecon, and you go right past the U.S. embassy.
And you can imagine how much it drove Fidel up the wall.
It's a monolith.
It looks like...
Monolith.
Let's cut the tape right there, because I know where this is going.
It's an ugly building.
Oh, come on, man.
You know, you're a great reporter, but you really have no taste whatsoever.
And I do a better job of describing it anyway.
The architects are the same ones that built the U.N. buildings in New York.
It's a rectilinear building, very streamlined, very tidy, very modern.
Amongst architects, it's regarded as a classic piece from the 1950s of a certain...
I forget the name of the school.
The point is, this is a building with a rich history.
Even well after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the George W. Bush years,
tensions between the U.S. and Cuba got really bad.
And as a sort of fuck you, Fidel would hold rallies right in front of this embassy.
Yeah, really noisy ones, repudiating the United States.
And they put billboards along the seafront there, too, calling the Americans terrorists.
I was here in 2015 when John Kerry came and they opened the embassy for the first time in 54 years.
It was the hottest goddamn day.
And they packed in all these people right there, in that little garden right there.
And it was weird.
The Cubans had brought in all these civilians to basically say, yay, yay.
For the first time, it wasn't like rent-a-mob against.
It was rent-a-mob for.
Despite the renewed friendship, there was an extended negotiation about how much stuff the Americans could bring into Cuba.
And in part because of the embargo, it's pretty difficult to get all kinds of things in Cuba.
Even if you can get things locally, it's a security issue.
In the local market, if such a thing existed, they could go and buy it.
But they were afraid to do that because they knew from their experience in Moscow, where the embassy was completely bugged during construction,
that they couldn't trust that any purchases they made here, even for stones for the facade or furniture,
all of it had to be shipped in from the United States because of concern that bugs would be placed in all of the, even in the stone.
And so...
It has to be remembered that this is a relationship marked by long-standing mistrust and with good reason.
I'm John Lee Anderson.
And I'm Adam Entis.
From Vice World News, this is Havana Syndrome.
I just wanted to point out where we are.
So that's the monument to the USS Maine that was blown up in Havana Harbor, which caused the Spanish-American War.
Walking around Havana with John Lee Anderson is, to say the least, an education.
After the Spanish-American War, the Americans basically took over Cuba.
And American corporations, Hershey's, Chocolate, and others, they bought up huge amounts of land.
U.S.-Cuba history goes way back.
A lot of it has to do with slavery.
But in the late 19th century, the U.S. inserted itself into the Cuban fight for independence against colonial Spain and took over the island as its colonial administrator.
By the time the revolution happened, the Americans owned the railroads, they had the electricity, they owned everything.
And then there were a few rich Cubans with them.
One very, very famous, the king of sugar, Julio Lobo.
He owned 14 different sugar mills.
He had a swimming pool built for Esther Williams, the synchronized swimming movie star, just because he flew her down one weekend.
It's still there.
They tried to get him to stay and join the revolution.
The U.S. also turned a blind eye to corruption in Cuba, which only exacerbated the country's stark inequalities.
And, of course, there's the Nacional, which was built in 1930.
It was like the showpiece for the hotels in Cuba, and right next to it, the Capri.
And this was the kind of moth quadrant, right?
Mayor Lansky, George Raft, and then the Riviera down there.
Americans were coming here in the 30s.
I mean, Hemingway was living here, right, from 1930 on.
It also didn't help that American citizens started coming to Havana in droves.
When that really took off was during Prohibition.
As I came into the beautiful harbor of Havana, my one thought was to land and go where all good Americans go when they go to Cuba.
Can you guess where?
Sloppy Joes, the mecca where tourists seek courage and inspiration.
So Americans came down here to drink.
There were bars everywhere that just catered to Americans.
There were dirty weekenders.
Prostitution, gambling, everything.
American tourists basically treated the city like an amusement park.
I think planes ran between here and Miami every half an hour, and there was more than one airline.
And there was also ferries between here and Key West that ran.
By the 1950s, Cuba's ruled by a dictator named Fulgencio Batista,
whose brutality the U.S. government ignores because he's willing to protect American business interests on the island.
But then, in 1959...
From his stronghold in the wild Sierra Maestria Mountains...
Something happens to completely change the course of history on the island, and in the Western Hemisphere.
The Cuban Revolution.
Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant after two years of guerrilla warfare against the Batista regime.
A group of young idealists who'd spent several years waging a guerrilla war from the Cuban countryside managed to overtake Batista's forces and seize power in a stunning coup on New Year's Day, 1959.
Now Batista has fled. A new leader is on the scene. Fidel Castro.
These guerrillas are, of course, led by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and an Argentine doctor friend named Che Guevara.
An Argentine with a Botticelli angel's face and a scholar of Marx.
This is all happening as U.S. officials are in the midst of a global war against the supposed threat of communism.
And this is right after the witch hunts of McCarthyism, where people inside the U.S. could be blacklisted if they were even suspected of sympathizing with communists.
And so when a bunch of leftist revolutionaries take control of a country just 90 miles off the coast of Florida and immediately start snuggling up to the Soviet Union, it's like the Americans' worst fear coming true.
In January 1961, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower breaks off all diplomatic relations with Cuba.
There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached.
So the U.S. is pulling its people off the island, which is basically the final adios y hasta nunca.
The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
Cuban army pilots open the first phase of organized revolt.
A few months later, President Kennedy deploys CIA-trained anti-Castro Cubans in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
With the Castro government completely victorious over the invading rebels, there is despair and confusion among the relatives.
Which, of course, was a massive failure, though it marks the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba to this day.
BATISTA
Yeah, that's the Havana Yard Club, and that's the one that they wouldn't let BATISTA join because he had to have a lot of love.
Everywhere we visited in Havana had history, political or personal.
Even though we were in Cuba working as journalists following the Havana Syndrome story, we kept coming across John Lee's old stomping grounds.
How long did you live in Havana again?
I lived here for three years with my family, from 93 to 95, while I was researching and writing my Che book.
It was a really hard time for Cuba then, but we had little kids, and in some ways, it was one of those worst of times, best of times.
So, this is the entrance to Nautico, my old neighborhood.
It was a closed neighborhood, and it was one of the last kind of middle-class suburbs built just before the Revolution.
There was a Russian woman here, she sold smuggled goods.
My kids went here.
It's a terrible school.
There's my house.
Amazing.
There's my house.
This is my street.
They changed everything.
They changed the house.
You're like barely a block from the ocean.
Yeah.
94, summer of 94.
Things were really bad then.
The Soviet Union had fallen and abandoned the island.
And 30 years of subsidies had ended overnight.
And so, Cuba was on its own.
The country was in a really deep economic crisis.
They called this the special period in time of peace.
Things got so bad that there was serious food shortages, and the average Cuban lost an entire meal per day.
The special period lasted through much of the 90s, but things were at their worst when we were there.
And in August of 94, there were mass protests in Havana, almost insurrectional, where people were expressing their anger in a way they hadn't done in the entire history of the Cuban Revolution.
After the rioting on the Malikon, three weeks, Fidel said anybody who wanted could go, in a fury.
I mean, it was shocking.
Thousands of people building homemade rafts from whatever they could find to set sail towards the U.S.
The massive exodus that took place that summer was known as the Bolsero's crisis, or the Cuban rafters crisis.
I'll never forget coming back one day.
I watched as this truckload turned out to be like two families, about 23 people.
They unloaded a raft here, a pretty precarious raft, homemade, you know, oil drums and plywood.
And they got on it, and the neighborhood here, the women and the kids, everybody, my kids, came,
and you could see lightning on the far horizon, and dusk was coming.
And they were begging these families not to go, and they pushed off.
And just as they pushed off, they may have been like 10 feet out, a woman and a child jumped into the water.
And they came ashore, and they were just terrified and shaking.
It was terrible to watch.
My kids, you know, they all internalized this stuff.
And I found my daughter Rosie, the middle one, drawing a picture.
And I saw this kind of, like, square and this kind of, like, pod on top.
And I asked her, what are you drawing?
She said, that's it.
It was this idea of, like, people on a raft.
It really shook me, you know.
In the late 90s, the government was thrown a lifeline when Venezuela's strongman president, Hugo Chavez, came on the scene.
But in 2013, Chavez dies.
Venezuela's in a crisis, and the Cuban government once again is left in a bind.
And this is when a number of suitors show up at Cuba's door offering to help, including the usual suspects, Russia, China, and the U.S.
Everyone's looking to increase their influence on the island.
This is the newer end of Havana.
And as the crow flies, we're probably less than maybe a third of a mile from Fidel's well-guarded residence.
After visiting John Lee's old house, we hopped in a car and headed to a nondescript residential street about a half a mile away.
Typically, this is where a lot of foreigners have been given, granted residences through one of the state agencies that provides housing for diplomats and foreigners.
This street is key to the Havana syndrome story.
At the beginning of the block is a multi-story cement building.
So this is the 113 is what we're looking for.
It's going to be on the left.
You want to walk up to the end and then come back?
Just to see you get a sense of the...
Let's do this fairly quickly because there's some fairly official-looking guys here.
Okay?
Yeah.
And it took us a while, but finally we spotted it.
The home of Tony, patient zero.
This is a kind of typical house.
Not dissimilar to the one I lived in.
It's very 60s, kind of low-level...
Now that I'd met Tony and heard his story, I wanted to retrace his steps to see where he lived
and looked for any obvious signs of Cuban intelligence in the area.
It's approximately 4.30 in the afternoon, which is around the time that we're here now.
It's the golden hour, as they say.
And he hears a cacophony of dogs barking, howling, which he thought was very odd.
And then a few seconds later, he feels this intense pressure in his head.
The pressure started in the head, and then the discomfort in the ear.
And hears the sound, which it feels like his head is in a vice.
It got really uncomfortable.
It started very, very loud, like ear-piercingly loud.
He thinks it's an escalation in the harassment that he had been subjected to in a very different kind of way,
like his colleague, who had his car tires deflated.
Remember Tony told us he thought this was just harassment, which spies deal with all the time.
But he thought this was a new, very different form of harassment.
After talking to a lot of my sources, what I learned before coming to Havana
is that in the weeks leading up to Tony's incident,
that normal spy-versus-spy harassment appeared to be ratcheting up.
He arrived in Havana in mid-October, and from the moment he arrives, they are all over him.
And this increased harassment coincided with the arrival of a new CIA station chief in Havana,
though I can't confirm that the two events are related.
Recently what I found out was that around the summer of 2016,
there was an increase in the harassment,
and it became more hostile, if you will, less innocuous.
Rather than it just being evidence of somebody coming into your home,
it became more abusive, more threatening.
An embassy employee would come home.
Often their houses are surrounded by a fence, a wall,
so it's like a compound sort of arrangement.
And when they enter the compound, in the lawn,
they found knives, which have been kind of stabbed into the earth up to the hilt.
Now again, this is sort of strange, right?
Like maybe some kid, neighborhood kid, decided to pull a prank.
They can never really know for sure,
but obviously people who are trained in this believed that this was the Cubans sending a message.
At one point, the person had a dog, and the dog was suddenly taken sick.
They rushed the dog to a veterinarian,
and the veterinarian found puncture marks from needles in the dog.
The dog was in inches of dying from whatever was injected,
and had to be medevaced back to Florida,
and back to family members who were still in the United States.
And then there were the scorpions.
Sometimes, you know, they would come home,
and this is something they saw in 2016,
both diplomats and spies would come home,
and they would find scorpions in their apartment or in their house.
Sometimes the scorpions would have been partially stepped on,
so that some of their limbs were broken and couldn't be moved,
and the result was that the scorpions would go in circles.
The wife of someone who worked at the embassy was at home,
putting on her pajamas, when of all things, a scorpion fell out.
When she looked inside the pajamas, she found a piece of tape.
The suspicion was that Cuban intelligence had used the tape to keep the scorpion in place
until she put the outfit on, but they couldn't know for sure.
And the perceived harassment only keeps escalating.
Before Tony arrives in Havana, one of his embassy colleagues,
who I've learned was also in the CIA, has his cover blown.
And immediately, the harassment starts.
He wakes up to find his tires are flat.
Later, someone writes a gay slur on his car.
We asked the Cuban government for comment on this,
but they didn't respond.
Tony, of course, was aware of the uptick in harassment aimed at his colleagues
around the end of 2016.
And some stuff was happening to him, too.
There was the constant surveillance.
And he kept coming out to his car to find his windshield wiper was gone,
even after he replaced it, which was hard to do in Havana.
Then one day, he came home to find a recently cleaned shirt crumpled on the floor of his bedroom.
A pungent smell of urine filled the room.
Had someone or something perhaps peed on it?
He thought maybe this was payback for having slipped his Cuban surveillance the day before.
But when they peed on my clothes and I came home and they were balled up in the corner,
I laughed hysterically.
Like, it made me happy.
They knew that I was being good at my job.
So at first, he felt pretty sure that he knew what was going on
when he heard that strange noise in his house.
But this harassment is different because it's actually hurting him.
I think it must be that one over there is the one he's referring to.
That's the one that he suspected in this building on our right.
At first, Tony suspects that the sound is coming from a building nearby.
It's a building he believes Cuban intelligence is using to watch him.
So the tall building, the five, six-story building, is about 200 feet away from where we're standing.
The neighborhood is filled with mostly low-slung houses like Tony's.
But this tall building just dominates the street.
He can't come or go without passing it.
So he was on the bottom floor.
So it was like a two-bedroom, like an office and a kitchen and a bathroom.
And then behind that gate was where he would keep his car.
And every time he left the gate, he'd see, as he was coming out past this building,
there'd be this flurry of activity that he believed was related to following him.
He believes that his tail, you know, the people that would follow him around,
that they had their base of operations, their listening post, as they call it,
was in that multi-story building.
And they would swarm when he left.
And if they were going to break into his house to check on the bugs,
that's when they would do it, when they saw that he left.
But Tony doesn't know for sure that's where the sound is coming from.
He spends the night after the first incident on his living room couch.
The next day, he goes into the embassy to report what happened to him,
to see if he really has been injured by this thing.
At this point, he's worried he might have had a stroke.
And he immediately goes to see the medical officer in the embassy,
who had previously actually lived in his house before he arrived.
And the embassy medical officer says something that just stops him in his tracks.
That honestly stopped us in our tracks when he told us.
He tells him what happened, and he describes the noise.
And the medical officer said he had heard a similar sound.
Which was a huge revelation for us.
For years, we'd thought that he, Tony, was the first victim.
Since 2018, I had thought of Tony as patient zero.
Of course, we couldn't know for sure.
He was the first person who came forward to report that he was ill to the CIA.
So it was just kind of mind-blowing to have him say point-blank,
there were people before me, this medical officer, possibly others too.
When Tony and the medical officer realize they've both had similar experiences,
Tony takes the information to the regional security officer, or RSO,
who is in charge of keeping track of security incidents involving embassy personnel.
And that guy says he had a similar experience as well.
This is obviously a huge shock for all of them.
And it's at this point that Tony feels they have to talk to the ambassador directly.
They go to De Laurentiis' office.
As in Ambassador Jeffrey De Laurentiis, Tony and the regional security officer
huddle in one of the embassy's secret skiffs.
Knowing that it's the only place in the embassy that's truly secure, they believe.
A sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a skiff.
Every U.S. embassy in the world has at least one of these, if not several.
And that's also true in the case of Havana.
He tells De Laurentiis about the escalation in harassment that had been going on for months.
And De Laurentiis, he was sort of taken aback and didn't realize how bad it had gotten.
He asks Patient Zero to write a report and to send the report in.
And that's sent in on December 30th, 2016.
As we have mentioned before, at the ambassador's request,
Tony writes a report about what he'd experienced and sends it to the CIA.
But then, when he gets home from work that day, he hears it again.
This is now December 30th, at the exact same time, 4.30 in the afternoon.
This time, he's decided that he's going to record what he heard.
So he's in his house in the same place, and he uses his phone to record the sound.
And he sends the audio file to his brother, who plays it for himself and his wife.
And they can't believe what they're hearing.
He says to his brother in a text message,
That's like 10 times less than what I'm hearing here.
And you cannot get a sense of also the sensation that I'm feeling, the pressure.
You're only hearing a fraction of the sound.
But what I'm experiencing is like this whole body experience.
More after the break.
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So that's the chain of events on the ground
in the lead-up to the first reported incident
of Havana syndrome.
But my question has always been the timing.
I mean, this is just two years
since relations were restored.
The Cuban government had put so much energy
into reopening the embassies
and building these relationships.
But then in the fall of 2016,
months after that new station chief arrives,
two earth-shaking events change everything.
The first is that Donald Trump is elected president,
who as a candidate had threatened
to tear up Obama's agreement with the Cubans.
And then a few weeks later, Fidel Castro dies.
Fidel had been ill for years
and had already stepped back from power.
But his death as the ultimate revolutionary figurehead
nonetheless had a huge symbolic impact.
And I've wondered if this moment of vulnerability
may have made some people within the Cuban government
so nervous that perhaps someone decided
that it was time to pump the brakes, shall we say,
on making nice with the Americans.
We're going to go to Tina's.
So while we were down here,
I also wanted to check out Tina Onifer's house.
She's the diplomat who reported an incident in her kitchen
a few months after Tony, in March 2017.
She lived maybe a mile or two from Tony's house.
It's a beautiful neighborhood, really exclusive.
And you can see that as you drive down its streets.
The houses are big and beautiful,
and the lawns are well manicured.
Yeah, just go slow and just like basically...
No, he doesn't have to pause even.
As soon as we turn onto Tina's block,
we notice people watching us.
Well, here we have the security around here.
We may not be able to do this outside
without attracting attention.
There's the security guy right in front of us.
As you can hear, as we drive by Tina's house,
we also start picking up a lot of interference.
I'm no expert, but it could have been a cell phone jammer.
Either way, we were able to find Tina's house.
Oh, it's like a little hacienda almost.
It looks really run down, right?
There's the side over there.
Where her kitchen window.
Her house was a lot bigger than Tony's,
but in worse shape.
Plants were overtaking the property.
It looked as though nobody had moved in
after Tina's family left in 2017.
It looks, yeah, completely abandoned
and completely run down.
You can see the window to the side,
which I think is the one that she was standing at
when this happened,
because it's facing an old interior ministry.
Which was the building?
The house.
There was a security guard right in front of that house.
If we went to the house.
Okay, we cannot stop here.
Yeah, understood.
We're in a high security area.
Yeah, so just take that really good look
and look at the front of that house.
Okay, so what just happened?
We drove into Tina's neighborhood onto a street,
which is in a highly secure area.
And the driver was jumpy before we went in
because he said, you know, I can't stop here.
There's nowhere I can stop.
In fact, the house right next door
was the Ministry of Interior facility
and they had security people outside
and they very much noticed us.
We were followed by a car.
It followed us at a discreet distance.
Just make sure we were out of the neighborhood.
And when we turned around and went back,
I think we picked up a tail
because they were wondering what the hell we're doing.
Because nobody does that, basically.
I've always wondered why Tina.
She's not a spy.
She's a run-of-the-mill diplomat.
If this was a situation where Cuban intelligence
was targeting CIA officers
and the Havana syndrome is somehow part of the harassment campaign,
why would they go after Tina?
But now that we're at her house,
I remember something.
This was actually Tina's fourth home in Havana.
The previous ones were either temporary housing
or had structural issues.
This house had previously been assigned to more senior people.
I had even heard rumors that the previous occupant
was a senior CIA officer.
But I haven't been able to verify that.
Tina, you know, thought,
how lucky am I?
You know, look at this.
She's got the two kids and the husband and the dog.
And, you know, this was sort of a dream come true
to be in this house in this neighborhood.
And so there might have been some confusion
about who was Tina, you know,
as I myself was somewhat confused about who Tina was.
You know, they may have thought,
why would they just put the vice counsel in this house
that was really for the DCM,
the deputy chief of mission, or the station chief?
What this trip kind of clarifies to me,
you know, the arc.
Which is a bunch of CIA guys
being sent here year after year after year
and being able to do absolutely nothing
because the Cubans are so good
at preventing them from doing anything.
And they get harassed,
usually nothing big,
like minor annoyances.
Then, once the opening happens,
the CIA sees an opportunity
to ramp up its activities here.
And it's beginning to happen.
And the Cubans get afraid
that they're losing control
and that this was a Trojan horse.
And so they decide,
we need to set the Americans back.
We need to neuter the station.
So they decide, you know,
to ramp it up.
And it's step by step.
It's scorpions,
pissing on shirts,
flat tires,
messages on cars.
These are the kind of things
that are escalating
from what it used to be.
But nothing incredibly dramatic.
And then suddenly,
something really dramatic
and totally strange
and unprecedented happens.
There's the entrance to the Nacional.
The Hotel Nacional
is in the heart of Havana
in a neighborhood called Vedado,
overlooking the seawall.
You can sort of map Havana
by its iconic hotels.
The Nacional, to this day,
is where all the VIPs
and celebrities are herded to.
And, you know,
everybody wants to stay there
or to have a drink
or a sandwich
in its culinary cafe.
Just half a block away
is another legendary hotel.
And to the right
is where,
is the Capri.
The Capri,
basically,
kind of the ultimate mob hotel,
inaugurated just a few years
before the revolution.
Mayor Lansky
was the front man
for this hotel.
Sinatra played
in all these places.
And so,
this is just very much,
it's almost like
the archetypal mob hotel
of the late 50s
when Havana
was a dirty playground
for Americans.
Every so often,
they fix the Capri up
as a place for tourists.
But it's never quite overcome
its reputation
as a sleazy place.
There's an adjoining nightclub
that's quite the scene.
It's also one of the hotels
that U.S. officials stay at
when they're only in Havana
for a few days.
It's got the Flying Eves entrance.
What I'm about to say
hasn't been reported
anywhere before
because I only recently
learned these details.
In March 2017,
the CIA sends down
an undercover officer
for a short assignment.
Her job is to make sure
the SCIF is secure.
My understanding is
that she was
a computer technician
and she checks
into the Capri
and she's only down
for a couple days
and then while she's there
she has this happen to her.
This is the first case
that they know of
that did not take place
in a residence.
So for them to do this
in a hotel
seemed incredibly targeted
and suggested that this
was a directed,
you know,
carefully orchestrated,
incredibly mobile mechanism
that was being
apparently used
to target
undercover CIA officers.
It really sent shockwaves
through the CIA.
Word is starting to spread
amongst the diplomats
stationed in Havana
that there's this mystery sickness
mowing people down.
people are starting to panic.
So a few weeks after
that CIA officer
gets sick during her stay
at the Capri Hotel,
three government doctors
are sent down.
One of them works
for the CIA.
So their job is basically
to make sure people
are taken care of.
For example,
when a,
if a CIA person
wakes up
in the basement
of a building
with an IV in his arm
and he doesn't remember
what happened to him
last night,
they'll try to figure out,
well, what was pumped
into his arm.
So these three doctors
show up.
They arrive at the airport.
They're all traveling,
including the CIA doctor,
using a State Department
identification.
And they make their way
to their hotel,
which is the Capri Hotel.
The CIA doctor
is in a room
on one of the upper floors,
the 13th or the 14th floor.
They arrive at around
11 o'clock at night.
They say goodbye to each other
and they go to their rooms.
And they,
and they go to sleep.
Early the next morning,
the CIA doctor wakes up
and feels weird.
He experiences pressure
and dizziness
and ringing in the ears
while he's in his room.
It's starting to seem
like no CIA officer
in Havana is safe,
even if they're only in town
for a day or two,
unannounced.
And so,
what happens after that
is more temporary people
come down
to fill the holes
that were left
with the departure
of the other agents
and it starts happening
to them too.
And several people
who were going to come
decided not to go
because they were concerned.
And one particularly
senior female analyst
says she still wants
to do this.
She's coming down
with one of her colleagues.
They stay in the National,
Novel,
which is maybe
a couple hundred yards
towards the ocean,
closer to the ocean.
She's in the room,
goes to sleep,
and she wakes up
in the middle of the night
and she's feeling the pressure
and she's hearing the sound
that's been described
by several of the other victims.
So what we have gathered
is that in the early months
of this mystery,
in 2017,
several CIA personnel
come down to Cuba
only for short visits
and they end up
getting very sick.
The officer,
who is supposed to check
on the SCIF,
who experiences something
at the Capri.
A CIA doctor,
who also gets sick
at the Capri.
And then a senior CIA analyst,
who experiences something
at the Hotel Nacional.
That analyst returns
to Washington,
but she can't shake
the damaging effects
of whatever hit her.
She's having terrible trouble
with her vision.
Her job is to read
and write
and she's struggling
with reading.
It got so bad
that she's having trouble
even driving her car.
People at the White House
who cover Cuba
know who this woman is.
Mike Pompeo,
who at the time
is the CIA director,
knows who she is.
So when this happens
to her,
it's a game changer.
Before that incident,
it wasn't clear
what the CIA
was going to do about this.
It took this case
to convince
the director of the CIA
that he couldn't protect
the personnel
that worked at the station
and that the benefits
of having them there
were not as great
as the threat
that they faced
operating here.
And he took
the extraordinary step
of closing down
the CIA station.
If you game this out
and it is
the Cuban intelligence,
if it is them,
I believe that
at least a handful
of individuals
would have had to have known
or been involved.
Before we leave Cuba,
we meet in our hotel
to try to make sense
of everything we've seen.
Could the Cuban government
really have been behind
the Havana syndrome?
And if so,
what would that
actually look like?
What could they have used
to target
those diplomats
and spies?
There's an easy
counter-argument
to all of that,
which is the technology.
Producer,
Ramon Campos-Iriarte.
We've talked to experts
who all believe
this is not something
you can go and buy
at a radio shack.
So it's not like
the Cubans
could have been like,
OK, well,
this is the moment
to do this.
Let's just
out of the magic bag
this amazing
freaking technology
that no one's ever seen
or heard of
and just put it to use
next week.
If it happened
with the compliance
of the Cubans,
they must have been
approached by someone else.
Fair point,
because not long
after the Americans
pull out of Cuba,
this thing,
these unexplained incidents,
start popping up
thousands of miles
away from the island,
as far away
from Havana
as Moscow
and Guangzhou, China.
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.
in the audience,
in the audience.
I'll tell you
in the audience.
On the way,
I'm owned,
I'll tell you
in the audience.
I'm out.