so i got a cryptic message recently i had just published another piece on havana syndrome
and i got flooded with messages you have to understand in the five years i've been working
on this story i've gotten a lot of tips people claiming to have evidence that explains it all
or that it's actually a secret u.s government program or just some anecdote from someone who
just wants to be part of the story but this one that came through on signal i thought i needed to
look into and it ended up adding a real twist to the story that i hadn't anticipated
the source identified himself as a former u.s government employee the message read i was
subjected to the russian microwave weapons circa 1988 i also have information on other attacks
on usg personnel that have not been widely reported on the source didn't want to go on the record
but he told me to reach out to some people who could help me connect the dots
i'm adam entis and i'm john lee anderson from vice world news this is havana syndrome
episode 7 8
six. If there's a there there. Ever since news of Havana syndrome first broke, perhaps the most
pressing question has been, what is causing this? Over the years, there have been various theories
coming from government officials, scientists, and journalists. For example, one theory that's
gained a lot of traction is that the sickness in Havana was the result of a toxic poisoning.
This was a theory put forth in 2019 in a report commissioned by the Canadian government,
whose own embassy employees in Havana had come down with similar symptoms around the same time as the
Americans. The doctors in Canada found organophosphate in some of their patients' systems. That's a
chemical found in a pesticide used in Cuba to prevent the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness
known to hurt kids especially. Incidentally, organophosphate has also been used as a lethal
nerve agent. The Russians used it to try to kill the double agent Sergei Skirpal in England in 2018.
NBC News confirming this morning that the couple who are critically ill in the hospital behind me are a
former member of Russian military intelligence and his daughter. The British... It was also used in the
murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's half-brother. A horrifying discovery from Malaysian
officials. They say Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was killed by a
chemical weapon. Another theory that we have talked about a few times that's gotten traction is that
Havana syndrome is the result of mass psychogenic illness. In other words, perhaps no one or just a
handful of people really were sick from some novel illness. But the rest of the cases are the result of
others convincing themselves that they too are sick. Supporting that theory is the fishbowl environment
that the spies and diplomats found themselves living in. They all went to each other's homes for parties,
all sent their kids to the same international school. Rumors travel quickly, and panic can spread
quickly. This was the same later in Guangzhou. As for the sound that many of these spies and
diplomats, at least in Havana, report to have heard, well, some speculate that it could very well be
crickets. In fact, there's this group of scientists who were asked by the State Department to advise
them from time to time. They looked into this in 2018 and found that the likeliest explanation for
the sound was the Indy's short-tailed cricket. This is what the Cuban government initially suggested
as well. That the gringos may have just heard the sound of normal crickets and then basically become
hysterical. But sources told me about a CIA analysis of the recorded sound. They said it was
man-made, not crickets. The theory that has gained the most traction is that this is some kind of
directed energy. Early on in our reporting, we spoke with a weapons expert at Georgetown University
Medical Center, someone who the State Department had actually consulted with. He told us he thought the
patients may have been targeted with radiofrequency waves or electromagnetic pulses. That waves of this
electromagnetic energy may have somehow entered their brains through their ears and other soft tissue.
For these researchers, the big clue for them was the victims who felt that they were in a beam of
energy that seemed directional in nature. They would walk around their room and literally be followed by
the beam. And when they ducked behind a pillar or opened the front door, it would suddenly stop.
If this was a weapon, some kind of energy weapon, who would have access to something like that?
Fingers had been pointed towards Russia. And when we got that tip from a source telling us to look
into the history there, we were intrigued and soon found ourselves diving down a Cold War rabbit hole.
Adam, our producer Jesse, and I are in Huntsville, Tennessee.
John Lee Anderson, how are you?
Here to meet the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jack Matlock.
I'm Jack Matlock. I was a foreign service officer for 35 years.
Matt Matlock was the American ambassador of the Soviet Union right before it crumbled in the early 90s.
But he'd spent a lot of time there before that posting.
I spent 11 years at the embassy in Moscow in four different tours,
translated Khrushchev's messages to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
By the way, I issued Lee Harvey Othell's wife's visa.
What was he like?
He was an impossible sort of guy to deal with.
From the moment Matlock and his colleagues in the Foreign Service arrived in Moscow in the early 60s,
it was clear that the Soviets would have eyes on them at all times.
We had to assume any areas that the Soviets had access to.
We just assumed that we were probably bugged for sound.
The Soviets weren't just interested in listening.
They wanted to read whatever the American diplomats were writing.
At one point, they figured out how to bug their typewriters.
We found that the Selectric typewriters had been, I would say, very ingeniously bugged.
But they managed to do that when they were shipped in, these typewriters.
Normally, equipment was shipped in under diplomatic seal with couriers.
Something happened, and they left them in customs overnight.
So it was a really ingenious thing.
The Americans were initially quite naive about Soviet eavesdropping capabilities.
But once they figured it out, they tried to protect themselves and their secrets.
We had set up several secure rooms that were insulated against the three ways you can get information out.
Light, sound, and microwaves.
Microwaves.
Starting in the 1950s, the Soviets had positioned themselves in buildings surrounding the U.S. Embassy
so they could watch the Americans through the windows and see who was coming and going.
But also so they could aim microwave-emitting devices at the embassy.
They did this for decades, on and off until at least the late 1980s.
Which is something I knew a bit about,
but as I heard more from the veterans of the Cold War in Moscow,
their experiences were so specific and so familiar.
Microwave energy was a known and active problem for the Americans in Moscow.
Now, it's not completely known what the Soviets were using the microwaves for exactly.
One of the theories was that perhaps they were using the microwaves
to jam up the Americans' own surveillance equipment within the embassy,
or specifically within the CIA station.
It was directed at the upper floors of the embassy.
The Soviets probably supposed that we had listening devices there.
Another theory was that perhaps the Russians weren't trying to jam our devices,
but instead trying to activate their own,
that they had apparently built into the walls of the embassy years earlier.
There's a history of this.
A few years prior, the Soviets had given the U.S. embassy
a wood carving of the American seal,
like the seal on the back of the quarter.
It was a beautiful gift that stayed on display at the embassy for years.
What the Americans didn't realize
was that the seal was actually an eavesdropping device.
The Soviets switched it on by aiming a radio beam at the seal from a van outside.
This would allow them to listen in on conversations happening near the seal.
So the Americans knew the Soviets were capable of developing covert listening devices
which used radio waves.
And microwaves are on the radio frequency spectrum.
So the concern was that perhaps
the microwaves were activating devices similar to the seal.
With the help of that source who contacted me on signal,
I found someone else who had firsthand experience in Moscow with microwave energy.
The microwaves had been a problem,
and a mystery in Moscow for decades.
Decades.
Isabel Howe and her husband, Dave, lived in Moscow in the late 1980s.
The Soviets, by this point, had sharpened their spy game.
Isabel's husband helped run security at the U.S. embassy,
so it was his job to prevent the Soviets from spying on the Americans inside.
He ended up finding microphones hidden in the concrete walls of the embassy.
But the Soviets weren't just watching the embassy.
They were watching diplomats at home, too.
The living room was a long living room, and it had floor-to-ceiling windows.
And any time I went by those windows, I could look over there,
and there would be some Soviets in uniform with their binoculars watching our building.
I knew there was nothing I could do about it.
Every place I went, I was followed by two KGB guys.
Every place I went outside.
You just couldn't live in Moscow without being constantly watched by the Soviet government,
even when she was out for a run.
They sort of tried to run along with me for a while.
Then they just drove along beside me in a car.
It was just hysterical.
How about coming in from being out and finding that someone had defecated on your bed?
Nice.
It's amazing that when it comes to American diplomats and spies living in these high-risk places,
not that much has really changed.
It's literally the same old shit over and over again.
Our townhouse was not only bugged with a sound, it was also bugged with cameras.
If I went around and looked very carefully, which I did for a little bit,
and then Dave said, don't do that anymore, they're serious.
So I just stopped.
But they were everywhere.
Again, living in an embassy can feel like living in a fishbowl,
especially in countries that are more adversarial.
And when Isabel was there, the Cold War was still very much underway.
Diplomats and their families rarely ventured away from the U.S. embassy compound.
So pretty much anything they needed was there.
They had their own bar.
It was all within the compound.
And it was a gossip.
You could just imagine what gossip it would be.
I knew this woman.
She was single.
She was a secretary.
She announced when she came, her goal was to sleep with every Marine.
And everyone knew that.
Oh, it was sex parties and drinking parties, etc.
The Marines must have been happy at that announcement.
Oh, my God.
I think they got into trouble, too.
But at least they weren't sleeping with the Soviets, you know?
And so if you pair that fishbowl atmosphere with the reports of microwaves,
it can make for some chaos.
There were some diplomats going home to the states and getting diagnosed with all kinds of illnesses
and then blaming it on the microwaves.
The State Department looked into the matter and concluded that, yes, the Soviets had been barraging the embassy with microwaves for decades.
But they said that the radiation levels were not high enough to actually cause any harm.
Of course, when the word began to get out, I suggested we really need to brief the staff.
What was it like briefing the embassy staff?
Well, of course, things got very emotional.
You know, the way these things go, actually, it was some of the spouses that didn't even live in the embassy
that began to get so excited, you know, when you talk about things that might affect your health.
We asked them to keep it confidential, but the wife of one of our officers, I won't name them, though we're pretty sure,
then leaked it to one of the correspondents, so it began to be, you know, news at home.
When I hear this, it sounds pretty familiar to what happened in Havana,
attempting to keep panic from spreading at the embassy.
Or rather to minimize what was happening.
Our producer, Ramon Campos-Iriarte, dug up this fascinating classified transcript
of a once-secret phone call between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and the then-Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, from 1975,
in which they discussed the microwaves problem.
On this call, Kissinger is letting the Soviet ambassador know
that he understands about the barrage of microwaves in Moscow
and that they've recently been ratcheting it up.
He even suggests it's doing harm.
He alludes to pulling out the then-American ambassador because he has cancer,
and the implication is that it was somehow related to the microwaves.
But Kissinger goes on to say to the Soviet that, quote,
We asked the State Department about that Kissinger memo and whether those beams of energy were ever found to have hurt anyone.
We also asked whether there's evidence that they continued after the 70s and 80s,
but they declined to comment.
But regardless of Kissinger trying to keep it quiet,
people who were stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during this time, they all knew about it.
When Isabel heard about the Havana Syndrome incidents, she immediately made the connection.
It made her think, could the Russians be behind this too?
When you first heard about, Isabel, when you first heard the stories, what crossed your mind?
Oh, I immediately, I thought, hmm, yeah, the Russians are still trying to get a foothold in Cuba,
and they are there with their expertise.
I thought about that, and I thought things have improved a lot.
Technology has improved a lot.
They can target this much better now.
I don't question any of that as a possibility.
Microwaves haven't only been used in surveillance, but weapons too.
The Soviets spent a lot of time developing them, and so did the U.S.
I think the military has always wanted some sort of death ray.
That's after the break.
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So before we get into the science of microwaves and why they'd potentially be used in this spy-versus-spy environment,
let's just start with the basics of what we're talking about.
Pulsed radio frequency energy is a form of electromagnetic radiation, which is basically energy that moves as a wave.
We're surrounded by low-energy radio waves all the time.
Think cell phone signals and FM radio.
Now that doesn't mean you could get sick from your cell phone or listening to the radio.
Radio broadcasters are sending out waves that are much longer and at a much lower frequency than can hurt us.
But we usually need to be protected from higher energy waves like microwaves, X-rays, and gamma rays.
So when it comes to Havana syndrome, the theory that we heard early on was that someone could have harnessed the lower energy radio frequency waves,
which includes microwaves, and then released them in short bursts in a way that could cause pressure in the head and injure the brain.
As for the sound heard during those initial incidents, well, the theory goes, it's possible that while there wouldn't actually be sound produced,
the patients could very well have perceived one.
Back in the 1960s, a scientist named James Frey discovered that if you aimed pulsed microwaves at someone's head,
the waves could cause someone to hear a clicking, even if there was no sound being produced.
The fact is that science has been testing microwave energy, as well as its impact on humans, for a long time now, especially during the Cold War.
The Soviet military budget supports increasingly more capable weapon systems and military forces that go far beyond any forces justifiable for defense purposes.
There was always a sense of competition with the Russians.
Cheryl Roefer is a scientist who studied laser technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory for over three decades, including during the Cold War.
One of the things her colleagues were tasked with was creating the next big directed energy weapon.
What was the interest in trying to explore this type of technology?
Well, I think the military has always wanted some sort of death ray.
I think you can trace this back to H.G. Wells.
The USSR continues to make comparable advances throughout its military forces.
Forces that will support its military doctrine, that if a war is to be fought, the Soviets will prevail.
This was the Reagan era.
Suddenly, the U.S. government was putting billions of dollars towards the development of all kinds of technology
that was supposed to protect the United States and be a threat to the Soviet Union.
Scientists like Roefer were tasked with finding ways to harness certain types of energy and turn it into a weapon.
Roefer was working on lasers, while some of her colleagues down the hall were focused on microwaves.
What was your takeaway from being down the hall from them?
What were the challenges that they faced?
Power.
Power is always the question.
How do you produce a power supply that will produce the power that you want?
How do you stabilize it?
How does the beam propagate through the air?
However, if you want to zap something, you need a lot of power in the zap.
Those are issues that scientists are still facing today, which is why, she argues,
it's not possible that Havana Syndrome would be a microwave weapon.
How is something happening inside people's heads without something happening on the outside of people's heads,
like heating up?
I don't see that that has been particularly well explained.
Roefer says the main issue is powering a mobile weapon of this kind,
and that doing so would require very large batteries, lots of electricity,
that would be very cumbersome and noticeable.
There's just certain basic chemistry and physics that goes into batteries
that we haven't gotten around, and that requires a certain amount of weight to go with it.
Oh, I see.
But not everyone agrees.
Yeah, well, she may be right.
Including Doug Beeson, a former Air Force physicist who helped build weapons in the Air Force lab.
You know, she may be right, but on the other hand, there's a lot of neat work going on out there.
When I heard about the Havana Syndrome, to me it was obvious.
I called up a few of my friends that I used to work with, and it was pretty obvious to them.
For Doug, he thinks that when it comes to military weapons,
there's a lot that the general public doesn't know about.
For example, in recent years, the U.S. government has been working on what's called active denial weapons.
These are directed energy weapons that aren't intended to kill people on the battlefield,
but instead just make them extremely uncomfortable to try to force them to move away from a situation.
The U.S. government has also been messing around with weapons that use high-powered radio waves,
which, for those following along, microwaves are on the radio frequency.
What if we told you the Pentagon has a ray gun?
And what if we told you it can stop a person in his tracks without killing or even injuring him?
Well, it's true.
You can't see it, you can't hear it, but I can tell you firsthand, you feel it.
In 2008, 60 Minutes reported on a new directed energy weapon the U.S. military was starting to train on.
It's a gun that doesn't look anything like a gun.
It's that flat-dish antenna which shoots out a 100,000-watt beam at the speed of light.
Go home!
Targets here are people, military volunteers creating a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq.
Engage.
The ray gun fires, and there it is, that flash of white-hot energy.
So we know that these kinds of movable, directed energy weapons already exist because the U.S. has made them.
And Doug says there may be classified work that's happening to further enhance these weapons.
You can fine-tune those waves to have it penetrate deeper and deeper into the body.
And there are various plates of the body that you can also affect.
I can't go into details about exactly what type of effects because I think most of that's classified.
But on the other hand, if you know anything at all about this type of technology, then, I mean, it's logic to be able to deduce.
Doug's saying that it's possible Havana syndrome is the result of a weapon that the government already knows about but hasn't publicly acknowledged.
And, in fact, there is some recent evidence to back that up.
We spoke to a lawyer representing a former National Security Agency officer.
That officer was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's a decade after visiting a hostile country in the 90s.
He can't say which country, that's classified.
But he believes the diagnosis is a result of an incident he experienced there, in which he woke up feeling very weak and fatigued.
In response to a workman's compensation claim he submitted, the NSA told the officer that it had intelligence connecting that very country with a high-powered microwave weapon.
In other words, the U.S. government is saying this kind of microwave weapon does exist.
And that it's designed to injure or even kill.
That response came just two years before the Havana syndrome incidents began.
But the government still hasn't publicly linked these cases.
By 2019, the White House officials who had been trying to take the lead in getting the CIA to get to the bottom of this mystery,
National Security Advisor John Bolton and his deputy Charles Kupperman, are frustrated.
They, too, had zeroed in on microwave weapons as a likely culprit.
But things in the Trump administration shift dramatically.
I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House.
That's rough.
Bolton and Kupperman get canned.
And I told him, John, I wish you well, but I'd like you to submit your resignation.
And he did that.
A new team comes in.
A guy named Matt Pottinger becomes Deputy National Security Advisor.
He's crucial in what happens next in the U.S. government's investigation into Havana syndrome.
Pottinger decides he needs to pick up where Bolton and Kupperman left off.
So he makes an effort to find out what else we can do, who else we can involve.
And that's when he loops in the Pentagon and this guy.
Dude, seriously, thanks for taking this subject on.
And it's really important.
So I normally don't do this shit because there's no upside.
But just tell me to shut up when I start getting too long-winded and shit.
I'm Chris Miller, career Special Forces officer.
Miller had worked a variety of government and military jobs for decades.
In late 2020, he was working for the White House National Security Council
when he was suddenly thrust into a brand new job,
one usually reserved for high-ranking political appointees
that he was very much not prepared for.
President Trump at the time decided to make a change at the Department of Defense.
And Secretary Esper was asked to leave.
And I came in to do that job for the final 73 days of the administration.
So I was the acting Secretary of Defense for the final phase of the Trump administration.
Like literally the last few months.
But he comes in at a particularly intense time.
This is right around the presidential election.
But he soon learns about something else on his plate.
Havana Syndrome.
So just that curiosity, how did Havana Syndrome become something you were aware of?
Well, I mean, great question, Adam.
So I'm, you know, a nobody, and I read The New Yorker.
And there was this article about the Havana Syndrome by this person I didn't even know at the time.
Didn't give it a heck of a lot of thought, to tell you the truth.
And lo and behold, I'm at the National Security Council in a job.
And I start hearing very discreet, side-whispering meetings going on.
And that it had to do with directed energy, whether it was to exploit communication devices or to attack people.
And ka-ching went, I've read about this.
There was some discussion that the radio frequency waves could be part of some sort of surveillance device gone wrong.
That someone was aiming a device intended to collect data from diplomats and spies' cell phones and computers.
But instead, perhaps accidentally, aimed the device at people's heads and zapped them.
Miller gets much more involved once he gets his new job leading the Defense Department.
He learns some surprising news, that these incidents have now spread to his area of jurisdiction.
When I was at the Department of Defense, the person that had been at the National Security Council...
He talks to a service member one day who shares that he'd had a bizarre experience overseas.
...who had been responsible for tracking these cases.
He came to me one day and said, there's a Department of Defense employee that has suffered an attack.
This incident occurred in the fall of 2020.
The individual came in, and I spoke with him, and I listened to what he had to say.
The Department of Defense employee was in a country with a large Russian presence.
And he was driving with his two-year-old in the back seat when he had this sudden feeling that his head was going to explode.
Then his son began screaming.
As he continued driving through a busy intersection, the pain suddenly went away, and his son stopped screaming.
I was asked not to report where exactly this happened, because there is a concern for the safety of the employee involved.
But sources told me that they did figure out that there was a GRU vehicle close by at the time of the incident.
That's Russian military intelligence.
And he described it in this very clinical, military way.
He used very specific terminology that resonated with me, which is being on the X.
And being on the X is something that we were trained for to identify that when you're in an ambush, you're on the X.
And the only requirement when you're on the X is to get off the X, because you're in the kill zone.
And although he's being assaulted by this weapon system that he doesn't understand, he realized he was in the midst of an ambush.
And he moved off the X, and the symptoms that he was experiencing, they just subsided.
And when he described it that way, in a way that I, knuckle-dragger military guy, I was like, we have something here.
And this isn't just some psychosomatic type thing.
And I'm not criticizing anybody in the past, but when that occurred, it now became a Department of Defense issue.
I couldn't just go, ah, it's a State Department thing or a CIA thing.
It's now I own this as the Secretary of Defense.
Who do you think, because the intelligence community had yet to identify a perpetrator or even identify a mode with which these injuries were being inflicted, what was your gut telling you about it?
Completely noncommittal at that point.
Let's follow the facts.
The problem is that it's very difficult, and there's no smoking gun.
But when you do the Venn diagram, it seemed pretty clear the Russians were involved.
What's the Venn diagram?
Well, when you lay on, when you do the signals intelligence, you do all the different intelligence aspects where the attack occurred, it obviously becomes, well, it's clearly not the Venezuelans.
I mean, you know, you're like, they're not in that particular...
Intelligence agencies knew that a Russian intelligence officer was there at the time of the incident because they used geolocation data.
Good intelligence officers know that their cell phone can be tracked this way.
This guy doesn't sound like a good intelligence officer.
It's possible that he used his phone to call his girlfriend or to post on Instagram.
We don't really know.
But the Americans were able to identify his location.
It's also around this time, in October 2020, that another person, a former very high-level CIA operative, goes public with his claim that he had a similar incident in his hotel room in Moscow.
So that's now two new instances, with at least circumstantial evidence, that point to Russia's involvement.
So when you start layering on all of the different intelligence and informational assets we have, the list of potential attackers gets really, really small.
It's around this time that the White House National Security Council gets some long-sought news.
The National Academies of Sciences had appointed an expert panel to investigate Havana syndrome.
These are some of the country's top scientists, with access to key players, patients, and government agencies.
By far the most authoritative report released thus far.
And they essentially, in a heavily caveated way, back up the theory involving directed energy.
At least for the cases that happen strictly in Havana.
The most likely scenario, they say, is pulsed microwave energy.
Not only that, but they make a point of saying that one country has been looking into this for a long time.
Russia.
Again, this was not surprising.
The Cold War crew, Bolton and Kupperman, had been saying this for a long time.
But this report was the first time that an unbiased party of experts was saying they agreed.
The report dropped in December 2020.
And the focus was now squarely on Russia.
Chris Miller again.
I was like, this actually makes a lot of sense to me, that this would be, you know, Cold War redux.
And that's when the Pentagon decides it's going to muscle its way into the government's investigation of Havana Syndrome.
At the end of the day, we have a moral, ethical obligation to make sure we recognize their sacrifices and take action and determine what actually happened.
And let's be honest, the Department of Defense is the largest bureaucracy in the world.
So I knew that by us becoming involved, it would gain more attention and, you know, would create momentum to do something.
People at DOD propose kicking it up a notch, meaning respond to Russian intelligence with our own harassment.
The concept that something that we might do might somehow trigger World War III is always the thing that's cited to me as why, like, you know, the Russians who have this escalatory ladder that's, they're willing to climb it much faster than we're willing to go up it.
Is that something that you were finding you were confronting?
Kind of the fear of the escalation that might come from the other side?
Great question. Don't know.
Let's be honest, we're dealing with bullies here.
You know, when we're dealing with Iranians, we're dealing with the doggone Russians, when we're dealing with the Chinese, they're just, it's no different than the doggone school, you know, playground bully.
Isn't it amazing that on something like this, like, there's just no breadcrumbs?
I mean, the Russians are not, or whoever it is, usually are not that good at covering their tracks.
Isn't it unusual that something would be this hard to crack?
Some mysteries, you know, that are just really...
Do you see my serious face? Do you see my serious face?
The breadcrumbs are there, man.
Yeah.
The problem was we weren't paying attention.
And the absolute power of the United States is when we actually start paying attention to something, we have a lot of resources to apply.
We hadn't done that.
Next time on Havana Syndrome.
So I wanted to let you know that I had a meeting the other day with a source who told me that 25, roughly 24, 25, he believed CIA officers were hit in Vienna.
Christ Almighty. Wow.
Havana Syndrome is hosted and reported by Adam Entous and me, John Lee Anderson.
It's produced and reported by Julia Nutter, Jesse Alejandro 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.
And he was just done growing up.
And edited and discerned the feeling that art has become one of the best of gaining transport.
Thank you.