hey adam hey john lee how are you good just yeah good in the summer of 2021 i got on a call with
adam excuse my tired voice i've been out reporting all week where are you i'm back in tegucigalpa
choppering around with a wealthy guy whose plantations and wilderness reserve is in a
kind of narco area so did you buy any good drugs or you know the last guys were making going all
through the motions that they had nothing to do with it so no what can i say adam called me because
he said he had big news about havana syndrome that no one else was reporting yeah so i i wanted to
let you know that i i had a meeting the other day with a source um who told me that 25 roughly 24 25
were hit in vienna jesus all of it um you know basically starting two months after the
inauguration of joseph biden christ almighty this year wow
you know i don't know enough yet to know what it means and i can tell that the americans aren't sure
either you know what what it means what's so interesting here too is they they managed to
keep it secret even though there's a large number of victims so you know i i kind of feel like we should
maybe go i'm john lee anderson and i'm adam entis from vice world news this is havana syndrome
episode seven vienna rules
by the end of the trump presidency in january of 2021 the number of suspected havana syndrome cases
is skyrocketing and that's because after years of the government turning a blind eye to possible
cases it's starting to actually look for them towards the end of trump's time in office the
pentagon is getting involved and the cia sends out a memo to thousands of its employees around the world
asking them to report any unexplained illnesses several other agencies send similar notes to
their staff the government is basically casting a wide net trying to catch anything that could turn
out to be connected to havana syndrome
in the months that follow hundreds of reports of unexplained illnesses pour in it seems like every
day there's a new case being reported somewhere in germany german police are investigating cases of the
mysterious havana syndrome at the u.s embassy in berlin in colombia
and in india
a visit by vice president kamala harris to vietnam in august was delayed when several u.s personnel there
reported symptoms and at least two had to be medevaced and the stands kyrgyzstan and uzbekistan
then early last year i was meeting a high-level source for drinks and he told me that the white
house was freaking out about the biggest possible outbreak outside of havana apparently in the first
few months of 2021 there was a huge cluster of cases in austria i broke the story in the new yorker
and pretty quickly it was all over the news we are vigorously investigating reports of possible
unexplained health incidents among u.s embassy vienna so the symptoms are sounding very much like the
havana syndrome symptoms that there is a history of course going back to the cold war of spies and
counter spies in the city because it was so close to the former soviet union but this is a different time
in place
it's like i want to have that moment as often as i can yeah right okay where are we guys i have no idea
we're in the old hapsburgian you know the kind of patrician tranche of vienna we are here because uh
this is the largest cluster of havana syndrome cases outside of havana itself and we have come
to vienna to get a sense of the environment where this took place i've got to be honest i've always
hated vienna it all started for me when a sadistic dentist gave me a root canal here once you ever
seen marathon man it was like one of those scenes i was dustin hoffman but i let myself get talked into
coming back here to see if we might learn anything new about havana syndrome by focusing in on these
austria incidents this is the american embassy it's a hapsburg palace look at that to be clear the u.s
embassy is not literally a hapsburg palace it just looks like one this is a secure building i mean
what do you mean secure what makes you say that well there's a big security gate uh a 10-foot uh metal
security gate around this building anyway we visited the embassy and checked out its strange looking windows
they've really screwed over the windows it looks like a elementary school house you know what that
may be remember we when we when we talked to the ambassador in moscow and he said one way to deal
with microwave is a metal mesh uh-huh yes and if you look up it looks like all the windows are covered
with metal mesh why would the blinds be closed here they're not but over here they are oh yeah so they
are but i but i have no idea if there's any connection between between we asked the state
department what that metal mesh was for but they declined to tell us we're here looking for clues as
to what happened but we didn't have a lot to go on the thing is it's taken me years to slowly piece
together the story of havana syndrome most of the people who've had incidents don't want to talk
and to this day i haven't been able to talk to anyone who got sick in vienna but there are other
reasons to be here because when we heard about the cases here it actually kind of made sense to me
that of all the cities in the world vienna would be a prime location for a rash of unexplained illnesses
and we thought maybe we'd find evidence here that would help us figure out what is causing the
spread of havana syndrome
the city has a long history of being a hotbed of espionage vienna has always been this kind of
oasis where you know people don't really do anything to each other and everybody's here
you know you have the un you have pretty much every embassy on earth is here i think even the north
koreans are here aren't they i mean years ago i was here to meet saddam's ambassador which is why i
ended up here that was actually the the first time i came to to vienna so that was that was 20 years ago
among spies vienna is considered a sort of sacred neutral ground which actually dates back to the
end of world war ii for a while after the war the americans and the soviets occupied different parts of
the city but they also decided to make it part of a neutral zone and within that zone something really
crazy started to happen american and russian spies started meeting up in cafes and talking to one
another something that really didn't happen anywhere else this is the environment that inspired the
likes of graham green and john le carré a spy's playground a place of intrigue and deceit famously
green's third man evoked the era when the allied powers shared vienna and what it took to survive it all
the hijackers had help from inside our station here in vienna we need to find out if we had a mole
even today hollywood loves to situate spy thrillers in vienna welcome to vienna betty miss me
hard not to think about it when you're here
the history is everywhere because when austria once again became a sovereign nation
their government decided to make the whole country a neutral ground as far as espionage was
concerned the rules were simple within austria any country could spy on any other country as long
as they didn't hurt each other or spy on the austrian government these rules became known as the vienna rules
because of the vienna rules austria is the only country on earth where many spy activities are legal
throughout the cold war vienna was a place where spies often crossed paths and tried to recruit
each other and even after the war things continued to happen in austria that basically couldn't happen
anywhere else in the world like in 2010 there was this story coming out of vienna that felt like it was of
another era two planes one russian one american parked side by side on the tarmac at vienna airport for
about an hour and a half as vehicles shuttled between them those people boarding that russian
plane they're all suspected russian spies it's been a quarter of a century since the world has seen a
spy swap like this they were all flying home to russia after spending months or even years imprisoned in
the united states and the other plane was flying back to the u.s carrying four suspected american
spies who'd been in russian prisons after pleading guilty to acting as illegal agents in the u.s
it's believed the russian spies are on their way to moscow some or perhaps all were on this jet that
landed in vienna it parked on the tarmac next to a russian airline
the austrian government for decades has tried to remain neutral and maintain good relations with both
east and west but over the last few years as russia and the u.s have become more confrontational
they've been trying to force austria to pick sides and that competition for austria's allegiance may
in fact be the most important clue in figuring out why so many american spies may have gotten sick in vienna
i'm good how are you ambassador good thanks hi trevor trena has a lot of experience wrangling u.s austrian
relations i am trevor trena and i was until january of this year the united states ambassador to the
republic of austria his familiarity with the country goes pretty far back my grandfather was ambassador
to austria from 1975 to 1977 even though i was a very young boy i remembered vividly the tales of
soviet espionage and i remember that my grandfather had to take a different route to the embassy every
single day and one day the route led to a dead end alley and my grandfather was furious that his life
had been endangered by someone who had not read a map correctly so i understood that where east met west
a lot of chicanery happened in february 2018 when trump picked trevor to become ambassador to austria
the administration's priority was to pull austria closer to the united states and further away from
russia my goal was to remind austria hey you're a western democracy just like america and and you
belong in in this club i think the competition for the hearts and minds both of austrians and all europeans
is a decades-long game and i think my contribution was just to take it to the next level and say i'm not
here to just you know compete i'm here to win when trevor arrives he hits the ground running he gets
austria's head of state invitations to the white house and in the early days of the coveted pandemic
trevor arranges for the donation of half a million u.s made masks which are given to children and the
elderly all over the country according to trevor stuff like this in diplomatic terms at least is a
big deal but in this battle for austria's heart trevor's not the only competitor i had a very nice
if formal relationship with the russian ambassador to austria and we sort of approached each other like
two sumo in the ring i was clear-eyed about the game he was trying to play and i'm sure he
was aware of the game i was trying to play austria is like right at the top of the pantheon of
countries that the russians respect and focus on and want the respect of in fact there are rumors
that putin himself owns a house somewhere in austria on a lake in mid-2018 the austrian foreign minister
sees president vladimir putin at an event in vienna there was an event early in my tenure and a
seemingly minor exchange has international repercussions in sort of a plucky move handed
him a printed invitation to her wedding and he sensing opportunity immediately accepted
and this created a huge conundrum diplomatic meetings at that level with someone like putin
they're usually so formal and heavily choreographed and so in this case the wedding created a tricky
situation for everyone including american officials like trevor who hate the thought that
this makes it seem as though the russians have an advantage over them with the austrians so i just
started to think about okay what can i do to take advantage of this situation and so when putin
actually shows up at the wedding putin actually gives her like a gift right when he when he arrives
or hands her a bouquet of flowers or something like this right so he what is what is putin's goal
by being there i think from a chess point of view it was a masterful move by him you know he saw an
opportunity he took it and i respect that i think it was very clever
the wedding ceremony proceeds afterwards there's music dancing and then putin takes the foreign
minister by the hand and starts dancing with her
and in the course of that dance there was a very public moment where she kind of curtsied to him
from a diplomatic point of view of the optics looked really terrible like austria bowing to
russia but for trevor there's a silver lining so i instantly sensed that this was a fabulous
opportunity for me to kind of come in really more like the aggrieved victim here a week later he goes
on austrian tv and gets asked about the curtsy his answer if one fancies oneself a bridge builder
then you better be sure you're building the bridge to both sides and i think that comment reverberated
all over the country
reverberated might sound over the top to american ears but trevor's right austria wants to be on
very good terms with the u.s so if the american ambassador criticizes a top austrian official
that's a big deal people lose their jobs over shit like that it was also a pivotal moment in the
relationship this is not long after the russians blatantly attempted to assassinate the double agent
sergey skripal in england by poisoning him and his daughter the americans the brits and other allies had
coordinated a response they wanted to expel russian diplomats and suspected spies from postings around the
world and they wanted austria to join the campaign they thought russia's actions were such a heinous
and flagrant violation of norms that the famously cautious austrians would get off the fence but they
didn't so literally dancing with putin just added insult to injury soon though trevor says that the
situation starts to turn in his favor i think that one thing that really benefited me is that putin made a
a couple big missteps while i was there there were a couple very high profile data hacks that affected
the coalition government that seemed to have the fingerprints of the russians on them also there
was a very high profile case where a senior austrian military official was caught spying for the russians and
put on trial the senior military official was a retired colonel in the austrian military who'd been
passing secrets to the russians for at least 25 years in exchange the russians paid him the equivalent of
three hundred thousand dollars and then at the start of 2020 the straw that breaks the camel's back
austria discovers that a russian diplomat has been spying on and stealing technology from an austrian company
in a short time span the russians are caught twice violating one of the vienna rules in vienna you can
spy on anyone except for the locals trevor says he pushes the austrians to respond forcefully and they
do we actually were able to get one russian official png'd or persona non grata which that never happens
ever ever austria kicks out the russian who's been posing as a diplomat to spy on the tech firm
which is a huge deal this is the first time that vienna has been so confrontational with the russian
government and russia's pissed they retaliate by expelling a couple of austrian diplomats
suddenly austrian russian relations are at their worst point since world war ii
which trevor of course loves the russians ended up with kind of dirty hands publicly and we took
advantage of that and this is how it comes back to havana syndrome
when trevor left vienna at the end of trump's presidency he felt good about the work he'd done
there but after his departure as far as i can tell things went downhill quickly more possible
cases of so-called havana syndrome are now popping up in austria's capital vienna i'm told by people
close to the situation that they started happening in the early months of the biden administration so
this recent spate involves more than 20 officers it was a mix of intelligence officers diplomats and
other u.s officials who were stationed in vienna the suspected havana syndrome incidents in vienna all
happened after trevor was gone it's unclear if the outbreak is connected to the tug of war that
trevor was a part of but if russia is behind the havana syndrome then maybe making a bunch of cia
officers sick in vienna could be retaliation for the u.s driving a wedge between russia and austria
i think as a diplomat you hate to think of anything that could go on that could harm the lives or the
well-being of other diplomats i don't know who or what could be responsible for these attacks but
if let's just use the argument if it were the russians it would really be quite a foolish thing
because they're already a tiny bit in the punch bowl with the austrians and if it came out that they
were involved in this it's a very high risk thing because the austrians would think so unkindly about
this that it could forever change the relationship so if it is a world power doing this and if they
do run the risk of being caught they're they're playing a very dangerous game
more after the break
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in our last episode we briefly mentioned the case of a cia officer who believes he got hit in moscow but
what we haven't told you is that that is one of the first cases of the illness to hit outside of
cuba i traveled to moscow in december of 2017 it was a 10-day trip um i was at that time i was the
deputy chief of operations and what we call the europe and eurasia mission center so that's you know
an area which encompasses everything from you know from dublin all the way to the you know the most eastern
time zones of of of russia so huge expanse for most of his career mark polymeropoulos was an
undercover cia operations officer i think of him as the real life jason born mark had served in
conflict zones around the world syria iraq afghanistan places where you can easily be killed
but by 2017 he'd been in the agency for decades and was in a more senior role and he wasn't
undercover anymore in fact during his trip to moscow he was actually meeting with russian intelligence
so and so but how do those meetings work i mean they're friendly enough i mean it's business like
that's not you know you're but what do you sit down and say hi there boris i'm here to spy on you
no i mean it's a it's an you know it's an open liaison channel so that you know this is not a
secret operation it's called it seems counterintuitive but senior american and russian intelligence
officers do communicate with each other they have periodic meetings to discuss possible ways to work
together mainly when it comes to counterterrorism but a few days after he arrives mark wakes up in
the middle of the night in his hotel room the room was spitting so i had a splitting headache i had
tinnitus which is ringing in your ears he has some of the same symptoms as other patients with havana
syndrome vertigo ringing in the ears nausea joke there i joke around and say you're like the jason born
with tbi like you know i've certainly been under some high pressure situations uh you know i've been in
embassies that were attacked you know al-qaeda you know car bombs have hit the back gate um but
ultimately this was the most terrifying experience uh of my life because i lost control mark had
believed that the trip to russia was low risk remember he was not undercover there he was
there openly meeting with russian intelligence he thought he was safe but since this happened to him
his perspective has changed i got much smarter on this of course in the last you know a couple years
so there has been an incredible kind of progression of of uh you know of attacks on our diplomatic
personnel for decades you know when we talk about you know the things called like moscow rules or a
gentleman's agreement not to hurt each other i mean you can also make an argument that the russians
really never respected that gentleman's agreement refers to the idea that the u.s and russia have a
tacit understanding that basically says you can around as much as you want but you don't physically hurt
each other spies obviously mark doesn't place much faith in that you know if they are behind
this now certainly they've taken it to a to a new level so here we have a very experienced cia officer
who is suggesting that russia might be behind the havana syndrome and then when the dozens of cases
in vienna pop up i can't help but think that what happened in vienna and what happened in havana
were really similar these are the two biggest outbreaks of havana syndrome that we know about
they both happened during u.s presidential transitions havana cases started in 2016 obama to
trump and then vienna at the end of 2020 trump to biden which is a very unstable time in the u.s
both outbreaks also happened in countries that are diplomatic battlefields for the americans and russians
so to me these havana syndrome incidents are of a kind they bear a signature on them and it seems to
me that the signature is russian well john lee i think you know my stance the only evidence i see
linking russia to havana syndrome is circumstantial and of course russia has denied any involvement in any
incidents maybe so but follow me for a minute so let's just say that havana syndrome is real
and that whoever attacked u.s spies in vienna is playing a very dangerous game to use trevor train
his words which country has shown time and time again the audacity to interfere in other countries
politics and physically hurt people on foreign territory the united states yeah okay fair the u.s but so
has russia take for instance the american presidential election in 2016 whether or not you believe russia
colluded with donald trump they certainly tried to influence the election the white house punishing
russia in part for interfering in the u.s election president obama taking executive action expelling 35
russian diplomats giving them and their families just 72 hours to get out and where i live in the uk the
russians have tried to assassinate people or actually killed them a number of times in the last few
decades in 2006 russia was linked to the poisoning of former kgb officer alexander litvinenko in london
and then just a few years ago the former russian spy poisoned by a nerve agent in britain has been
discharged from the hospital sergey skrippel was found collapsed on a bench as we've mentioned it was
sergey skirpal one of the spies who'd been part of that big swap in vienna who was later poisoned in
salisbury britain accused russia of being behind that nerve agent attack but russia has denied any
involvement in the poisoning the havana syndrome incidents in vienna aren't the first time that
russia has been suspected of attacking its opponents on austrian soil in 2020 there was a high profile
murder case directly linked to russia chechens in exile take to the streets near the russian embassy in vienna
protests have been growing since the killing of a strident critic of kremlin-backed chechnya leader
ramzan kadyrov saturday's attack was the latest in a string of killings of chechens who have a
background in the anti-russian insurgency it was the fourth violent attack on chechens living inside
the european union within the past year and after all that early this morning if anyone wondered how
far putin would go the russian assault on ukraine began with missile attacks on key targets russia
invaded ukraine and the dangerous game got a lot more dangerous
i mean this is obviously a lot of circumstantial evidence that doesn't prove russia is connected to
the havana syndrome incidents not in cuba or in vienna and the u.s does plenty of targeted killings
around the world we're not exactly innocents the united states can certainly be the aggressor
the bottom line for me is that we don't know for sure what happened in austria
uh hey guys uh adam here uh john lee i hope you're doing well throughout the course of our reporting
we've had a whatsapp group with a production team where adam and i have been sending each other voice
memos to share reporting and leads we also send each other random messages gracias el arroz esta
muy rica like when adam shows off his spanish rico this was ahead of our cuba trip adam was showing
why he could easily be taken for a hapless american tourist we also send each other funny stickers make
dumb jokes mostly about our producer jesse being a vegetarian very dumb joke
but sometimes adam sends a voice memo in which he's actually breaking some news like in february
listen i just got off the phone uh with senior u.s intelligence officials um regarding the intelligence
community's expert panel findings super interesting before we get to exactly what he said you need to
know the context just two weeks before the cia had done something quite extraordinary it made a public
announcement a new interim report from the cia says most cases of havana syndrome are the result of
other illnesses or environmental factors and are not the work of a foreign adversary
that was pretty stunning the cia not famous for making preemptive statements about anything had
come out to say that most of the cases said to be havana syndrome are nothing more than environmental
factors or psychogenic remember that the cia had asked its staff to report any odd health symptoms that
they had experienced they couldn't be explained other government agencies had done the same and that huge
dragnet brought in around 1700 cases and a lot of those reported cases barely qualified
things like runny noses mild headaches food poisoning etc in other words most of those cases
that were reported could not plausibly have been havana syndrome unfortunately the cia announcement
wasn't very specific it didn't say whether or not the cia believed the havana syndrome outbreak in
vienna was real but to add another head-spinning detail to all of this we do know that the cia actually
fired the head of its station in vienna because he wasn't taking the havana syndrome outbreak seriously
enough we asked the cia about the removal of the station chief but they wouldn't comment on it
a lot of people thought the cia announcement disqualifying hundreds of cases was big news
and it gave the skeptics something to crow about from their point of view the cia was effectively
saying there's nothing to see here but i personally thought it didn't solve the mystery it didn't address
the cases that we've been focusing on like what happened to tony and tina
but then things got even more confusing because two weeks after that cia report comes out i'm in
south america and i get this voice memo from adam he'd just gotten off the phone with a group of
senior u.s intelligence officials they were telling me about a separate report written by a panel of
outside experts brought in by the intelligence community to examine what could have caused these
symptoms effectively what they have decided is that they don't believe that psychogenic factors
explain these core cases the ones that we've been talking to the people that we've been talking to
so the ones in havana and other places that describe a directional uh nature of the
pressure that they feel and the sound they're basically saying that they don't think psychogenic
factors play a role in in those injuries they found that pulsed electromagnetic energy plausibly
explains the core characteristics of havana syndrome in these cases and specifically what they found was
that it is possible to generate the required energy in a concealable way with moderate power requirements
this is critical because in our previous episode we talked to a weapons expert who told us that there
wasn't a way to generate enough power for a weapon that could cause havana syndrome adam's news made it seem like
the u.s intelligence community disagreed and after getting this voicemail i didn't know what to think
and i still don't adam that's uh that's amazing thanks for the call i uh this feels like groundhog day
to me it's it's back to the beginning
on the final episode of havana syndrome we do just that we go back to the beginning one of the sayings
in the intelligence community is admit nothing deny everything and and make counter accusations so the
facts were against them everything was against them so they had to make ad hominem attacks to discredit the
doctors the patients and everyone
haveana 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
so
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