Oh, there he is, I think. I think that's him.
Never been on a testicle before.
Ah, this will be fun.
So I've never, I've never opened a Tesla door before.
How are you doing, man? Are you good?
Is everyone boosted?
Yeah, I'm boosted and actually I had it like two weeks ago.
So I'm, I am boosted.
And he also had it like a couple of years ago.
I never had it.
Oh, you never had it?
No.
Oh, well, this is good. You get it on this trip.
I do not.
Do you mind if I stick something in your trunk?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll sit in the back.
How long have you been living here?
There's things I'm not going to talk about with a microphone on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand.
I haven't been to **** in so long.
Well, here you go. You're identifying where I live.
Oh, you don't want me to?
No.
Okay, okay.
I don't know.
Don't worry, though. You won't use it.
I don't want to make it easy for people to look at me.
Okay.
I mean, if you want me to stop recording right now to like set ground rules and stuff, totally.
Yeah, why don't we talk about it?
Okay.
Hey, I'm, uh, I'm turning off recording now.
I'm John Lee Anderson.
And I'm Adam Entis.
From Vice World News, this is Havana Syndrome.
One, two, three, four.
Episode 8. Deny everything. Admit nothing.
So our first article on Avana Syndrome was published four years ago.
Back then, we knew a little bit about how it started.
But there's a lot we've learned since then, especially through our reporting for this podcast.
We're going to lay it all out here, what we know as of this recording.
There's even a few brand new things we can share with you in this final episode.
But let's start at the beginning.
Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the national anthem of the Republic of Cuba.
As we prepare to raise the United States flag here at our embassy in Havana,
symbolizing the reestablishment of diplomatic relations after 54 years.
So in July 2015...
Please rise for the raising of the flag and the national anthem of the United States.
The American embassy in Havana reopens, along with the CIA station there,
which is freshly invested in trying to make advances in intelligence on the island.
The following summer, in 2016, the CIA begins sending down a new team of officers to staff the station in Havana.
One of the first new CIA officers is someone we have referenced previously, but did not talk to on tape.
We're calling him Craig.
All Craig will tell you is that he worked for the U.S. government,
but I know from sources that he actually worked for the CIA.
At first, Craig experiences no harassment at all.
That changes when the new station chief arrives.
Soon thereafter, Craig's cover is blown.
He begins experiencing harsher harassment than he was trained to expect.
Craig is gay, and twice he'd found that someone had written a gay slur on his car.
Others on the island experience what they also perceive as harassment.
Then, in late August 2016, Craig's in his living room when he hears a sound and feels pressure.
He knows that a Cuban observation post is directly across from his house,
and he assumes it could be a new form of harassment.
But he isn't sure, and it keeps happening to him.
He starts to feel really sick.
Then, in October 2016, another CIA officer, Tony, arrives on the island.
I was hit pretty hard and pretty heavy right off the bat.
Then, in November 2016, Trump is elected.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Weeks later, Fidel Castro is dead.
The future of U.S.-Cuban relations is in flux.
Again.
A little over a month later, on December 29, 2016.
All of the dogs in the neighborhood started barking.
Tony has his first incident.
And then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom.
And then this severe, severe ear pain started.
Tony goes to the embassy medical officer to get checked out.
And he finds out that the medical officer had had a similar experience,
as well as the embassy's regional security officer.
Tony reports these incidents, along with the uptick in harassment,
to Ambassador De Laurentiis, and writes up a cable for the CIA as well.
Craig is off the island at the time, seeking medical treatment in the States.
Doctors initially think he may have a stomach bug, but they soon rule that out.
And shortly after New Year's, he returns to the island.
His condition is worse than ever.
One day, Tony and Craig are outside the embassy.
They head to the secure skiff, where Tony divulges what happened to him.
The sound, the pressure.
And Craig tells him the same thing happened to him, too, back in August.
By early February 2017, two CIA officers and the wife of a third have had similar experiences.
For context, that's most of the CIA station in Havana.
So, February 14th, Tony sends another cable, this time to the CIA's Office of Medical Services.
Ten days later, February 24th, the wife of that third CIA officer reports another incident at her home.
She calls her husband.
He tells her to go outside and tell him what she sees.
In front of her is a van that quickly drives away.
I'm told that she sees it take off and park in front of a house down the street, a house that Cuban intelligence used for meetings.
By the end of March, both Tony and Craig have gone to the University of Miami, where they have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
Tony is told to stay in the States, but Craig is sent back to the island.
I'm told Craig's marching orders were to get his ass back to Cuba and take care of business.
He was explicitly told to keep his mouth shut about all of it.
When he gets back, he experiences yet another incident at his home.
His embassy colleagues see that something is wrong.
They've seen that people are leaving the island under mysterious circumstances.
Rumors are flying about what is happening.
Havana is considered a family post.
People are worried about their kids.
And so one day, Craig confides in some of his State Department colleagues.
That's when they learn what's going on.
And the rumor mill continues.
Craig is only on the island for about a week before being sent back to Miami for more testing and treatment.
That same month, the CIA sent an undercover officer down to Havana to check on the skiff at the embassy.
She's down there for a couple of days, and when she gets back to Langley, she reports feeling very sick.
Also in March...
Right in the midst of that pot washing is when I felt it.
Tina has the incident in her kitchen.
The sensation that I felt was an overwhelming sense of inexplicable anxiety.
Later that month, the CIA sends an agency doctor down to Havana.
The night he lands on the island, he too reports an incident in his hotel room at the Capri.
Then again in August, a high-ranking CIA analyst reports an incident, this time at the Nacional Hotel.
So these were, my understanding is that it has only affected State Department...
On August 9th, 2017, Havana Syndrome goes public.
We take this very seriously.
What is this?
This incident.
And that's what we're calling it.
We don't know exactly what...
So this is 2016, and you don't know what this incident is?
At the end of September, the U.S. brings half its embassy staff home.
The next month, it closes the CIA station indefinitely.
For a brief period of time, it seems like American spies and diplomats are safe.
They think it's over.
But then, in December 2017...
I'd been in Iraq, I'd been in Afghanistan, certainly been under some high-pressure situations.
Another high-ranking CIA officer is seemingly injured, not in Havana, but in Moscow.
But ultimately, this was the most terrifying experience of my life because I lost control.
Similar incidents are reported at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China.
By our count, there are over a dozen cases.
You need to evacuate your family from that apartment right now.
The following spring, May 2019, during President Trump's state visit to England,
two White House staffers report incidents at the Park Lane Continental in London.
You're a clear line of sight from the sidewalk out front.
Yes, you could sit here in a van and do whatever you were going to do to zap somebody up front.
White House national security officials begin encouraging government agencies to cast a wide net,
asking staff around the world to report any and all unexplained illnesses.
They want to catch anything that could be connected to Havana syndrome.
And then, that same fall in November 2020...
Yeah, it's me. Something's wrong with me.
A national security official, who we're calling John, reports an incident right outside the White House.
I have had a really hard time of speaking, and I'm really just learning at it.
From there, things just spiral.
We are vigorously investigating reports of possible unexplained health incidents among U.S. Embassy Vienna community.
Hundreds of additional mysterious illnesses are being reported as potentially being Havana syndrome.
The numbers keep rising in part because the agencies have lowered the bar for suspected cases.
A senior official at the time told me over a beer,
the only thing we know for sure about the number is that we don't know the number.
And that still seems to be the case.
German police are investigating cases of the mysterious Havana syndrome at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
CIA officers suffered from Havana syndrome during India trips.
A recent possible incident interrupted Vice President Kamala Harris' trip from Singapore to Vietnam.
That's what we've told you so far.
Still, there was this key part of the story that I was missing.
It had to do with a specific time period, in the eight months after Tony reports his incidents,
but before Havana syndrome becomes public.
If this was mostly affecting the CIA, what was the agency doing behind the scenes during this period?
And could they have done more to solve this and help their people?
I finally found someone who could shed light on what was really going on.
How long have you been living here?
There's things I'm not going to talk about with the microphone on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I understand.
This is Dr. Andrew, which is a pseudonym to protect his privacy.
I don't want to make it easy for people to look at me.
Okay.
I mean, if you want me to stop recording right now to, like, set ground rules and stuff, totally.
Yeah, why don't we talk about it?
I'd known of Dr. Andrew for some time.
He's the doctor who reported that incident at the Capri Hotel in late April 2017.
When we published our first piece, that's literally all I knew.
But it turns out that the reason Dr. Andrew was in Havana that night
was because he was investigating Havana syndrome on behalf of the CIA.
So before joining the CIA, he'd had years of experience investigating medical mysteries
on behalf of the U.S. government.
He'd also spent over 20 years consulting in academia and in the public health sphere.
By February 2017, Tony is really suffering.
And he is advised by a colleague to send a cable to the CIA's medical office
detailing what's going on in Havana.
It was a strange communique, where it came from, some of the things about it.
One of the people who receives that cable is Dr. Andrew.
He also hears the sound Tony recorded.
I don't know what it was.
It was some je ne sais quoi.
You just look at it and you say, boy, this is disturbing.
So I decided to go ahead and pursue it.
That's when he's sent down to the Capri Hotel in late April 2017.
I was awakened with severe right ear pain.
I sat up in bed.
My first thought was, I've got to be dreaming.
My second thought was, is this really happening?
The guy investigating the thing appeared to get hit by the thing.
And around then, I started to hear the sound that I had heard on the audio tapes before,
a sort of grinding or mosquito sound.
Later that morning, during a meeting at the embassy, he realizes just how debilitated he is.
And my mind is just all over the place.
I'm having so much trouble.
I remember saying to myself, Andrew, listen to him.
He's talking to you.
He's about to ask you a question.
Come on, man.
Get it together here.
So when Dr. Andrew returns to the States, he gets checked out at the University of Miami,
the same place Tony and Craig were sent.
And he is diagnosed with a vestibular injury.
Dr. Andrew is determined to get to the bottom of this, but his colleagues are more skeptical.
I had colleagues who looked at the cable and immediately said, oh, this is crazy.
They're just acting like a bunch of little girls.
They need to man up.
This is just stress.
And they need to live with it and move on.
And I said, well, what about the brain injury or brain problems, whatever?
They said, no, no, we're not going to go there.
I said, what are you talking about?
I said, that's the 600-pound gorilla in the corner.
That's what everyone's worried about.
Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant.
If you don't address it, you're just ignoring it.
Dr. Andrew says that instead of relying on his expertise, his colleagues at CIA were looking
for outside experts and doctors who would confirm what they believed or wanted to believe,
that Havana syndrome wasn't real.
Everywhere that they went and didn't get the message they wanted, the doctor shopped.
They went elsewhere.
At the time, there are three main camps within the CIA.
Those who believe the patients, those who are skeptical, and those who are agnostic.
In fact, I'm told that the deputy CIA director, Gina Haspel, who would take over as director,
is in the agnostic camp.
And as months pass, the CIA's inability to get intelligence on what happened fuels skepticism
in the building.
They were already starting ad hominem attacks against people.
So, this one's crazy.
This one's, you know, after money.
I was malingering.
All these sorts of things were being alleged about the people in the group that was sick.
What Dr. Andrew is suggesting here is that some at the CIA were pushing back at the victims'
claims that they'd been injured in Havana.
We asked the CIA about these claims to try to corroborate them, but they declined to comment.
In the fall of 2017, the person in charge of Dr. Andrew's office suggests he should retire,
and he ultimately leaves in August of 2020.
I'm kind of mystified by why the same government that would have allowed you and funded you,
and then in the face of this cluster of, you know, very serious health episodes that we
now call Havana syndrome, why they would choose to sideline, ignore it, and even denigrate
the record of some of you.
One of the sayings in the intelligence community is deny everything, admit nothing, 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.
It's starting to feel to Dr. Andrew like the CIA is doing all it can to sweep this under
the rug, or worse, actively cover it up.
Meanwhile, Tony and Craig are back at work in the States, still trying to recover, and
they feel like they're in limbo.
In those early days, people weren't talking to each other.
The CIA has very little information.
Still, in the months following what happened to Tony, he says they kept sending more people
down.
People that got sent in to replace me and my colleagues weren't informed of why we were
off the island.
They were just told, you have to go in and fill in this position, which is standard, right?
Hey, we need someone to go do X, Y, Z jobs.
You're the flyaway.
Go fill in.
But they come out, and they're injured with the same patterns.
But they haven't talked to us.
They don't know why they were filling in.
You know, we were getting taken out like lemmings down there.
It was like fish in a barrel.
Every time we sent someone down there, they were coming back injured.
Pretty soon, the U.S. government stopped sending suspected of anti-syndrome patients
to the doctor in Miami who gave the traumatic brain injury diagnosis.
My understanding is that those officials were worried that the diagnosis would freak people
out.
You know, it was sent in to the various agencies and the state.
And then efforts were made to call Miami and have TBI removed from my records.
Again, the CIA declined to comment on this.
But according to Tony, someone was trying to doctor his medical records.
They thought it was scary.
It was too severe of an issue.
And efforts were made to have that removed from my medical records because they didn't want
it to be as severe as it was.
Tony and Craig are begging their bosses to give them medical care.
At one point, I'm told that the CIA sends one of the patients to a neurologist, and he explains
to the doctor what happened to him in Havana.
But the doctor barely examines him, told him he needs to see a psychiatrist, and that he's
fucking nuts.
This is impossible.
The way they're treated leaves both Tony and Craig feeling frustrated, marginalized, like
pariahs.
It fuels Tony's hopelessness, a hopelessness that would eventually lead him to consider
killing himself.
Then in August 2017, Tony goes on medical leave.
I remember I wrote an email to as many senior folks as I could find.
Seventh floor, my front office, to the medical folks, you name it, and all the other patients.
And I said, I'm leaving next Wednesday.
You're not helping.
We've asked for it.
If you need me, you know how to find me.
You have five days.
Feel free to reach out.
The station closes, then the embassy begins to draw down.
At some point around that time, I'm assuming, somebody decides that the people who are sick
should be given an award.
Right?
That's what I was thinking.
After all that.
So let me read this to you.
It's a citation with the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at the top.
It's inscribed to Tony with his real name.
It says he's being awarded the Exceptional Service Medal.
In recognition of his selfless service, despite being targeted by unknown forces and subjected
to unprecedented damaging attacks.
Despite the months of attacks and ongoing harassment, he remained in his assignment.
So this is the CIA saying in black and white that something happened to Tony and his colleagues
and that they suffered attacks in Havana.
The timing here is kind of remarkable.
It's January 2018, four months after Tony has gone on medical leave.
Most CIA officers, when they find out they are getting an award, are ecstatic.
But Tony and the others are really conflicted.
Because they feel like the CIA leadership dragged its feet, withheld support, didn't really believe them.
And now they find out that the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is going to give them this honor.
I debated to go in or not.
I debated kind of mailing in a fuck you letter.
And he was there with his other colleagues who've been hit, and you should have seen their faces.
That's Tony's brother sitting next to him.
You mean upset?
Up there getting the award.
Awards.
They're not good awards, like there's some kind of hero.
So Pompeo's up there, and all these people don't want to be there.
I see what you mean.
You mean the people who were getting the award didn't want to be there?
Tony and some of the other patients had been having discreet meetings with members of Congress
and their staff, telling them about Havana Syndrome and what's been going on behind the
scenes at the CIA.
They say the goal wasn't to humiliate the agency.
It was simply to get the agency to try to help their people.
But within the CIA, the closed-door meetings with members of Congress were an unnerving development.
Let's not forget that there is some political history here.
Mike Pompeo was one of the most outspoken critics after the embassy attack in Benghazi, Libya.
He alleged that the Obama administration didn't do enough to protect our people there.
So fast forward to this award ceremony.
In some of the patients' minds, the whole thing is about damage control and protecting the leadership.
I asked the CIA about it, but they wouldn't comment on the record.
And former CIA director Mike Pompeo didn't get back to us.
There's one side of you that's going, holy shit, this is a really big deal.
Like, we're finally being recognized.
But on the other side of it, you're going, now?
You could have done this at any point.
You could have helped us at any point.
But now we're really fucked.
Now's the time that you want to be like, oh, here you go.
Thanks for everything.
Frankly, this is Washington at its worst.
Institutional ass covering.
Makes you wonder, why would the CIA initially ignore or dispute allegations, but then, within
a span of just a few months, turn around and give Tony, the doctor, and others an award?
Hey, Adam.
John Lee here.
Hey, brother.
How are you?
I've actually been talking to someone who has helped me gain some clarity on this.
He worked in Havana at the embassy in a very senior position.
And it turns out that he was the hands-on guy investigating and overseeing the Havana syndrome
problem.
He told me something that changes everything about the way I see the Havana syndrome.
This is a quote from him.
He says, we heard the Cubans may have been worried because so many contacts have been made
around the world.
This could have pissed off the Cubans.
That's after the break.
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All I did was report what happened to me, and I got injured.
And, you know, I've seen other people come back from various places with other injuries doing their jobs, and they're treated like heroes.
And I got treated like, you know, I'd done something wrong.
Tony is unable to work.
He's medically disabled.
He says he's seen over 100 doctors, but none of them have really fixed him.
His health problems are similar to many victims that I've spoken with.
They also feel ignored, sidelined by their own government, and they're angry about it.
Despite his condition, Tony has been able to put his skills to use, organizing dozens of his former colleagues to demand support from the government.
Last fall, President Biden signed the Havana Act into law, which means some of them will get compensation.
Humor helps.
Unfortunately, we all have a wonderful sense of humor.
Tina is feeling a little better, still receiving treatment.
But the job she does today is a far cry from the senior-level Foreign Service assignments she was on five years ago.
It's frustrating.
I mean, I triage emails for two hours a day, every day.
And that's my only job.
My supervisor is a first- or second-tour officer.
Just to clarify, that's usually someone at the beginning of their career.
It's all very easy, which is good.
And even then, I don't do a very good job with it sometimes.
How does it feel for you, seeing that people are still getting sick from this?
How does it feel, given your feelings towards the diplomatic corps?
It's heartbreaking.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but certainly not on my colleagues.
I mean, these are just people like me.
They're in it because they love it.
It's a calling.
So it's gotten hard, really hard, to see that we haven't figured it out yet.
I really want us to figure it out so that nobody else gets hurt.
Sorry.
No, I'm going to apologize.
Take as much time as you need.
The CIA and the State Department are understandably concerned that they'll have trouble convincing
employees to take overseas jobs, because they still don't know what's behind these health
incidents.
Yeah.
I saw my trash.
Momentarily.
Please continue to hold.
Thank you for standing by and welcome to the NSC background call on Cuba.
Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you so much for calling in this evening.
I know it's late.
We're at the vice office when we get an email saying that the National Security Council is
about to hold a conference call about Cuba.
So we jump on the call with a bunch of other reporters to hear the news.
Good afternoon, everybody.
And thanks again for jumping on the line.
Today, the United States announced a series of measures to increase support for the Cuban
people and safeguard our national security interests.
The U.S. Embassy in Havana is about to staff up again, albeit gradually.
Go ahead.
Yeah, thanks very much for doing this.
In 2017, the Trump administration scaled back our presence in Havana.
And as you just said, we're going to be increasing our presence.
I asked if reopening the embassy meant that they had gotten to the bottom of Havana syndrome.
But I got the same old non-answer.
We are working closely with all the relevant bureaus in the Department of State and across
the interagency as well on plans to investigate and get to the bottom of the anomalous health
incident.
The State Department is deliberately not using the words Havana syndrome.
Instead, they're using the term anomalous health incidents.
Essentially, what they're saying is, we don't know what happened or who did this, but we're
going back in anyways.
And in fact, in January, the U.S. reopened visa and consular services at the embassy in Havana.
At this moment, we do not have a conclusion as to the attribution.
We pulled out without knowing what happened.
And apparently, we're going back in without knowing what happened.
When I hear this, my first thought is that the CIA station is either back up and running
or is about to be.
But I can see why they might feel pressured to return.
As part of its mission, it makes sense that the CIA would want to be in a position to acquire
intel again in Cuba.
And for that matter, to be able to compete with the Russians there.
I was in D.C. recently meeting with a few sources.
And I met with one who was very high up in the chain at the embassy in Havana.
He was talking a lot about the CIA's activities on the island and how they were trying to up their
game and make inroads with new sources.
That rang a bell for me.
A lot of folks were skeptical that the Cubans were ever really going to cooperate with the United States,
that they were not going to change their stripes.
I was reminded of something we were told earlier.
The CIA wants to get close to a lot of our adversaries around the globe.
Former CIA Director John Brennan.
If you remember, he was unusually candid about how the CIA planned to operate in Cuba.
Because once you have that up-close and personal access, it affords you new opportunities as far as your intelligence objectives are concerned.
Meaning, the opening of relations between the U.S. and Cuba could help the Americans cultivate and recruit more spies.
So I think that certainly was a prevailing view within Langley.
And an intelligence officer's objective is try to gain as much insight as they can into what's happening in other countries.
Higher-ups wanted their officers in Cuba to step up their spying.
They wanted to keep an eye on what the Russians and the Chinese were up to.
And that meant upping operations in Cuba.
That may very well have freaked the Cubans out.
And perhaps pissed them off.
Based on our reporting over the past four years, this is the story that makes the most sense to me.
Someone within the Cuban government had to have been behind it.
But with some help.
And perhaps with approval from a very senior figure.
I'm talking Fidel Castro.
He'd been out of the government for some time, but retained huge symbolic authority.
And been vocal about wanting to slow down the detente with the Americans.
Remember, a lot of this harassment began just before he passed away.
I'm told that a high-up official within Cuban intelligence, a close ally of Fidel's,
was identified by embassy officials as the likeliest person to have organized the attacks behind the Havana Syndrome.
He's the person with the likeliest motive, given their understanding of his position.
That said, he would not have the technological capability.
But my source says the embassy knew who would.
The Russians.
We know that generally speaking, Vladimir Putin has been looking for and finding ways to go after the U.S. for over a decade.
But apparently, when the U.S. and Cuba restored relations, this spooked Russia.
And while we have pointed out that Russia had retained some influence on the island since the end of the Cold War,
there's evidence to suggest that it had also been increasing its intelligence presence on the island.
And of course, as we've learned, Russia's been toying with microwave technology as weapons for years.
So, the CIA goes into Cuba guns blazing, which freaks out the Cubans.
They respond aggressively, and with help from the Russians,
unleash a difficult-to-trace weapon on CIA officers to get them to back off.
In fact, my State Department source says that out of all of the theories his team studied at the embassy,
this was the only hypothesis going.
To be clear, Russia and Cuba have denied involvement with these incidents.
And we asked the Russian embassy about whether the country has been upping its intelligence presence on the island,
but they didn't get back to us.
That said, I also recently found out about the CIA's tradecraft during this time,
which provides some critical context and shows how vulnerable its officers were.
Remember, Havana had been considered a backwater CIA station.
Things change, of course, in the summer of 2016 when they're told to step things up.
But some of the important secret protocols spies use to stay hidden are extremely lax.
For example, the State Department holds diplomatic slots for CIA officers.
They're cover jobs.
Those slots are supposed to be rotated frequently
to make it harder for the Cubans to figure out who the spies really are.
But in Havana, the slots weren't rotated.
So when Tony arrives in 2016, he's put in the same position that his predecessor was in.
When Tony learns this, he assumes his cover is blown.
I heard a couple of good examples of how lax the tradecraft was in Cuba.
The Cubans know who the station chief is.
So phone calls between him and undercover officers are supposed to go through an intermediary
to keep the undercover officers' identities hidden.
At least one call that I know of didn't go through that intermediary.
I'm pretty sure this sloppiness exposed these officers.
And if Havana syndrome was part of a campaign to blunt the CIA's operations on the island,
well, it certainly was effective.
As for the cases that happened after Havana,
well, if Russia had the technology and it had worked in Havana,
why not take it on the road?
Especially if your goal in life is to fuck with the U.S.
At that point, it's not even about going after specific CIA officers.
It's about messing with our heads anywhere they can.
I hear what you're saying, John Lee, but I really think we need to stick with the facts.
And there are just not that many of them.
What do we know?
We know we have a bunch of people who say they've been hurt,
but the CIA hasn't been able to find any communications intercepts
in which officials in Russia or Cuba talk about what they did.
And I want to be honest, I think it's very strange that they haven't been able
to collect anything like that.
I think the events in Ukraine raise further doubts about assumptions
that the Russians can be so disciplined.
Look at the way the Russians have been operating in Ukraine.
They're so sloppy.
And yet we're supposed to believe that they were able to disguise these activities
for so long against our CIA personnel around the world.
The CIA also told us that they are continuing to rigorously investigate
the causes of the incidents.
But they added that, quote,
we have not so far developed credible intelligence linking a foreign state actor
or weapon to any incident.
The CIA's investigation into Havana syndrome hasn't stopped.
Just a few months ago, I spoke to a source with deep knowledge
of what the CIA has been able to turn up.
And a couple of things they said stood out to me.
One, they confirmed a rumor I heard
that in some suspected Havana syndrome cases,
the cause was probably a technical failure.
Some of those secure SCIFs had faulty HVAC systems,
which increased pressure inside the SCIF,
and that caused some people to hear a sound,
have ear pain, and get dizzy.
So for at least these cases, it wasn't a secret weapon.
It was an equipment malfunction.
The other thing I learned is that even though the government
has narrowed down the list of potential cases,
there are about two dozen that they still can't explain.
And some of those cases are, in fact, outside of Havana.
Meaning, Havana syndrome remains a global mystery.
On top of that, we've learned about a number of incidents
that happened in the 80s and 90s
that have piqued the interest of various U.S. government agencies.
I know that investigators have spoken to some of the people involved
to see if there might be a connection.
But in other cases that I know of,
these investigations have been strangely passive.
One patient offered to give the government audio recordings
that he took immediately after his incident.
But the government, for reasons I don't understand,
won't even take them.
Looking at how much we've learned,
I think back to something else Dr. Andrew told us.
Someone else made the prescient comment of,
this is going to be like Moscow microwaves
and we don't have time to deal with that.
Meaning an investigation that never actually goes anywhere
and never reaches a conclusion?
I don't know what they meant, frankly.
I think maybe it was just a matter of time and manpower drain.
They were extremely busy.
They were always understaffed.
I think they genuinely believed
that this was not likely a real thing
and that they just didn't have time to deal with this
and they needed to nip it in the bud, as they said.
I think it's pretty safe to say
that Havana Syndrome is not an isolated incident.
And I think it's also likely
that there are some U.S. government officials
who are aware of this,
but who have chosen to remain silent.
Maybe, but I'm not going to sign on to that claim.
A source once told me something
that really stuck in my mind.
Intelligence is an imperfect science.
It's what you know.
And it can change in a blink of an eye.
To me, despite the Americans going back into Cuba,
the Havana Syndrome has already been incredibly effective
for whomever unleashed it.
As a tactic or a covert weapon,
it's brilliant, leaves no hard trace,
has a major physical and psychological impact.
And even if there are only a handful of quote-unquote true cases,
it's caused a far and wide ripple effect.
Freaked out U.S. officials all over the world.
All they had to do, it seems,
was hit us in a few key places.
From there, the alarm that it caused
did much of the rest of the work.
Like, maybe this is a both-and situation,
meaning, yes, our people were hit with something,
and then, also, there are some cases that are psychogenic.
If I was the foreign adversary behind this,
I'd be pretty satisfied.
This worked out pretty damn well for them.
To top it all off,
our officials have been left relatively defenseless.
Without a smoking gun,
we can't come out and declare war on anyone.
And we kind of look like wimps,
complaining of some mysterious ailment
that there's no hard evidence for,
except for the symptoms.
And we haven't even come out and said as much.
So we're basically sitting ducks,
waiting for the next Havana syndrome.
And we'll see you next time.
Havana syndrome is hosted and reported by Adam Entous
and me, John Lee Anderson.
It's produced and reported by Julian 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 Bohn.
With production help from Sam Egan
and Adriana Rodriguez.
Fact-checking by Nicole Basulka.
Janet Lee is the Senior Production Manager
of Vice Audio.
Thanks to Rolando,
Jonathan Seaborn,
Matthew Simonson,
Mark Zaid,
Siegfried Beer,
Jasha Novak,
Ran Bandi,
Gabriel Lee,
Maximo Anderson,
Nick Troutwine,
David Remnick,
and The New Yorker.
And a special thanks to those
who shared their stories with us.
Those we can name,
and those we can't.
Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you.