“Havana Syndrome” is the Greatest Scandal in the History of American Intelligence
The U.S. Intelligence Community is systematically suppressing discussion of how Russia and Cuba have attacked hundreds of Americans with a secret weapon
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is one of those Philosophy 101 questions which many of us have endured as students. But is there still a scandal if the powers that be insist that there is no scandal? If people are just imagining a tree falling in a forest, how can there be any sound?
Such is the strange place where American spooks find themselves these days thanks to the unprecedented saga surrounding the so-called Havana Syndrome. Per media lore, U.S. spies and diplomats in Cuba circa 2015 fell victim to strange medical symptoms, as did some of their Canadian counterparts who were posted to Havana. Hence the term describing what befell them, which included acute headaches, vision problems, dizziness, and general loss of mental acuity. Some, but not all, victims recalled experiencing strange noises and sensations, often in their residences. In many cases, sufferers became unable to do their jobs due to untreatable medical issues.
However, as readers of this newsletter know already, this mysterious syndrome long predates 2015 and extends far beyond Cuba. The first documented case occurred in 1996 and involved two counterintelligence officers from the National Security Agency, Chuck Gubete and Mike Beck. While the agency won’t divulge where Gubete and Beck were attacked, it’s known to be Russia. Both men began experiencing the now-familiar symptoms. Gubete died several years ago, succumbing to the undefined malady, while Mike Beck, a former colleague of mine in NSA’s Counterintelligence Division, is dying slowly of Parkinson’s disease, which he believes was caused by the 1996 attack on him in Russia.
I don’t pretend to be impartial here, since several friends and colleagues of mine have fallen victim to the “Havana Syndrome,” experiencing ruined health and worse: hence my pointed question about how many more American spies must die before our government does something here. That said, I don’t let my having a dog in this fight skew my analysis. I go where the facts lead me, as always. To get at the ground truth in this case, which is exactly what President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Community doesn’t want anyone to do, over the past year I’ve interviewed more than dozen current and former IC personnel with direct knowledge of this mysterious syndrome – first as victims of enemy action, then as victims of their own bureaucracy, which remains more interested in denying these attacks than in making them cease.
My title is intentionally provocative. Terming this syndrome, which falls under nebulous rubric of Anomalous Health Incidents or AHI according to the Director of National Intelligence (that’s Avril Haines, an Obama-Biden flunky), the greatest scandal in the annals of American intelligence sounds like a reach. As you read on, you will see that it’s not. Moreover, this is a wholly different sort of scandal than anything the U.S. Intelligence Community has previously experienced. Preceding big scandals which shamed the IC and generated bad media headlines fell under rubric of what’s popularly termed “intelligence failure.” Too often, politicos choose to blame the spooks for their own screw-ups, rebranding failures of policy as failures of intelligence. Let’s briefly review some of the classics of this venerable Beltway genre.
America’s ill-fated spring 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and his regime because they supposedly had weapons of mass destruction really wasn’t all that mysterious if you understand how the IC works (I had a front-row seat to this shitshow). In 1990, the IC, led by CIA, assessed that Saddam was several years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon; UN inspectors discovered after our successful 1991 Gulf War that Iraq had been at most a year – perhaps only six months – away from getting “the bomb.” Hence the default IC answer thereafter on Iraqi WMD displayed a bias towards analytic pessimism, even alarmism. Better to assume the worst there and not get pantsed again.
Similarly, the “intelligence failure” regarding Al-Qa’ida’s 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon becomes rather easy to understand if you know how the 1990s IC worked (again, I was there). While there were spook screw-ups on the road to 9/11, some of which mattered, the bigger issue is that the IC functioned as lawmakers wanted it to. In the 1970s, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, in response to spook excesses in the first half of the Cold War, Democratic-led Congress enacted reforms, including placing “the wall” between domestic and foreign intelligence collection and analysis. In the run-up to 9/11, the domestic (FBI) and foreign (CIA and NSA) sides of the IC didn’t communicate very well, because they legally weren’t supposed to. The rest, as they say, is details.
All the same, bona fide intelligence failures do happen, and on occasion they bring vast consequences. Take the alleged Aug. 4, 1964, North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy destroyers as they cruised off the coast of North Vietnam (my father was involved in this one). Known to history as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, that supposed Communist attack was employed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to ask Congress for permission to bomb North Vietnam, opening the door to America’s Vietnam War. While none disputed that armed enemy vessels attempted to attack U.S. ships on Aug. 2, the attack two days later was doubted even by the U.S. Navy. However, NSA provided the signals intelligence which proved to the White House that the Aug. 4 attack happened. Unfortunately, NSA analysts realized a few days later that there was a embarrassing screw-up at SIGINT field sites in Asia, where intercepts from Aug. 2 were mistakenly believed to have been picked up on Aug 4. By the time NSA headquarters realized their error, U.S. warplanes had already bombed North Vietnam. The agency therefore decided to cover up the unpleasant truth for four more decades.
“Havana Syndrome” isn’t like any of those IC failures. Here, the leadership of the Intelligence Community has conspired with the White House and whoever is really running the Biden administration to deny and conceal that hostile intelligence services are attacking and crippling Americans, mostly IC personnel, all over the world, including at home. Hundreds of Americans have fallen victim to AHI attacks in more than a dozen countries, as well as a distressing number of attacks at home. The IC is aware of multiple attacks in the national capital region, meaning in Washington, DC, as well as the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. There have also been several AHI attacks in Florida. Rumors abound of more attacks in other U.S. states, but the IC strives to low-ball such claims even internally.
Let’s review what Biden’s DNI concluded about AHI in March 2023, as this newsletter explained at the time:
This was [the DNI’s] bottom line:
“Most IC agencies have concluded that it is “very unlikely” a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels, with two agencies at moderate-to-high confidence while three are at moderate confidence. Two agencies judge it is “unlikely” an adversary was responsible for AHIs, and they do so with low confidence based on collection gaps and their review of the same evidence.”
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to independently assess any of that bureaucratese, because the IC redacted the supporting analysis so heavily that it’s indecipherable. The accompanying statement from DNI Haines made her position clear: “U.S. adversaries, including Russia, were not engaged in a global campaign resulting in AHIs,” adding, “IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors.”
In other words: it’s all in your silly heads, folks.
I’m not going to mince words: that DNI statement is a bald-faced lie. The terrible truth is that, for many years, multiple hostile intelligence services have employed a Russian-designed and built acoustic directed energy weapon against Americans to harm and cripple them. The culprits are Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB (for attacks inside or near Russia), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff or GRU (for attacks further afield) and Cuba’s Dirección de Inteligencia or DI, a close Kremlin spy partner since the 1960s (many of the attacks in the Western Hemisphere, including inside the U.S., are the DI’s handiwork).
Our Intelligence Community is well aware of what the mystery weapon is and how it works. American spies have possessed fragmentary information about this clandestine Russian spy program for decades. Now, based on extensive intelligence collection and analysis, the IC has identified a half-dozen variants of this unique weapon, which was initially developed by the KGB during the late Cold War. The variants represent improvements in terms of capability, portability, and range. The top-shelf model is customarily deployed in a van and has an effective range of several hundred meters. The smallest weapon is man-portable in a backpack and is employed against close targets at a hundred meters or less. All variants produce similar symptoms and long-term medical harm.
Our enemies are not concerned in the slightest about “collateral damage.” Many IC victims of AHI have been struck at their residences when family members are at home. Spouses, partners, and even children have been attacked, experiencing long-term health impacts. Such attacks have occurred inside the United States too. Again, Biden’s IC refuses to do anything about this. Somehow this White House is happy to provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and munitions, to help Kyiv defend itself against Moscow’s aggression, armaments which have been used to kill thousands of Russians – but doing anything to protect Americans from Russian attacks, even on our own soil, is unthinkable.
The Biden administration bears much of the blame for this institutionalized dishonesty and cowardice, but not all. The Obama and Trump administrations were in no hurry to get to the bottom of the AHI mystery either. That said, it’s only been since 2020 that the IC has developed a complete picture of what’s behind the “Havana Syndrome” thanks to rigorous analysis not just of highly classified multisource intelligence, but also of the victims and their symptoms and experiences. I’ve spoken with multiple IC officials who described a similar nightmare when they were suddenly hit by a terrible, physically jarring noise unlike anything they’d ever heard, followed by a fearsome headache, and their lives have never been the same since that moment.
There’s good evidence that the Russians have been targeting Americans with this weapon for three decades. The 1996 attacks on NSA’s Beck and Gubete appear to have been a trial run of sorts for the secret device. My colleague Tom Rogan has presented plausible evidence that Russian intelligence targeted President George W. Bush with the mystery weapon during a 2007 visit to a resort on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. If that sounds crazy, that wasn’t the first time the Kremlin has tried to harm top American officials with unconventional weaponry. During a 1959 visit to Moscow, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, were attacked by something, apparently a KGB secret weapon, that beamed ionizing radiation at them. The Secret Service covered up this shocking incident for decades, until it was revealed in 1976 by a high school newspaper in the suburbs of the nation’s capital.
The Cubans have long been willing to harm IC personnel who displeased them. More than two decades ago, NSA played a pivotal role in the roll-up of a whole network of Cuban spies who had penetrated multiple U.S. federal agencies. Through meticulous long-term analysis of intercepted DI communications, tied with intelligence about Cuban espionage modus operandi, the IC eventually identified several DI moles in Washington, DC. Among those arrested and convicted for espionage on behalf of Havana were the Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belén Montes and the State Department’s Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn. Formidable IC counterintelligence work identified other DI moles around Washington, DC, who were not prosecuted for espionage. The lion’s share of that success was provided by a gifted NSA analyst with a unique drive and flair for counterespionage. Her thanks for her triumph involved getting targeted by Havana. She was harassed and surveilled, and even had her residence ransacked by DI operatives seeking to silence her. NSA was skeptical of her claims of Cuban intimidation and the agency disgracefully did nothing to protect her. It's therefore no wonder that Havana has graduated to worse and more aggressive attacks on IC personnel they don’t like.
People and bureaucracies inevitably get more of what they reward or tolerate, a truism that’s as valid in espionage as everything else. It’s therefore unsurprising that Russian and Cuban AHI attacks have only increased in their number and brazenness in recent years. Since the IC refuses to acknowledge this crisis, insisting that nothing is happening, even telling crippled American spies that it’s all in their head, why shouldn’t our enemies keep attacking us? They’re paying no price for their aggression. Anyone expecting Russia or Cuba to suddenly become humanitarians is a fool even by Beltway standards. Moscow, per the mantra, does not believe in tears.
It gets worse. A core component of the Top Secret conspiracy executed by Biden’s IC regarding AHI is denying that anything is happening while suppressing evidence that something awful keeps happening. A few years ago, two FBI senior special agents took a vacation in Turkey with their families. Both agents had served as legal attaches abroad; known as LEGATs, these are FBI representatives stationed in U.S. embassies all over the world, coordinating investigations and information exchange with host-country law enforcement. Both LEGATs were known to Russian intelligence, and one had served at U.S. Embassy Moscow. While on holiday with their families, as they enjoyed an Anatolian beach week, they were attacked by a Russian intelligence operative, believed to be from GRU (specifically its sinister and shadowy wetwork Unit 29155, which has run amok all around the world in recent years), carrying the backpack version of the mystery weapon. The LEGATs and their families were bathed in invisible toxic waves in plain sight of dozens of bystanders.
Moreover, this attack was caught on film. Turkish intelligence, known as MIT, has what can be charitably termed a frenemy relationship with American intelligence agencies, and MIT was surveilling the FBI agents, suspecting they were in Turkey on a secret mission, employing a beach holiday as cover (in fact, this was just a family vacation). MIT caught the Russian operation on video, offering a good look at exactly how GRU and others employ the backpack weapon.
However, MIT refused to hand the video over when American intelligence learned of its existence and requested to see it. NSA hackers from the agency’s elite Tailored Access Operations shop got down to work and stole the video by cracking into MIT classified computer networks. In the Hollywood version of this story, that purloined Turkish video represents the “smoking gun” and a brave CIA senior official who’s had enough of the lies, blows the cover-up wide open and tells Congress of its existence. Public hearings on the Hill follow, with the bad guys getting indicted, while the honest spies who protect their people and follow the law get vindicated.
None of that happened. No spooks I’ve spoken with know what happened to that video. I strongly suspect that – just like the Top Secret intelligence file on Iran’s nuclear program displeasing to the Obama administration which I revealed here last week – it’s being analyzed by “top men” at a classified facility somewhere in the Northern Virginia suburbs, if it hasn’t been somehow “misplaced” already.
The Biden White House and their Intelligence Community flunkies know the truth about AHI, but they work overtime to ensure that Congress, the media, and the public don’t find out. Not long ago, American intelligence learned that a GRU hit team was on the move, with a backpack version of the mystery weapon, headed for the capital of a country that’s friendly with the U.S. The Russians planned to infiltrate the country to “zap” Americans stationed at the embassy there, including IC personnel. American spooks who followed AHI closely viewed this as a golden opportunity to catch the bad guys in the act, stopping the planned attack pre-execution, while seizing the backpack weapon. At last, the IC would have the weapon in our hands, incontrovertible evidence of exactly who and what was behind “Havana Syndrome.”
Again, none of that happened. To the horror of the American spies who wanted to nab the Russian hit team, Langley rejected the operation, despite its being nearly risk-free for Washington, DC. The host country, no friend of Moscow, was happy to arrest the GRU operatives and hand their deadly gear over to CIA at its local station. That agency station chief killed the secret operation, instead evacuating some CIA personnel from the embassy temporarily to prevent their falling victim to AHI. Stopping the Russians wasn’t on the table.
What the hell is going on here? wondered the American spies who proposed interdicting the GRU hit team and seizing their secret weapon. Clearly, the local COS was “just following orders” from CIA headquarters, what’s termed the “seventh floor” at Langley. Biden’s IC was determined not to have the weapon fall into American hands. Because if that happened, it would only be a matter of time before Congress found out and started asking questions. Such can’t be allowed, since that would require Biden’s intelligence bosses and their masters in the White House to admit that they’ve known the truth about AHI for years and chose to aggressively cover it up, as hundreds of Americans fell victim to this outrageous Moscow-Havana operation. Many are crippled for life. Others are dead.
Team Biden doesn’t want to know the truth. Indeed, they refuse to. One more time for the seats in the back: They don’t want to know.
Lurking behind the entire AHI issue is a disturbing counterintelligence enigma. While many Americans have fallen victim to these mysterious attacks, Russian-Cuban targeting, particularly in recent years, reveals specific intent. CIA’s “Russia House” has been decimated by AHI attacks. IC personnel at multiple agencies who are considered experts on Russia and Cuba have fallen victim to the mystery weapon in numbers which are plainly indicative of intentional targeting. IC investigators working the AHI issue have themselves been targeted by the enemy, inside the United States. American spies working Russian and Cuban counterintelligence have been in the crosshairs of “Havana Syndrome” in vastly disproportionate numbers. To any veteran counterspy, it’s evident that Moscow and Havana are systematically taking out IC personnel they fear. As one victim explained to me: “If they can’t recruit you, they cripple you.”
How do they know exactly whom to target? Simply put, IC personnel and their classified jobs cannot be identified by Internet searches and social media trolling. You can only find out, for instance, who’s manning the Russian counterintelligence shop at CIA or NSA by possessing IC internal Top Secret information. Which leaves only two possibilities.
First, our Top Secret communications across the IC have been compromised by Moscow. This cannot be ruled out en principe, since break-ins into classified American communications have been executed by Russian intelligence in the past. However, neither Moscow nor anybody else is known to have compromised Top Secret communications across the IC, ever. That’s what a spy service would need – access to all Top Secret cables and emails, from multiple agencies, over years not merely months – to piece together exactly who’s holding what sensitive jobs in which agency. Nobody can state that such is impossible, but those who are familiar with how the IC manages its Top Secret communications (I’d tell you more but, as they say, I’d have to kill you) know that it’s unlikely. Moreover, such an unprecedented compromise would have stunning national security implications far beyond the counterintelligence arena.
Which brings us to moles. The more likely explanation for how Moscow and Havana execute their precision targeting of IC personnel with their mystery weapon is that turncoats are providing them the timely Top Secret information needed to take out American spies deemed troublesome by the Russians and Cubans. Which, given how the IC compartmentalizes secrets, means that there’s more than one mole embedded in more than one U.S. intelligence agency. This newsletter discusses moles a great deal, and longtime readers won’t be astonished by the notion that the IC is penetrated by multiple moles reporting to Moscow or Havana. Nevertheless, if the Russians and Cubans are running moles inside several IC agencies, that would unravel the targeting mystery surrounding AHI. It also explains why they systematically take out American counterintelligence experts on Russia and Cuba, since those are exactly the personnel who are looking to unmask moles. Those counterspies much be crippled before they unmask the moles who are enabling targeted AHI attacks against the IC.
“What,” Lenin famously asked, “is to be done?” There’s no reason to think that if Vice President Kamala Harris moves to the Resolute Desk in January, her administration will act any differently than Joe Biden’s regarding AHI. The official cover-up will continue, as it must, since how can President Harris allow her IC to admit that Biden’s spy bosses aggressively covered up the crippling of hundreds of American spies, doing nothing to protect them? Particularly disreputable has been the key role played by David Cohen, who’s been CIA’s deputy director throughout Biden’s presidency (he held the same post during the final two years of Obama’s presidency). A partisan hack, Cohen is despised by the workforce at Langley in no small part thanks to his acting as enforcer regarding AHI, leading the cover-up and threatening CIA staffers who dissent from the party line regarding “Havana Syndrome.” Cohen is a brazen liar even by the impressive standards of Team Obama-Biden-Harris. Last week, he stated that “dire predictions” that Afghanistan would become a renewed terrorist haven after the Biden administration handed the country over to the Taliban three years ago “have not come to pass,” which would be news to Taylor Swift fans worldwide, among many others. Despite, or perhaps because of, his accomplished mendacity, Cohen is rumored to be Harris’ choice for CIA director in the new year.
If Harris is our new president in January, I strongly encourage the Senate, particularly its intelligence committee, to ask pointed questions regarding AHI. If Cohen is nominated to lead CIA, senators have a moral as well as political obligation to forthrightly ask him about what’s really been going on with Russian and Cuban attacks on Americans all over the globe. If Trump returns to the Oval Office instead, I have similarly low expectations for AHI policy. Any Trump nominees to fill top IC positions must be asked by the Senate what they plan to do about AHI. Will they tell the truth here? Will they protect Americans from more enemy attacks? Senators must demand specifics, no matter who wins our coming election.
Otherwise, it's only going to get worse. Neither Moscow nor Havana has any reason to cease their AHI attacks on Americans. Biden’s IC conspiracy to cover up the awful truth has only resulted in more crippled Americans. Senior spooks assess that it’s only a matter of time before Moscow passes their mystery weapon to Communist China and revolutionary Iran. Then we will experience these attacks on Americans truly worldwide. What’s stopping this? Nothing. Similarly, what’s stopping Cuban intelligence from outsourcing AHI attacks to criminal cartels possessing no overt links to Havana? After all, El Salvador’s notorious MS-13 is disturbingly thick on the ground around Washington, DC. Again, nothing.
It's long past time for the unpleasant truth about “Havana Syndrome” to come out before more American spies are disabled or even killed, many of them right here at home. Joe Biden’s spy bosses are perfectly content to let their own personnel die while covering up what’s killing them. I’ve done what I can here, blowing the whistle as a Deep State Dissident, now it’s time for Congress to ask important questions.