The Greatest Threat to American Spies is Their Own Leadership

Whistleblowers are trying to expose the awful truth about “Havana Syndrome,” but the Biden-Harris administration won’t let them

This newsletter has led the way in exposing the reality of the so-called Havana Syndrome, the mysterious malady that’s harmed, crippled, and even killed hundreds of American spies and diplomats going back to 1996 (at a much-increased pace since 2015). Two weeks ago, Top Secret Umbra proclaimed that “Havana Syndrome” is the Greatest Scandal in the History of American Intelligence. That dire assessment came on the heels of my breaking shocking stories regarding what the U.S. Intelligence Community euphemistically terms “Anomalous Health Incidents.” In case you’re new here (there have been a lot of new subscribers recently — welcome!), you may want to review them to understand how ridiculous the Biden-Harris administration’s cover-up of AHIs truly is:

CIA to Workforce: Drop Dead (16 APR 2024)

How I Became a Deep State Dissident (09 APR 2024)

So, I Guess I Touched a Nerve… (04 MAY 2021)

How Many American Spies Have to Die Before We Do Something Here? (30 APR 2021)

At last, the normies are starting to catch on. Back in March, the National Institutes of Health released their highly anticipated findings on AHI, which sounded authoritative. Officially, the two NIH five-year studies (resulting in two papers in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association) of over 80 subjects, U.S. Government employees and their adult family members, who claimed Havana Syndrome symptoms, met rigorous professional standards. At least that was how NIH portrayed it earlier this year. As usual, the Democrats’ media wing followed the party line. As NPR stated, “Two rigorous government studies found no unusual pattern of injury or disease in the brains of people with the mysterious cluster of symptoms known as Havana Syndrome.” Moreover, NIH found no evidence of any such syndrome, much less anything caused by hostile foreign agents, lurking behind AHI.

The now-customary “it’s all in your heads” message to AHI victims tracked perfectly with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s conclusion of March 2023 that it is “very unlikely” a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. Moreover, per the ODNI, “Five [IC] agencies judge that available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents..” Similarly, a January 2022 Central Intelligence Agency study determined that, despite an allegedly comprehensive investigation, the agency had “so far not found evidence of state actor involvement in any incident.”

However, the NIH studies were met with gripes that the fix had been in from the start. Six weeks after the NIH studies were released with fanfare, CNN reported that AHI sufferers were bewildered and angered by NIH conclusions, which seemed to be just more layers of cover-up proffered by Biden’s IC leadership: “There’s so much anger now,” explained a former CIA senior officer and AHI victim, who added that the refusal of top IC officials to take their complaints seriously was “psychologically damaging.” Worse, victims were forced to participate in the NIH studies as a condition of receiving medical care for their condition: “They wanted us to be a lab rat for a week before we actually got treatment at Walter Reed — and at bare minimum that is unethical and immoral.” I’ve heard identical complaints from several AHI victims across the IC.

Then it got worse, predictably. At the beginning of this month, CNN reported that NIH was suspending its work on AHIs “out of an abundance of caution” after internal investigation revealed “that people had been coerced into to being part of the research” – without explaining who exactly had been coercing victims. CNN continued, “Some of the people who reported being sick previously claimed that the CIA made them join the research as a prerequisite for getting health care.” CIA on the record did not deny such allegations, instead offering the Beltway boilerplate that “any claim of coercion, or perceived coercion, extremely seriously and fully cooperated with NIH’s review of this matter, and have offered access to any information requested.”

CIA has top men on it, I tell you. Top. Men.

FoxNews added fuel to the fire a few days ago by confirming that AHI victims had indeed complained internally about being coerced into participating with NIH’s whitewashed studies. “The way the study was conducted, at best, was dishonest and, at worst, wades into the criminal side of the scale,” explained an AHI sufferer, who added: “CIA dictated who would go. NIH often complained to us behind the scenes that the CIA was not providing adequate, matched control groups, and they flooded in a whole litany of people that likely weren't connected or had other medical issues that really muddied the water.”

In other words, CIA willfully tainted the NIH studies by including people who were likely not suffering from AHI. CIA employees were asked leading questions, for instance: Have you ever suffered migraines? That’s about half of American adults. Langley succeeded in establishing a signal-to-noise ratio that ensured the “scientific” findings that Biden’s IC needed from NIH. There’s now pressure from AHI victims on JAMA to withdraw the two NIH studies, which have been established to be deeply flawed methodologically, at best.

I remind this is the same NIH which played such a curious role in suppressing any public discussion of the unapproved “lab leak” origin of COVID-19 – with help from the spooks. Biden’s IC assumed a sordid part in stifling any examination of what role Communist Chinese research labs, especially the Wuhan Institute of Virology, played in how the earth’s deadliest pandemic in a century, even though the “lab leak” hypothesis was favored from the start by the only IC entity that’s capable of serious, independent medical intelligence research and analysis.

By now you might be sensing a pattern.

You know it’s not going well when Salon, which is nobody’s idea of a right-wing rag that’s out to smear Democrats, starts its report on how Biden’s IC has handled the AHI issue thus: “CIA has consistently lied to the American public about anomalous health incidents for the last several years and may be guilty of obstruction of justice.” That statement is true, indeed derived from an IC whistleblower’s complaint against Biden’s IC that was recently obtained, in redacted form, by the James Madison Project, via a Freedom of Information Act request. As Salon explained on Sept. 16, this detailed whistleblower complaint constitutes a game-changer in the AHI debate since it plainly demonstrates that the issue is far from settled: “The information just released by the government…shows that Congress and the FBI were among the government institutions that were either lied to or information was withheld from them.”

I must strongly agree, since I have that whistleblower complaint before me right now. Dated Mar. 15, 2023, it’s 26 pages long and somewhat redacted because its original classification was SECRET/NOFORN. However, a veteran spook who’s acquainted with the AHI issue and how it’s been handled by the IC can make educated guesses about what’s been blacked out. What’s visible is devastating enough.

The whistleblower who went to the IC’s Inspector General is a CIA officer and AHI victim whose tale of bureaucratic abuse by the top echelons of the IC is genuinely shocking, even to cynical, world-weary counterspies like yours truly. It cites “urgent concern” that IC leaders have systematically lied about AHI to virtually everybody, including Congress. In particular, it alleges that ODNI intentionally misrepresented Havana Syndrome in the March 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment on the AHI matter, including “active suppression of dissent through the abuse of authority, knowing exclusion and suppression of intelligence or information which contradicts the predetermined analytic line, the active suppression of witnesses, and actions which may constitute obstruction of justice and witness tampering as defined in federal statute.”

To cut to the heart of the accusation regarding the ICA:

To manufacture the consensus, the CIA, with apparent assistance of elements of the DNI – notably the National Intelligence Council and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center – is engaged in the apparent suppression of dissenting information, intelligence, and/or evidence contradictory to the preferred analytic line [on AHI].

The whistleblower then summarizes “manipulation of intelligence and processes” such as:

Intelligence abuses, some of which can be compared to “cooking the books” in financial and investment fraud…withholding contradictory information, using unethical bureaucratic maneuvering, direct and indirect threats of career consequences, actual adverse career impacts and intimidation…should witnesses of victims cooperate with the FBI.

There’s more, particularly regarding allegations that IC leadership intentionally kept the FBI in the dark about AHI attacks, including on American soil:

Some of the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, and to an extent the NIC and ODNI… could arguably be characterized as conducting an information operation against the public, Congress, the Intelligence Community, and the defense community…I have seen or obtained specific documents known to the CIA which were withheld, one of which existed as far back as 2019, which contradict [the ICA’s] underlying assumptions…Additionally I have [REDACTED] information that one victim requested to speak to the FBI but was told their information had been passed to the FBI already. This victim remains unknown to the FBI and FBI investigators have none of the information related to this victim and their reported incident.

Significantly, that victim was assaulted inside the United States, meaning the FBI unquestionably had jurisdiction over any investigation, but IC leaders didn’t want that to happen. The whistleblower alleges that multiple AHI victims have been stymied by IC higher-ups in their efforts to engage the FBI regarding their cases. Significantly, “The effort to discourage (arguably coerce) witnesses and victims seems particularly focused on events inside the United States.” The whistleblower further alleges bureaucratic retaliation against those who have reported AHI attacks inside the U.S.

Worse, the whistleblower accuses IC leadership of conspiring to ensure that the ICA conformed to the AHI party line by systematically suppressing and ignoring contrary intelligence and information. In particular, the FBI was kept in the dark. The whistleblower makes specific allegations regarding how FBI investigators were denied access to intelligence that was relevant to AHI cases. These allegations include efforts by IC leaders to stifle internal dissent by threatening careers and even the jobs of spooks who failed to get in line on Havana Syndrome – in particular, if anyone dared to contact the FBI “outside the chain” to discuss AHI attacks.

The whistleblower additionally discusses motivations for the cover-up. After all, why exactly would Biden-Harris intelligence bosses want to suppress the truth about AHIs, harming hundreds of brave Americans while doing so? Try this on:

Should an adversary execute a directed energy attack in the United States without detection, then logically the FBI and the IC are not as effective in counterintelligence as portrayed internally and externally. The failure in subsequent years since 2016 to address also calls into question the competency and efficacy of [CIA] leadership…The existence of AHIs in the homeland, and arguably abroad, in which attribution is determined would then create a difficult policy question for the USG.

In other words: We must skew the intelligence, since if the IC officially knows that AHIs are real and who’s doing it to Americans – of course they do, as this newsletter has revealed in detail – the White House might actually have to do something about it.

What to make of this whistleblower’s allegations? They remain unproven as yet, but these detailed claims track neatly with similar allegations made to me by other AHI victims who have been abused, manipulated, and silenced by their own IC leaders. None of it’s an accident or a coincidence. This is the Biden-Harris plan to keep the unpleasant truth about AHIs hidden from Congress and the public. The orders for this conspiratorial cover-up are coming from the White House and the National Security Council. Contrary to Hollywood myth, the spies don’t make policy, they implement it.

Despite its redactions, this whistleblower’s complaint raises grave yet substantive questions about the Biden-Harris administration and an apparent conspiracy that’s been coordinated at the highest levels of the executive branch since early 2021. We know who was holding leadership jobs at the ODNI, CIA, NIC, and NCSC over the past almost four years. Accusing the White House of a cover-up of this magnitude – an on-going conspiracy to hide a terrible truth from Congress and the public by abusing brave Americans injured while serving our country – is genuinely shocking.

It's up to Congress now to act. The media, with a few honorable exceptions, has shown too little interest in unraveling the AHI mystery for too long. Only Congress, with its oversight function, has the power to compel answers from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their underlings about what’s really going on with Havana Syndrome. This whistleblower showed immense courage, sacrificing career and more, to tell the IC Inspector General the truth. It’s time for a few Congressmembers to show some courage too. The spooks need you. Just do it.