When the Kremlin Hides its Lethal Secrets in Plain Sight
What if Moscow wants us to know who and what’s behind the infamous “Havana Syndrome”?
This newsletter has published several deep-dive pieces about the so-called Havana Syndrome, what the U.S. Intelligence Community prefers to euphemistically term Anomalous Health Incidents. Just a few days ago, Top Secret Umbra’s latest analysis of AHIs established, based upon considerable evidence, that the Biden-Harris administration, through its intelligence bosses, since 2021 has engaged in an active cover-up to conceal from Congress and the American public that it knows the unpleasant reality lurking behind the Havana Syndrome. The difficult fact is that AHI is caused by a special weapon from Moscow. To refresh:
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.
The Biden-Harris administration, in the greatest scandal in the history of American intelligence, has assiduously hindered discussion of this secret Kremlin weapon and who’s using it to cripple and even kill Americans, including attacks inside the United States. Since 2021, the Intelligence Community has told lies, prevented the truth from reaching Congress and the public, and executed a bureaucratic conspiracy to stifle discussion of Havana Syndrome. Of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his “special services” know exactly what they’ve done. And they know that we know.
They simply don’t care. What if the deep, dark secret here is that there is really no secret? What if the KGB placed the unpleasant truth about AHIs in public view decades ago, but nobody in the West even noticed? What if the only people in the dark about Havana Syndrome are Congress and the American public?
Recently, a friend of mine who came out of that old system shared with me an obscure book he picked up in the former Soviet Union back in the late 1990s. His is the sincere loathing of Communism and its ugly, mass-murdering secret police culture that only someone who grew up around it possesses. Putin says that he is a proud Chekist, to use the proper term: my friend doesn’t share that view.
To understand the relevant context, we must go back to the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the KGB, when many Chekists were cut adrift, without ideological moorings or a steady paycheck. Some got in bed with organized crime and related less-than-legitimate enterprises. Some tried to curry favor with Russia’s new elites. More than a few sold Soviet secrets to Western intelligence agencies. Others got by as best they could. Some wrote books to cash in on the KGB secrets they had in their heads.
For a few years in the 1990s, there was a strange free-for-all where former Chekists [i] published tell-all (or at least tell-some) books about their Cold War activities. Some of the authors embellished their spy stories, just as Western authors in that genre are wont to do. Nevertheless, this represented a bonanza for Western counterspies. Here were accounts which, even if fictionalized in places, offered the highly classified secrets of Soviet intelligence. If you knew Russian and could decipher the Chekist tea leaves, you could learn a lot. I cracked open more than one Cold War mole mystery by carefully reading such KGB reminiscences – which, when paired with cold case counterintelligence information, unmasked deep Kremlin secrets.
That said, the era of revealing Chekist memoirs proved short-lived. Once Vladimir Putin, the former KGB major, took over the Kremlin in 1999, state archives were shut, and authors were discouraged from revealing state secrets. Those who didn’t get the message were shut down, run into exile, and in some cases died under mysterious circumstances.
The long-term value of those 1990s KGB remembrances can be fairly termed a mixed bag. It’s difficult to assess when an author is being entirely truthful – that’s never a Chekist specialty – and it will be impossible to verify certain accounts, particularly regarding KGB spy operations, until Putinism falls someday, and a future Russian government decides to open the archives to researchers. I’m not holding my breath and neither should you.
Moreover, some of those 1990s Chekist memoirs are rather strange. The book my friend alerted me to fits firmly in the “Weird KGB Stuff” category. It was published by a minor firm in Minsk in 1997 under the title Your Own Intelligence: A Practical Guide (Своя разведка: Практическое пособие). The author is listed as Roman Ronin, but that’s an alias. Under his nom de plume, “Ronin” published a few “spy story” books about supposed KGB espionage operations. The author’s identity remains unknown, but he clearly possessed deep knowledge of KGB modes of thought and action. [ii]
The book reads like it’s ripped from KGB classified internal training curriculum, bolstered by personal notes about Chekist modus operandi. Its overall tone is that of an experienced insider in the Soviet spy business. Essentially, in the aftermath of the collapse of the KGB, the author provides the reader with a concise and detailed guide for How to become your own Chekist.
This was perhaps helpful advice in the Wild, Wild East that was the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, when gangsters and oligarchs proliferated as normal folks struggled to just survive. Belarus remained so mired in Soviet-era models, unlike Russia where the KGB broke up into several successor agencies, that Minsk never even changed the name of its secret police, which to this day remains the KGB (it would have cost a fortune to change the letterhead).
Your Own Intelligence constitutes a mystifying read for Westerners. The author is an unapologetic Chekist and makes jaw-dropping statements, encouraging the reader to do whatever is necessary to get the job done. The author didn’t get his manuscript approved by Amnesty International and there’s encouragement for torture that makes waterboarding look like a picnic: “If there is a lot of time to spare, it is more humane and effective to use gradually increasing pressure on the psyche accompanied by physical pain, but when there is almost no time, it is easier to use primitive physical violence.”
Overall, the book offers a guide to the full range of intelligence operations, from the collection of HUMINT (there’s a lot on how to recruit and validate assets) and SIGINT (which wiretaps work best, plus how to protect your own communications security), to intelligence analysis, even how to apply disinformation. There’s considerable discussion about how to mess with the heads of your target with physical and psychological manipulation, and here’s where things get interesting. The author elaborates the uses of a full array of unpleasant spy tricks, including hypnosis, the use of compromising materials (i.e. kompromat) including sex and drugs to influence the mind, plus there’s frank discussion of torture, even something termed “zombification” (essentially a Chekist take on coerced mental programming).
Of greatest interest to AHI is the book’s section on “technotronic methods” for influencing the target, including an alarmingly frank explanation of how to effectively use electric shock to make your subject confess, without killing him, as well as how to apply ultrasound to “bake” the target’s brain, as here:
In this case, both thermal and mechanical effects of elastic vibrations with frequencies over 100 kHz are used. Even the low intensity of such concentrated vibrations significantly affects the thought structures and nervous system, causing headaches, dizziness, visual and respiratory disorders, convulsions, and sometimes loss of consciousness. Devices for such effects are easy to make yourself. "Baking" selected areas of the brain with well-focused ultrasound is sometimes used to permanently remove unwanted memories from memory, but this is only possible with well-trained personnel and special equipment used in medicine.
“Ronin” continues with an explanation of the espionage uses of infrasound, that is, a type of sound wave with a frequency that falls below the normal range of human hearing, typically less than 20 Hz:
The use of mechanical resonance of elastic vibrations with frequencies below 16 Hz, usually imperceptible to the ear, is quite effective in terms of its effect on a person is the use of mechanical resonance of elastic vibrations with frequencies below 16 Hz. The most dangerous interval here is considered to be from 6 to 9 Hz. Significant psychotronic effects are most pronounced at a frequency of 7 Hz, consonant with the alpha rhythm of natural brain vibrations, and any mental work in this case becomes impossible, since it seems that the head is about to explode into small pieces. Low-intensity sound causes nausea and ringing in the ears, as well as deterioration of vision and unaccountable fear. Medium-intensity sound upsets the digestive organs and the brain, causing paralysis, general weakness, and sometimes blindness. Elastic powerful infrasound can damage, and even completely stop the heart. Usually, unpleasant sensations begin with 120 dB of tension, traumatic ones - with 130 dB. Infra-frequencies of about 12 Hz with a strength of 85-110 dB induce attacks of seasickness and dizziness, and oscillations with a frequency of 15-18 Hz with the same intensity instill feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and, finally, panic and fear.
Last, the book illuminates the reader concerning what he terms “Ultra-high frequency (UHF) non-ionizing radiation”:
This electromagnetic microwave radiation affects bio-currents with a frequency of 1 to 35 Hz. As a result, there are disturbances in the perception of reality, an increase and decrease in tone, fatigue, nausea and headache; complete sterilization of the instinctive sphere is possible, as well as damage to the heart, brain and central nervous system. Waves actively modulated in the frequencies of the alpha rhythm of the brain are capable of causing irreversible “quirks” in behavior.
UHF radiation introduces information directly into the brain, and in their fields any psycho-processing of the subconscious is noticeably accelerated. Telephone and radio line wiring, sewer and heating pipes, as well as a television, telephone and fire alarm are quite usable as antenna transmitters of such waves. The working equipment, in fact, can really be made in makeshift laboratory conditions. Directed microwave radiation usually manifests itself in twitching of the legs, burning in the soles, earache, eye irritation, clicking in the “buzzing” head, blows to the nasopharynx accompanied by coughing, sneezing and runny nose, possible cardiac arrhythmia and numbness of the hands. Such symptoms usually disappear after the person leaves the radiation zone.
I’m no scientist but what “Ronin” described in 1997 tracks with disturbing precision with depictions of what an AHI attack feels like and the lasting medical harm it causes, according to many Havana Syndrome victims who have come forward with their accounts. How did “Ronin” know all this, in such detail, nearly three decades ago? He was obviously relying on highly classified KGB information here. According to intelligence sources, the KGB studied the impact of these ugly techniques on prisoners, who served as Kremlin guinea pigs before they used their secret weapon for the first time on real-live American spies in 1996 (as this newsletter revealed).
I don’t take any Chekist account at face value. Nevertheless, what “Ronin” tells us provides a telling clue about what the KGB developed during the late Cold War in its arsenal of deniable special weapons. The Biden-Harris Intelligence Community can no longer pretend that it has no idea what’s causing AHIs. The KGB already told us, right in print, back in the 1990s. Surely the IC has more detailed information in its classified holdings about this subject than what was offered in than an obscure Russian language book printed in Minsk in 1997.
Since the current IC leadership is compromised by its long-term cover-up regarding Havana Syndrome, we cannot expect them to come clean now, even when confronted by hard evidence. Again, Congress must act, because nobody else in our nation’s capital is willing to do anything to protect Americans from foreign attack, even right on our own soil. Putin has no incentive to stop his attacks so long as the White House plays along with his Chekist ruse with its silence.
[i] Contrary to Putin’s dictum that “There are no ‘former’ Chekists” (Бывших чекистов не бывает), I’ve met a few of that breed; they are undeniably outliers, however.
[ii] I have a plausible suspect for “Ronin,” but my identification is not 100 percent solid; moreover, this suspect is still alive and has become an opponent of the Putin regime, and I have no wish to place him in additional danger.