Intelligence agencies largely rule out foreign weapon

The US Department of Defence said it would continue to prioritize “the care of affected personnel” as it announced the compensation, paid out under the Havana Act which was signed into law in 2021. The payments total nearly $3 million (£2.2 million).

Havana Syndrome was first publicly reported in 2016, when US diplomats in Cuba reported getting sick and hearing piercing sounds at night. Since then, American staff based elsewhere, including China, have reported “anomalous health incidents.” In 2017, the US government pulled more than half of its staff from its embassy in Havana after employees and their families reported dizziness, nausea and difficulty concentrating. Canada’s government also heard of similar symptoms from its embassy employees in Cuba, leading to a sharp reduction to its personnel in Havana in 2019.

There has been widespread speculation for many years over what, and who, is responsible. Some have claimed the illness is caused by microwaves, prompting further speculation that a foreign power may have used some kind of sonar weapon to attack US overseas staff and their dependants.

“My brain is broken,” former CIA analyst Erika Stith told CBS News in 2022. “We got this as a result of serving our country. And we deserve to be taken care of,” she said.

Last year, most US intelligence agencies and departments surmised that it was “very unlikely” that a foreign actor used “a novel weapon or prototype device to harm” US personnel and their families, according to a report by the National Intelligence Council. However, a small component of the US intelligence community did not completely dismiss the theory. The report said none of the agencies or departments it spoke to “call[ed] into question the experiences or suffering” of US workers and their families, adding that the community believed they “experienced genuine, sometimes painful and traumatic, physical symptoms and sensory phenomena and honestly and sincerely reported those events as possible anomalous health incidents.”

While Havana Syndrome cases began to emerge around a decade ago, some have claimed the illness has been around for much longer, spanning the Cold War years.