Book alleges Russia behind some Havana syndrome cases, US cover-up

US acquired suspected microwave device from dark web in late 2024

The Stanford professor who chaired the US government’s 2022 scientific panel on Havana syndrome told The Guardian he believes a subset of cases is “most plausibly explained by exposure to pulsed microwave energy,” and that the underlying record points to concealment. David Relman’s panel had access to patient records and more than 1,000 classified documents on the topic. “To any reasonable person looking at all the evidence I was able to see, it inevitably leads to the conclusion that there may have been a cover-up,” he said.

Relman’s assessment is among the findings of the forthcoming book “The Havana Syndrome,” by Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados, which argues Russia was behind at least some episodes and accuses parts of the US government and intelligence community of covering up evidence. The Guardian drew on early access to the book and its own interviews with intelligence sources, AHI patients and scientists.

Official judgments have shifted over the past decade. In 2022, the scientific panel concluded that “the signs and symptoms of AHIs are genuine and compelling” and “could be due to external stimuli.” The US intelligence community’s 2023 formal assessment read: “The available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents,” calling a Russian campaign “very unlikely.” This summer, Tulsi Gabbard rescinded both Biden-era assessments in a memo issued just before she left office. Gabbard said the earlier findings were marred by “selective exclusion of evidence” and “mischaracterisation of sources,” though the statement released no new evidence and provided no revised assessment.

The most significant new piece of evidence to emerge recently, The Guardian reported, is the alleged US government acquisition of a “Havana syndrome-style device” in an undercover operation — first reported this year by the independent journalist Sasha Ingber. Two sources confirmed to The Guardian that a device was acquired and brought to the US in late 2024 for testing after a purchase from a dark-web seller. A person who claimed to be part of the undercover team told Rey and Zill that the device was “man-portable,” shot non-thermal pulsed microwaves and was acquired from “a complex Russian illicit network.” It was not believed to have been used in an actual incident, but testing on animals has reportedly shown it may cause similar symptoms to AHIs, which could prove that building such a device is scientifically possible.

The human story at the centre of the renewed scrutiny, The Guardian reported, is that of a senior CIA officer jolted awake in a London hotel room shortly after 1 a.m. in April 2019 by what he described as the most intense head pain he had ever experienced, his body soaked in sweat and his eyes feeling as though they were spinning in their sockets. He tried to make it to the bathroom to vomit but found his sense of balance had deserted him. Eventually, he fell back into a fitful, shallow sleep. The next day, arriving at the work meeting he had travelled for, he could not remember the names of colleagues in the room, people he knew well. As the meeting got under way, he could barely follow the discussion. He initially chalked it up to a terrible, if rather odd, case of food poisoning. Over subsequent weeks, brain fog, loss of balance and increasingly harsh tinnitus persisted. By September, he had started to feel better and was on another work trip, this time to Poland. Asleep in a Warsaw hotel room, the same officer was again woken by terrifying head pain, even worse than in London. “Someone standing over me with a baseball bat and just repeatedly hitting me on the head,” he later said, rating it a nine or 10 on the pain scale. Two hours later, the same feeling returned, and he began to suspect some external attack. He dragged himself off the bed and curled up on the floor, where the intense pain subsided. That was the last time he had the “attack” sensation, but he went on to suffer chronic nerve pain, fatigue and other severe health problems for years. Sources described the man as a senior CIA officer who had recently been assigned an important job relating to worldwide operations against Russia.

The incidents acquired the name Havana syndrome after the Cuban capital, where mass reports of the phenomenon first emerged among US diplomats who believed they may have been attacked with a sonic weapon. In official documents, the episodes are called anomalous health incidents, or AHIs. Many of the dozens of CIA officers who reported them believed they were the result of a Russian intelligence operation to wound or intimidate covert US operatives using a previously unknown weapon that delivered sonic or pulsed microwave energy. That theory drew sustained pushback. Some scientists said a portable device capable of delivering such injuries belonged in the realm of science fiction. Experts proposed causes ranging from environmental factors and toxins to the sound of chirping crickets. One explanation was that the symptoms were psychogenic and the result of “mass hysteria,” and some inside the CIA accused those involved of faking their injuries in the hope of a medical payout. The disagreements led to bitter arguments and broken friendships at the agency.

Rey and Zill are longstanding producers for the CBS programme 60 Minutes. They covered the Obama administration’s 2015 policy of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, so when reports surfaced the next year of a mysterious new condition afflicting employees at the reopened embassy in Havana, they contacted a senior US diplomat who had been posted there. “I expected him to say: ‘This is all bullshit,’” Zill told The Guardian. “But he said: ‘Oh no, this is completely true. And I can put you in touch with a bunch of people who were hit.’” The pair spoke to more than a dozen affected people off the record, then began receiving reports of similar cases among US diplomats in China and whispers of cases in other locations around the world. Once the first 60 Minutes episodes devoted to the topic aired, victims began reaching out, including — or previously — undercover CIA operatives who could not speak openly because their assignments were classified.

A pattern linked some of the key cases, the producers found. The alleged victims were working, or had previously worked, on beats where they rubbed against Russian interests. The pattern held in Cuba — where the original cluster emerged during the Obama-era thaw, which had irritated hardliners in the Cuban government and their backers in Moscow — and in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia and Vietnam, allies of Moscow where parts of the elite were looking to improve relations with the West. Several CIA officers who had been stationed in Kyiv around the time of the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, decried by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as a US-backed coup, later suffered AHIs in different locations around the world. “I went through years of doubts about the story, and all the crazy things we were hearing,” Zill said. “We’re meeting these highly effective intelligence officers and they’re all telling versions of the same story,” Rey added.

The origins of the syndrome go back long before Cuba. Mike Beck, a counterintelligence officer at the National Security Agency, became ill while on a temporary assignment in the 1990s to check a US diplomatic facility for bugs, developed a rare form of Parkinson’s disease at 45 and died this year. A declassified NSA statement included in his 2014 workplace compensation claim noted that “there is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr Beck travelled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill an enemy, over time, and without leaving evidence.” Sources told The Guardian the unnamed hostile country was Russia.

The first known AHIs in the contemporary batch occurred in late 2014, when several US government employees at the consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, became ill. One was found unconscious in a consulate stairwell after feeling sudden, intense pressure on her chest and hearing a “high-pitched squeal,” Rey and Zill reported. The following year, a researcher at a US defence institute — who asked The Guardian not to use her name — was on a tour of the Balkans, attending meetings with military officers from the host nations alongside US defence attaches. Her itinerary took in Montenegro, which was in the process of applying for Nato membership, and Serbia, a Russian ally that harboured resentments towards the US over the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia. On her final evening in Belgrade, as she walked through lively pedestrianised streets to her hotel, she felt “a sinking feeling, as though I was in a lift that was descending suddenly.” Inside her hotel room, she continued to feel “a falling sensation, a feeling of gravity pulling at me, and nausea,” and her government laptop began flickering with blue static; it never worked again. In the weeks that followed, she developed pain that felt “like a drill was going into my eye,” struggled to speak clearly and to focus at work, and said she used up her vacation, her sick leave and leave donated by colleagues before eventually leaving her job.

One early theory, The Guardian reported, was that AHIs could be the result of data-collection attempts gone wrong — a machine designed to pull classified data from operatives’ electronic devices that had unfortunate side-effects when turned up too high. That is still seen by some as a possibility, although even if intelligence collection was the initial idea, the damaging health effects would have quickly become apparent to the operators. Some observers insisted the whole concept of “Havana syndrome” was an invention. They asked why, if Russia possessed a brain-frying weapon, it was not using it on a wider range of its enemies. Why were there not more reports of collateral victims?

Marc Polymeropoulos, who had spent most of his career in the Middle East, was one of several veterans of the “war on terror” moved to senior roles focused on Russia. He was made deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia in 2017 as the CIA launched a drive to push back against Russia’s intelligence agencies. “They wanted us to take the same kind of tactics and spirit we used in the global war on terror to the Russians,” Polymeropoulos said. “Obviously, we didn’t have permission to run lethal operations against the Russians, but we could do things we hadn’t done as much previously, such as enlist the help of multiple friendly services and expose the Russians for what they were doing,” he said, in an interview at a restaurant just outside Washington. In early December 2017, Polymeropoulos and another senior CIA executive made a liaison trip to Moscow, to meet their counterparts in Russia’s SVR and FSB intelligence services. The official meetings were ill-tempered and lacking in substance. Late one night, Polymeropoulos woke suddenly in his hotel room. “I had vertigo and a splitting headache. I thought it was food poisoning at first, I thought I was going to puke and crap my brains out, and I remember being like, holy shit, the room is spinning and my ears are ringing,” he said.

On his return to Washington, Polymeropoulos struggled with a persistent migraine that would not subside, and with superiors who insisted his symptoms were unrelated to other AHIs. He saw a variety of doctors on his own time, but owing to the classified nature of his job he could not share details of where he had been when he became ill. He left the CIA in 2019 and, frustrated at being stonewalled in his requests for medical assessment, became the first CIA officer to go public with a Havana syndrome story under his real name, telling the journalist Julia Ioffe about what happened in Moscow. The resulting publicity prompted the CIA to send him to the Walter Reed military medical centre, where he was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury. In 2023 he was found eligible for compensation under the Havana Act, which authorised payments to “personnel who incur brain injuries from hostilities while on assignment”. The financial payout was modest, but he saw it as a moral victory after years of fighting for recognition.

The scientific debate has been as sharp as the political one. The sociologist Robert Bartholomew and the neurologist Robert Baloh co-authored a book declaring the whole story a hoax — “a case study in the social construction of mass psychogenic illness” — borne of high-stress work environments and propagated by excitable journalists. The cellular neuroscientist Douglas Fields argued in a journal article that the medical studies of patients showing cognitive changes had used unsound methodology, and that energy-weapon theories “defy the laws of physics.” James Giordano, a professor emeritus of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center and the forensic neuroscientist on the original cohort of cases from Havana, disagreed. “The early scepticism was perfectly appropriate, but over time we started to see an increase in the number of individuals who have gone through clinical evaluations that cannot be faked,” Giordano said. “We are talking about objective signs that are presenting with a very distinct pattern,” he added, citing “a profound tumbling or falling sensation,” pressure in the head, chest and throat, and cognitive effects. It was true that chemical or drug exposure could cause similar symptoms, he said, but this would be visible on blood tests. Another key factor was the sudden onset and the sense of a specific location where the apparent attack felt strongest.

When the Biden administration took office in 2021, CIA director Bill Burns and director of national intelligence Avril Haines vowed to resolve the issue. Burns met many of the AHI cohort, including Polymeropoulos, listening carefully to their stories and promising them a full investigation. Burns also fired the CIA’s chief medical officer, who had infuriated some AHI patients by accusing them of faking their symptoms. Burns and Haines launched two investigations: one to re-examine intelligence on whether a foreign adversary was behind Havana syndrome, and another that convened a panel of scientists and physicians to determine whether it was even possible for a weapon to cause the symptoms. More than 100 CIA operatives and other US government officials reported AHIs in locations around the world that year. In Vienna, The Guardian reported, there were so many incidents that the work of the CIA station was essentially paralysed and the station chief was recalled. A spate of government employees also reported incidents on US soil, including several who claimed to have been hit on the grounds of the White House. Was this an adversary stepping up its campaign, or was the increasing publicity about AHIs leading more people to misidentify other conditions or episodes as Havana syndrome?

Relman, the Stanford professor who chaired the scientific panel, said its members were given access to open source and classified scientific studies into pulsed radio frequency energy, which suggested that the science behind there being a “device” that could cause AHI symptoms was plausible. Scientists who disagreed were simply unaware of the research into such technology that had been taking place for decades in several countries, especially in the Soviet Union and then Russia, he said. Regarding the medical results, Relman conceded that plenty — perhaps the vast majority — of AHI claims could be explained by other factors. But there were dozens of cases “that were unusual in the distinctness of their features and the near impossibility of explaining them based on known medical and environmental conditions,” he said.

Determining who may have carried out such attacks was beyond Relman’s purview. That fell to the second expert group, which in 2023 issued the assessment that it was “very unlikely” to be caused by a foreign adversary, dismaying many AHI patients who had hoped to finally receive closure on what caused their health problems. Even people who have seen the intelligence disagree on what it shows. One source told The Guardian there was no “smoking gun” — no human intelligence or intercept showing Russian operatives discussing a programme to use directed energy against Americans. “Everyone has seen how strong our collection capabilities on Russia are,” the source said, referencing how US intelligence obtained Vladimir Putin’s war plans before his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “If this was really a large-scale Russian programme, we would have expected to see something in some of these channels, but we didn’t.” Another former intelligence official disagreed. “If you’re waiting for an intercept of someone saying: ‘My name is Igor and I’m going to press the button on my secret laser’ before you have confidence, that’s probably never going to happen,” the official said. “But for any reasonable person who has access to the intelligence and knows how to read it, the Russian fingerprints are clear.”

At the end of the Biden administration, a tweaked version of the assessment said that while five US intelligence agencies still found foreign involvement “very unlikely,” one agency believed there was a “roughly even chance” that a foreign actor had used “a novel weapon or prototype device” in a number of attacks. Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents more than 30 AHI patients, welcomed Gabbard’s memo and said it was a first step to overturning what he described as a CIA cover-up. When asked why the CIA might have perpetrated such a cover-up, Zaid suggested it could be to protect its reputation after prior negligence. “This has built up to a level that the agency can’t let the truth get out because it’s going to reflect so poorly on them,” he said. Burns, in a comment for the book, said it was “simply not true that there was a ‘cover-up’ by the CIA” and described the earlier investigation as “a rigorous effort across the entire intelligence community.”

Rey and Zill argue the purported cover-up was the product of years of institutional dysfunction rather than a single decision. “There’s not a single cigar-filled backroom meeting that led to decisions getting made,” Rey said. “There was a lot of, ‘This is a pain in the ass’ or ‘The president’s not going to want to hear this’. There was bureaucratic dysfunction, careerism and things that just got in the way of proper investigation.” Rey noted that the FBI sent criminal investigators, rather than counterintelligence investigators with access to classified information, to Havana after the attacks there. He also described a nascent investigation at CIA headquarters in late 2019 that reportedly found phones linked to Russian intelligence operatives near suspected incidents, including the episodes that year involving the senior CIA officer in London and Warsaw — in London, a suspicious phone was supposedly just 10 metres (30 feet) from his hotel room. When then-CIA director Gina Haspel was briefed, she allegedly complained the material was not solid enough to take to the president, given how sensitive he was on Russia-related matters. “The meeting abruptly ended after Haspel shouted that if she took reports like this to President Trump, she would be fired as director,” Rey and Zill write.

The book also takes up the work of Christo Grozev, a journalist and investigator who has exposed several Russian intelligence operations. Grozev claimed leaked travel data suggested at least four potential crossovers between suspected AHIs and travel by officers from Unit 29155 of Russia’s GRU military intelligence, known for its campaign of sabotage and assassinations in western countries. Grozev also said he had traced travel by “members of what appears to be a technical unit adjacent to 29155” to Cuba during the initial attacks.

For people who have lived with symptoms for years, the rescinded assessments and the reported device offer some hope of official confirmation that they were targeted by a foreign adversary. Many, The Guardian reported, are more angered by the lack of recognition at home than by the attacks themselves. “The Russians are our enemy, I put them in the same bucket as al-Qaida or the Taliban, or any other groups I worked against,” Polymeropoulos said. “Do I want to see them held accountable? Of course. But I’m actually more upset and feel more of a betrayal from my own government,” he added, a frustration The Guardian reported as shared by many in the patient cohort. Asked about the broader implications, Giordano said: “We know the technology has reached a level that enables it to be used in weaponisable ways. I see that as a clear and present threat.”