‘Havana syndrome ’ and the mystery of the microwaves
Doctors, scientists, intelligence agents and government officials have all been trying to find out what causes “Havana syndrome” – a mysterious illness that has struck American diplomats and spies. Some call it an act of war, others wonder if it is some new and secret form of surveillance – and some people believe it could even be all in the mind. So who or what is responsible?
It often started with a sound, one that people struggled to describe. “Buzzing”, “grinding metal”, “piercing squeals”, was the best they could manage.
One woman described a low hum and intense pressure in her skull; another felt a pulse of pain. Those who did not hear a sound, felt heat or pressure. But for those who heard the sound, covering their ears made no difference. Some of the people who experienced the syndrome were left with dizziness and fatigue for months.
Havana syndrome first emerged in Cuba in 2016. The first cases were CIA officers, which meant they were kept secret. But, eventually, word got out and anxiety spread. Twenty-six personnel and family members would report a wide variety of symptoms. There were whispers that some colleagues thought sufferers were crazy and it was “all in the mind”.
Five years on, reports now number in the hundreds and, the BBC has been told, span every continent, leaving a real impact on the US’s ability to operate overseas.
Uncovering the truth has now become a top US national security priority – one that an official has described as the most difficult intelligence challenge they have ever faced.
Hard evidence has been elusive, making the syndrome a battleground for competing theories. Some see it as a psychological illness, others a secret weapon. But a growing trail of evidence has focused on microwaves as the most likely culprit.
In 2015, diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba were restored after decades of hostility. But within two years, Havana syndrome almost shut the embassy down, as staff were withdrawn because of concerns for their welfare.
Initially, there was speculation that the Cuban government – or a hard-line faction opposed to improving relations – might be responsible, having deployed some kind of sonic weapon. Cuba’s security services, after all, had been nervous about an influx of US personnel and kept a tight grip on the capital.
That theory would fade as cases spread around the world.
But recently, another possibility has come into the frame – one whose roots lay in the darker recesses of the Cold War, and a place where science, medicine, espionage and geopolitics collide.
When James Lin, a professor at the University of Illinois, read the first reports about the mysterious sounds in Havana, he immediately suspected that microwaves were responsible. His belief was based not just on theoretical research, but first-hand experience. Decades earlier, he had heard the sounds himself.
Since its emergence around World War Two, there had been reports of people being able to hear something when a nearby radar was switched on and began sending microwaves into the sky. This was even though there was no external noise. In 1961, a paper by Dr Allen Frey argued the sounds were caused by microwaves interacting with the nervous system, leading to the term the “Frey Effect“. But the exact causes – and implications – remained unclear.
In the 1970s, Prof Lin set to work conducting his experiments at the University of Washington. He sat on a wooden chair in a small room lined with absorbent materials, an antenna aimed at the back of his head. In his hand he held a light switch. Outside, a colleague sent pulses of microwaves through the antenna at random intervals. If Prof Lin heard a sound, he pressed the switch.
A single pulse sounded like a zip or a clicking finger. A series of pulses like a bird chirping. They were produced in his head rather than as sound waves coming from outside. Prof Lin believed the energy was absorbed by the soft brain tissue and converted to a pressure wave moving inside the head, which was interpreted by the brain as sound. This occurred when high-power microwaves were delivered as pulses rather than in the low-power continuous form you get from a modern microwave oven or other devices.
Prof Lin recalls that he was careful not to dial it up too high. “I did not want to have my brain damaged,” he told the BBC.
In 1978, he found he was not alone in his interest, and received an unusual invitation to discuss his latest paper from a group of scientists who had been carrying out their own experiments.
During the Cold War, science was the focus of intense super-power rivalry. Even areas like mind control were explored, amid fears of the other side getting an edge – and this included microwaves.
Prof Lin was shown the Soviet approach at a centre of scientific research in the town of Pushchino, near Moscow. “They had a very elaborate, very well-equipped laboratory,” Prof Lin recalls. But their experiment was cruder than his. The subject would sit in a drum of salty seawater with their head sticking out. Then microwaves would be fired at their brain. The scientists thought the microwaves interacted with the nervous system and wanted to question Prof Lin on his alternative view.
Curiosity cut both ways, and US spies kept close track on Soviet research. A 1976 report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, unearthed by the BBC, says it could find no proof of Communist-bloc microwave weapons, but says it had learnt of experiments where microwaves were pulsed at the throat of frogs until their hearts stopped.
The report also reveals that the US was concerned Soviet microwaves could be used to impair brain function or induce sounds for psychological effect. “Their internal sound perception research has great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behaviour patterns of military or diplomatic personnel.“
American interest was more than just defensive. James Lin would occasionally glimpse references to secret US work on weapons in the same field.
And while Prof Lin was in Pushchino, another group of Americans not far away were worried that they were being zapped by microwaves – and that their own government had covered it up.
For nearly a quarter of a century, the 10-storey US embassy in Moscow was bathed by a wide, invisible beam of low-level microwaves. It became known as ”the Moscow signal“. But for many years, most of those working inside knew nothing.
The beam came from an antenna on the balcony of a nearby Soviet apartment and hit the upper floors of the embassy where the ambassador’s office and more sensitive work was carried out. It had been first spotted in the 1950s and was later monitored from a room on the 10th floor. But its existence was a secret tightly held from all but a few working inside. “We were trying to figure out just what might be its purpose,” explains Jack Matlock, number two at the embassy in the mid-70s.
But a new ambassador, Walter Stoessel, arrived in 1974 and threatened to resign unless everyone was told. “That caused something like panic,” recalls Mr Matlock. Embassy staff whose children were in a basement nursery were especially worried. But the State Department played down any risk.
Then Ambassador Stoessel, himself, fell ill – with bleeding of the eyes as one of his symptoms. In a now declassified 1975 phone call to the Soviet ambassador to Washington, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger linked Stoessel’s illness to microwaves, admitting “we are trying to keep the thing quiet“. Stoessel died of leukaemia at the age of 66. “He decided to play the good soldier“, and not make a fuss, his daughter told the BBC.
From 1976 screens were installed to protect people. But many diplomats were angry, believing the State Department had first kept quiet, and then resisted acknowledging any possible health impact. This was a claim echoed decades later with Havana syndrome.
What was the Moscow signal for? “I’m pretty sure that the Soviets had intentions other than damaging us,” says Matlock. They were ahead of the US in surveillance technology and one theory was that they bounced microwaves off windows to pick up conversations, another that they were activating their own listening devices hidden inside the building or capturing information through microwaves hitting US electronic devices (known as “peek and poke“).
The Soviets at one point told Matlock that the purpose was actually to jam American equipment on the embassy roof used to intercept Soviet communications in Moscow.
This is the world of surveillance and counter-surveillance, one so secret that even within embassies and governments only a few people know the full picture.
One theory is that Havana involved a much more targeted method to carry out some kind of surveillance with higher-power, directed microwaves. One former UK intelligence official told the BBC that microwaves could be used to “illuminate” electronic devices to extract signals or identify and track them. Others speculate that a device (even perhaps an American one) might have been poorly engineered or malfunctioned and caused a physical reaction in some people. However, US officials tell the BBC no device has been identified or recovered.
After a lull, cases began to spread beyond Cuba.
In December 2017, Marc Polymeropolous woke suddenly in a Moscow hotel room. A senior CIA officer, he was in town to meet Russian counterparts. “My ears were ringing, my head was spinning. I felt like I was going to vomit. I couldn’t stand up,” he told the BBC. “It was terrifying.” It was a year after the first Havana cases, but the CIA medical office told him his symptoms didn’t match the Cuban cases. A long battle for medical treatment began. The severe headaches never went away and in the summer of 2019 he was forced to retire.
Mr Polymreopolous originally thought he had been hit by some kind of technical surveillance tool that had been “turned up too much“. But when more cases emerged at the CIA which were all, he says, linked to people working on Russia, he came to believe he had been targeted with a weapon.
But then came China, including at the consulate in Guangzhou in early 2018.
Some of those affected in China contacted Beatrice Golomb, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has long researched the health effects of microwaves, as well as other unexplained illnesses. She told the BBC that she wrote to the State Department’s medical team in January 2018 with a detailed account of why she thought microwaves were responsible. “This makes for interesting reading,” was the non-committal response.
Prof Golomb says high levels of radiation were recorded by family members of personnel in Guangzhou using commercially available equipment. “The needle went off the top of the available readings.” But she says the State Department told its own employees that the measurements they had taken off their own back were classified.
A host of problems plagued early investigations. There was a failure to collect consistent data. The State Department and CIA failed to communicate with each other, and the scepticism of their internal medical teams caused tension.
Only one out of the nine cases from China was initially determined by the State Department to match the criteria for the syndrome based on Havana cases. That left others who experienced symptoms angry, and feeling as if they were being accused of making it up. They began a battle for equal treatment, which is still going on today.
As frustration grew, some of those affected turned to Mark Zaid, a lawyer who specialises in national security cases. He now acts for around two dozen government personnel, half from the intelligence community.
“This is not Havana syndrome. It’s a misnomer,” argues Mr Zaid, whose clients were affected in many locations. “What’s been going on has been known by the United States government probably, based on evidence that I have seen, since the late 1960s.“
Since 2013, Mr Zaid has represented one employee of the US National Security Agency who believed they were damaged in 1996 in a location which remains classified.
Mr Zaid questions why the US government has been so unwilling to acknowledge a longer history. One possibility, he says, is because it might open a Pandora’s Box of incidents that have been ignored over the years. Another is because the US, too, has developed and perhaps even deployed microwaves itself and wants to keep it secret.
The country’s interest in weaponising microwaves extended beyond the end of the Cold War. Reports say from the 1990s, the US Air Force had a project codenamed “Hello” to see if microwaves could create disturbing sounds in people’s heads, one called “Goodbye” to test their use for crowd control, and one codenamed “Goodnight” to see if they could be used to kill people. Reports from a decade ago suggested these had not proved successful.
But the study of the mind and what can be done to it has been receiving increased focus within the military and security world.
This is taken from a long article. Read the rest here: www.bbc.co.uk
Header image: Health Magazine
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