Havana syndrome: sonic attack or all in the mind?
by Nicky Woolf, The Sunday Times, 22 Jan. 2023
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In February 2017, Michael Hoffer, a surgeon and professor at Miami University, received a phone call. “This is the State Department,” the caller said. “We have a problem.” Hoffer, who specialises in neurosurgery and otolaryngology (the ear, nose and throat), had worked with the US military previously, studying traumatic brain injuries among soldiers deployed in Iraq. But the problem outlined to him on this call was different. Something was happening in Havana — something the government didn’t understand.
The identity of Patient Zero has never been made public, but he was, we now know, an undercover agent for the CIA. He went to the medical centre in the embassy compound to report what had happened. The staff there were mystified. In February two more agents reported the same thing. Over the following weeks three cases turned to four. Then five. Diplomats, not just CIA agents, started to have the same symptoms. Nausea, dizziness, cognitive issues and insomnia. In almost all cases the onset was accompanied by that strange sound.
In the beginning, embassy staff called it “the Thing”. It was only later, after the story went public, that it would be given the name “Havana syndrome”.
Over the past year I’ve been delving deep into this story for a new podcast, The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome. I’ve spoken to dozens of scientists, doctors and government officials, and to the victims themselves, to try to get to the truth. Was it real? Or was it all in their minds? Were Americans under attack? And, if so, by whom?
“In simple terms, there was no proverbial smoking gun,” says James Giordano, a professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University, and executive director of the US government-funded Institute for Biodefense Research. Giordano was asked by the State Department in February 2017 to help it figure out what was going on. It was clearly going to be a tricky task. “There was no entrance wound per se. There was no exit wound,” he says. “But there seemed to be something happening in between in each and all of these patients.”
In March 2017 the embassy briefed its staff. But, according to Kevin Coats, a consular officer, the briefing was light on details. “They pulled us all into a classified area and told us that some things had been going on. There had been some events that affected some folks ... and they were getting treated.”
Patients were being flown to Miami, where Hoffer led a team looking into the mystery ailment. On brain scans he found what he described in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association as clear evidence of “damage”. It looked like a traumatic brain injury — but the patients had no history of head trauma. One doctor dubbed it “the immaculate concussion”.
Soon after the briefing, in her office in the embassy building, Coats’s wife, Karen, was hit. Coats says Karen “heard this high-pitched noise that was so intense that she jumped back around the corner. And she’s like, ‘Wow, what the heck?’” The sound behaved oddly. When she left that spot, it disappeared completely; when she stepped back there, it returned at full volume.
That afternoon Karen Coats started seeing black spots. She was sent to Miami, where a doctor found that her retina was bleeding. She was told they’d “only ever seen this when somebody has a trauma to their head, like a car accident”.
What the doctors were seeing in these patients was dramatic. David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford, was asked by the government to lead an investigation by the National Academies of Science and Medicine. “Every person on our committee was mesmerised by the individuals who spoke to us,” he says. “It was quite clear that what we were hearing were the features of an illness that none of us had heard about or seen.”
The number of victims continued to climb. By August 2017, when the story broke in the press, 24 Americans had been diagnosed with brain injury. Canadian diplomats in Cuba had started to be struck too. Similar reports from diplomats and intelligence officials, mostly American, emerged from Guangzhou, China, in 2018; London and Washington in 2019; and Vienna and Hanoi as recently as 2021. By February 2022, according to the CIA, more than a thousand cases had been reported.
There have been at least seven official US government investigations; more secret ones may exist. Many directly contradicted one another in their findings. The earliest theory, mooted by Rex Tillerson, then Trump’s secretary of state, was an attack with a “sonic device”. This captured the public imagination, but the State Department later distanced itself from the idea. Some suggested the noise might have been caused by a species of cricket, others that the symptoms might be the result of insecticide or some kind of environmental toxin or virus. Those were quickly ruled out by investigators.
From the start, however, one theory seemed a perfect fit: that the whole thing was a mass delusion. Havana syndrome is “a classic outbreak of mass psychogenic illness. Standard. Textbook,” says Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist at Auckland University and one of the world’s leading experts on mass delusions. Suggestibility can cause powerful physical symptoms. The obvious example is the placebo effect, but Bartholomew says history is replete with examples of outbreaks that looked like diseases or even mass poisonings but turned out to be psychogenic.
On closer scrutiny, it was clear there were parts of the story the psychogenic hypothesis could not explain. Yes, the power of suggestion could feasibly be responsible for headaches, nausea and dizziness — but it can’t make you bleed inside your eyes.
Then there’s the level of secrecy that surrounded the cases, especially the first few. “Mass psychogenic illness depends upon a communication network,” says Relman. “That’s how the contagion occurs. Yet when we talked to the very earliest cases in Havana ... their cases were closely held. It seemed unlikely that case No 2 could have caught it from case No 1 when case No 1 hadn’t uttered a word about it.”
The more digging I did, the more difficult it became to discount the possibility that this was an attack. Sonic weapons do exist. For example, long-range acoustic devices — essentially very powerful and focused loudspeakers — are widely used for crowd control. But for the events in Havana an acoustic weapon didn’t fit. Victims including Karen Coates reported stepping in and out of the sound’s range as if it were coming from a narrow beam. Sound waves don’t have that kind of pinpoint accuracy.
Other types of directed energy cannot be as easily ruled out. “Really, there’s one thing that was a fit for all the key pillars of argument, and that was pulse radio-frequency radiation,” says Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego. Golomb was the first to offer a theory that could explain both the sound and the symptoms.
She suggested that it could be caused by the Frey effect — a phenomenon discovered in the 1960s, whereby pulsed radio-frequency energy, such as microwaves, produces an experience of sound within the skull. Linda Birnbaum, a microbiologist who was part of the National Academies’ investigation, says she found Golomb’s theory the most persuasive: “We felt it was likely that this was some kind of microwave-type radiation event.”
If this sounds like science fiction, it isn’t: arms companies already make or have patented devices capable of doing exactly this. “The technological readiness level of scalable microwaves has progressed significantly over the past seven to eight years,” says Giordano.
If it was indeed an attack, then the question is: who might have been behind it? The Trump administration, which had already reintroduced curbs on tourism to Cuba, immediately blamed the Cuban government, expelling its diplomats and reversing Obama’s opening-up of diplomatic relations. The hoped-for economic boom never came. Today, abandoned building sites and half-built hotels dominate the Havana skyline.
Nobody I have spoken to believes the Cubans would, or even could, have had anything to do with it. Why would Cuba jeopardise its newly thawed relationship with the US?
If it was an attack, by far the most likely culprit is Moscow. As long ago as 1953 the Kremlin was firing microwave energy at American diplomats: dubbed the “Moscow signal”, it was designed to remotely activate listening devices hidden in the US embassy. Russia has maintained “ongoing programmes” of directed-energy weapons ever since, Giordano says, though that is also true of China and America, so it’s possible there are not one but several culprits. Nobody has yet caught anyone deploying this kind of device — there still isn’t a smoking gun.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA agent for 26 years, describes suffering symptoms of Havana syndrome in Moscow in 2017. He was later confirmed to have a traumatic brain injury. “It falls right into the [Russian] playbook,” he says. “Sowing dissent or worry or concern within US overseas personnel.”
Nobody I have spoken to believes the Cubans would, or even could, have had anything to do with it. Why would Cuba jeopardise its newly thawed relationship with the US?
If it was an attack, by far the most likely culprit is Moscow. As long ago as 1953 the Kremlin was firing microwave energy at American diplomats: dubbed the “Moscow signal”, it was designed to remotely activate listening devices hidden in the US embassy. Russia has maintained “ongoing programmes” of directed-energy weapons ever since, Giordano says, though that is also true of China and America, so it’s possible there are not one but several culprits. Nobody has yet caught anyone deploying this kind of device — there still isn’t a smoking gun.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA agent for 26 years, describes suffering symptoms of Havana syndrome in Moscow in 2017. He was later confirmed to have a traumatic brain injury. “It falls right into the [Russian] playbook,” he says. “Sowing dissent or worry or concern within US overseas personnel.”
“She can’t concentrate on anything for more than about 30 minutes,” says her husband, Kevin. “She can’t remember words. She’s embarrassed all the time, so she never wants to leave the house. It’s heartbreaking.”
The first episode of The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome is released on Apple Podcasts tomorrow.
Diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba had been restored with great fanfare by President Obama in 2015, thawing the Cold War hostility that dated back to the 1960s. Money flooded in to the country. People invested their life savings into opening Airbnbs or restaurants to capitalise on the hundreds of thousands of American tourists coming to Cuba for the first time. But in November 2016, Donald Trump, who had promised to undo the changes, was elected president.
A few weeks later, on December 30, an employee at the newly reopened US embassy, set a street back from the Havana waterfront, experienced something strange: an intense feeling of pressure in his head, and a sound — a loud buzzing, grating noise. The next day he was dizzy and nauseous. He had trouble thinking.
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/havana-syndrome-sonic-attack-or-all-in-the-mind-rk5k37ccm
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