Havana Syndrome: how mass hysteria and institutional failure conjured up a sci-fi weapon
In the middle of the night, an American diplomat hears a strange, shrill sound coming from just outside his Havana home. Is it an insect? It sounds like no insect he has ever heard. He remembers that his colleagues have been reporting hearing similar strange sounds — unnatural mechanical sounds, they say, sounds that seem targeted at them. A chill runs up his spine. Are the Cubans coming for him? The next day, he feels dizzy and has trouble concentrating on his work. Within a week, his symptoms worsen. He develops nausea, vertigo, irritability, and ringing in the ears. Within a month, he is flying out of Havana on medical leave.
In 2016 and 2017, 21 American and at least 14 Canadian diplomats posted in Havana experienced some version of this horror story. By 2022, Havana Syndrome — as it was called — had spread well beyond Havana, sickening more than a thousand diplomats in countries as far-flung as China, Colombia, Poland, Russia, and Uzbekistan. A mix of incompetence, pseudoscience, cowardice, bureaucracy, and geopolitics hampered investigation. It was not until 2023 that some form of closure — albeit unsatisfying — was brought to the drama.
What follows is the story of a mental illness epidemic: a mass hysteria. Unlike an ordinary epidemic, the infectious vector is not a bacterium or a virus, but mere words. The risk factors are not obesity and old age, but fear, stress, and suggestibility. Lying at the intersection of the most mysterious corners of medicine, psychology, geopolitics, and spycraft, the saga of Havana Syndrome has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it in 2017, and I hope you will find it as fascinating as I did.
Prelude
Cuba’s history is deeply intertwined with that of America, and of the world. In 1492, Columbus visited Cuba on his very first trip to the Americas. A Spanish colony for nearly 400 years, Cuba won independence from Spain in the waning years of the 19th century with the help of American troops and ships. From 1902 to 1959, the Republic of Cuba was an American client state. An American-backed Batista dictatorship took power in 1952, only to be overthrown by a communist revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959.
In the middle of the Cold War, America now had an enemy-aligned state 90 miles off the Floridian coast. Various American schemes to overthrow Castro, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuban exiles and the (reportedly) 600 CIA assassination attempts, all failed miserably. Castro’s decision to welcome Soviet nuclear missiles in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war. In the midst of these years of civil war and international crisis, the US imposed a near-total embargo on the island that remains in effect to this day: no American business may trade with Cuba. Every year since 1992, the UN General Assembly has passed a resolution demanding an end to the embargo; almost every year, only two countries vote against it: the US and Israel. For decades, one of Cuba’s highest foreign policy priorities has been normalizing relations with the United States.
In 2014, the stars seemed to be aligning for precisely such a normalization. The Cold War was long over, and Venezuela, one of Cuba’s last socialist allies, was in economic collapse. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama was president of the United States. Fidel Castro had just stepped down as president of Cuba, replaced by his brother Raul. The Holy See had just elected its first Latin American pope, the most liberal in its long history. With mediation from the pontiff, Obama and the new Castro engaged in a long process of détente. Prisoners were swapped; Cuba was taken off the US list of state sponsors of terror; direct flights were resumed for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis; and importantly for our story, both countries opened official embassies in the other’s capital.
The thaw would prove to be short lived. In November 2016, Donald Trump won the US presidential election. Trump made no secret of his opposition to Obama’s Cuba policy. In a rally on September 16, 2016, he said:
The President’s one-sided deal for Cuba benefits only the Castro Regime. But all of the concessions that Barack Obama has granted the Castro Regime were done through executive order, which means the next President can reverse them — and that is what I will do, unless the Castro Regime meets our demands. Those demands will include religious and political freedom for the Cuban people.
It was in this context that Havana Syndrome first appeared in late November 2016. By this time, American diplomats had only recently started their jobs in a communist police state that, for decades, had been an enemy — and which president-elect Trump seemed determined to make an enemy once again. Some of the diplomats were CIA officers, working in a country in which they and their colleagues have no experience, a country with a highly competent intelligence service. The work environment was, to say to least, not stress-free.
A strange sound
According to a detailed ProPublica article, the first four people to report Havana Syndrome were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover. The first two incidents occurred during the Thanksgiving weekend of 2016, shortly after the death of Fidel Castro. While in their homes in the luxurious western suburbs of Havana, the two officers heard “sharp, disorienting sounds” at night. One of them told investigators that the sound disappeared once he moved to another room.
These two spies were the first to experience Havana Syndrome, but not the first to report it. That distinction belongs to “a fit-looking man in his thirties”, also a CIA officer, who I’ll nickname Alex. Alex sought medical help at the embassy in late December 2016, complaining that he developed headaches, hearing problems, and ear pain after hearing a beam of sound directed at his home. By mid-January, the other two officers had also sought medical help at the embassy. On Feb 6, the wife of an embassy staffer saw a van speeding away after hearing similar disturbing sounds, but apparently did not suffer any medical consequences.
Initially discussed among the “country team” of roughly 15 senior American diplomats, the incidents quickly reached the top echelons of both the Cuban and American governments. On Feb 17, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, Francisco Palmieri, handed the Cuban ambassador in Washington a diplomatic note of protest. On Feb 23, President Raul Castro personally told top US diplomat Jeffrey DeLaurentis that he was aware of the incidents, and proposed working together to solve the mystery. The Cubans promised to add police patrols and surveillance cameras around the diplomats’ homes, in addition to allowing a FBI team to investigate in Cuba for themselves.
On March 24, Alex met an embassy colleague, who I’ll call Bob, and told him about his medical diagnosis: serious ear damage, requiring the use of a hearing aid. The following Monday, he played Bob a recording of the noise that, he believed, he had been targeted with. Bob realized that he had been hearing the same sound in his backyard for months, but never thought it was anything more serious than the unfamiliar insects of a new country. For months neither he nor his wife were sick in the slightest. Within days after meeting Alex, however, they were on the plane to Miami for medical evaluation; they would be “diagnosed with a wide array of concussion-like symptoms, ranging from headaches and nausea to hearing loss.”
On March 29, DeLaurentis met with all ambassadors with security clearance, about four dozen in number, to tell them what was known so far about the emerging syndrome. The meeting set off a massive outbreak. Within a month, more than 80 people — including diplomats, family members, and other personnel —requested medical evaluation. About a dozen of the 80 were declared to be new cases of Havana Syndrome, half of the eventual total. There was little consistency either in the sound they heard before falling ill, or in the symptoms of the illness:
The affected diplomats experienced a wide range of sensations: Some heard sharp, piercing noises or a cicada-like buzz. Others felt concentrated “beams” of sound or auditory vibrations like those from the half-open window of a fast-moving car. Still others heard no sound at all. According to a one-page summary of the cases that was jointly prepared for the Cuban government by the State Department’s bureaus of Medical Services and Western Hemisphere affairs, “Some voiced feeling shocked or shaken by the exposure, or awoken (sic) from sleep, and others described a more gradual onset of symptoms that continued for days to weeks afterwards.”
Before Bob left Cuba in early April, he said goodbye to his Canadian neighbor, telling him why he was leaving. The Canadian diplomat started worrying: his family had been hearing similar sounds in the previous months. Were they the cause of his son’s nosebleed, or his wife’s headaches?
The Canadians did not have to wait long to experience Havana Syndrome for themselves. DeLaurentis informed the Canadian top brass in April, who then relayed the news to the 18 rank-and-file diplomats in early May. As with the Americans, fear spread like a contagion, and Havana Syndrome followed on its heels. 27 Canadians sought medical attention, of which 8 were diagnosed with symptoms: nosebleeds, dizziness, headaches, and insomnia. The Canadians had milder symptoms than the Americans, and only two heard sounds — one was Bob’s neighbor, and the other heard “a sudden, twanging sound, like a piece of sheet metal being waved”.
The Canadian government, in keeping with decades of cordial relations with Cuba, avoided criticizing the country and announced it had no plans to reduce staffing levels. The Trump administration took the opposite approach. On June 16, Trump announced he was “canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba”, saying “we will expose the crimes of the Castro regime.” On September 29, the State Department repatriated 24 out of its 47 Havana diplomats, and ordered 15 Cuban diplomats to leave Washington. These policies are not just due to Havana Syndrome — Trump had been railing against Obama’s rapprochement since long before it first appeared — but the suspicion that Cuba was attacking American diplomats certainly did not help matters.
A Sonic Weapon?
Around September 2017, the first reports of Havana Syndrome appeared in the press. Senior State Department officials told the media that several of their department’s employees were subject to an “acoustic attack”. The story exploded across the Internet, with uncritical articles by Vox, CNN, BBC, and CBC, among many other outlets.
The idea of a sonic attack never made sense from either a diplomatic or scientific viewpoint. Diplomatically, the Cubans were finally making progress on what had for decades been one of their highest foreign policy priorities: better relations with the United States. What could they hope to gain from suddenly attacking American diplomats with a secret weapon? Attacking Canadians made even less diplomatic sense, because Canada has had a cordial relationship with Cuba for decades. Around the same time Havana Syndrome began, Canada’s prime minister delivered a gushing eulogy of Fidel Castro, expressing “deep sorrow” at his death and calling him “a larger than life leader who served his people”. Nor is it plausible that a third country attacked American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba without Cuban knowledge. As Pro Publica put it, the “attacks” occurred in some of the most heavily policed areas of a police state, including the upscale western suburbs where Fidel Castro and other Cuban elites lived.
The scientific problems with an acoustic weapon are numerous. Take a listen to the Associated Press recording in the previous section. As far as I know, it is the only publicly available recording of any sound associated with Havana Syndrome. The sound has been positively identified as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket, which “matches, in nuanced detail, the A.P. recording in duration, pulse repetition rate, power spectrum, pulse rate stability, and oscillations per pulse.” At least one other recording of the “sonic weapon” is also due to the same cricket species, according to a 2018 State Department report. The same report analyzed eight recordings in total, concluding that all eight are “highly likely” to be insects. Recall that Bob, the diplomat who heard sounds in his garden for months before hearing about his colleagues’ symptoms and falling ill himself shortly after, had assumed for those months that the sounds were from insects.
Aside from the complete lack of evidence for any sonic weapon, such a weapon would be very difficult to construct. Of course, it is possible to damage someone’s hearing with very loud sounds, but such damage requires large, extremely obvious speakers blasting extremely obvious, ear-piercing sound. This does not fit with the patients’ stories, nor can loud sound produce the neurological symptoms they experienced weeks afterward.
Infrasound and ultrasound, at frequencies below and above the human hearing range respectively, have been suggested as possibilities for a weapon. Infrasound is made up of waves longer than tens of meters. Such long wavelengths are impossible to focus, limiting infrasound’s use as a targeted weapon. The effects of infrasound are poorly understood, but there is no strong evidence for any harmful effects. According to the National Institute of Health:
the primary effect of infrasound in humans appears to be annoyance […] There is no agreement about the biological activity of infrasound. Reported effects include those on the inner ear, vertigo, imbalance, etc.; intolerable sensations, incapacitation, disorientation, nausea, vomiting, and bowel spasm; and resonances in inner organs, such as the heart.
A 2021 JASON report on Havana Syndrome summarized its literature review of the effects of infrasound with: “available reports acknowledge complaints of discomfort with some affecting sleep patterns, but do not document significant evidence of medical/physiological consequences, especially persistent ones, often ascribing causes and complaints to subjective annoyance and the like.” This conclusion is based on papers like Tonin et al 2016, which subjected volunteers to infrasound and found no statistically significant effect on the symptoms reported by volunteers.
Ultrasound is a more likely candidate for a weapon. Its biological effects are also poorly understood, but it is known to be able to damage tissue. Doctors use it to break kidney stones; dentists use it to break apart plaque and tartar. However, Jun Qin, an acoustic engineer at Southern Illinois University, is skeptical that an ultrasonic weapon is responsible for Havana Syndrome. Ultrasound is strongly absorbed by moist air, at a rate of a few dB per meter (depending on frequency, temperature, and humidity): after travelling 30 meters, ultrasound becomes 30,000 to 1 billion times weaker (again depending on frequency, temperature, and humidity). Ultrasound is also absorbed and reflected by walls and windows. Even if the ultrasound can be delivered, says acoustic expert and physicist Jürgen Altmann, it cannot cause concussion symptoms because it cannot shake the head by more than microscopic amounts.
The Early Investigations
In 2018, a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) paper reported “no evidence of white matter tract abnormalities” in affected diplomats, but claimed that Havana Syndrome resembles persistent concussion, with symptoms that sometimes last for months: “persistent symptoms (>3 months after exposure) were reported by these individuals including cognitive (n = 17, 81%), balance (n = 15, 71%), visual (n = 18, 86%), and auditory (n = 15, 68%) dysfunction, sleep impairment (n = 18, 86%), and headaches (n = 16, 76%). Objective findings included cognitive (n = 16, 76%), vestibular (n = 17, 81%), and oculomotor (n = 15, 71%) abnormalities. Moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss was identified in 3 individuals.” Based on these symptoms, the paper claimed that the diplomats had “sustained injury to widespread brain networks.”
The 2018 JAMA paper was widely panned for its threshold for impairment: the exceedingly liberal 40th percentile. With such a threshold, 40% of the entire human population would be considered impaired. A more typical threshold is 5th percentile. Using this threshold, the first, second, and fifth of the six patients who completed all 37 tests scored normally on all of them; the third scored abnormally on two tests (percentiles: <1 and 2); the fourth scored marginally abnormally on one test (4th percentile), and the sixth scored abnormally on six tests (percentiles: four <1, one 2). Even the poor results of the sixth patient cannot necessarily be attributed to anything that happened in Havana — for all that we know, he could have scored equally poorly before ever stepping foot in Cuba.
Also in 2018, JASON, a group of independent elite scientists set up after Sputnik to advise the US government, wrote a report analyzing recordings of the sound allegedly responsible for the syndrome as well as the medical files of affected diplomats. It concluded that “no plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) can produce both the recorded audio/video signals, and the reported medical effects”; that “the most likely source [of the sound] is the Indies shorttailed cricket”, whose call “matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings”; and that it is highly unlikely for microwaves to produce similar acoustic signals in both the brain and microphones.
In 2019, at the request of the State Department, the CDC conducted a “Cuba Unexplained Events Investigation.” Given how incompetently the CDC handled the COVID pandemic, it is not surprising that the result of the investigation was essentially nothing. The CDC came up with a “case definition” — a summary of the symptoms of 95 people — but failed to identify any “mechanism of injury, process of exposure, effective treatment, or mitigating factor for the unexplained cluster of symptoms experienced by those stationed in Havana.”
The disease spreads
In late 2017, Havana Syndrome spread beyond Havana. It would eventually reach every continent except Antarctica, including countries as disparate as Russia, Georgia, Poland, China, Australia, Colombia, Uzbekistan — and even the United States. The most vivid account of these non-Cuban incidents was written by Julia Ioffe for GQ, a men’s magazine better known for fashion and sports reporting.
Ioffe’s article focuses on the story of Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA operative who was the deputy chief of operations for the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. As deputy chief of operations, he redirected the entire Center’s operations toward countering Russia. In December 2017, he visited Moscow — allegedly to meet with the Russians to discuss counterrorism cooperation — but met with a hostile reception from his FSB counterparts. On December 5, he woke up in his Moscow hotel room with an overwhelming feeling of nausea, which he attributed to food poisoning. Two days before the end of his trip, while eating dinner at a posh Moscow restaurant, the same overpowering nausea returned. After enjoying a few healthy weeks back in the United States, in February 2018, he started feeling vertigo, nausea, ringing ears, and an intense pressure radiating from the back of his head to his face.
The rest of the GQ article mostly deals with Polymeropoulos’ fury at the CIA’s refusal to take his symptoms seriously and speculation on the reason behind the refusal. Gina Haspel, then director of the CIA, accused Havana Syndrome investigators who had blamed the incidents on Russia of “just trying to stir up trouble on Russia”, saying that they were hiding information from her and lying about what their investigation found. Two sources claimed that she said “this is why we need to clean out Russia House,” the CIA unit focused on Russia. Ioffe considers the possibility that Haspel meant what she said, but appears to favor an alternate explanation: that Haspel didn’t want to hear about Russian malfeasance because she would be forced to report it to Trump, who would not take the news well because he had a soft spot for Putin.
The GQ article contains lurid accounts of other Havana Syndrome incidents. One particularly fantastical account describes children twitching in unison on American soil:
An American diplomat and his spouse, who had been hit when they were stationed in China, traveled to Philadelphia to get specialized treatment at the University of Pennsylvania. One night in June 2018, according to three government sources, the couple was startled awake by a sound and pressure in their heads similar to what they had felt back in China. On the advice of FBI agents, the family moved to a hotel, but on their second night there, they were again awoken in the early morning hours. Terrified, the parents ran into the room where their children were sleeping to find them moving in their sleep, bizarrely and in unison. In the weeks afterward, the children developed vision and balance difficulties.
The attackers supposedly even managed to attack a White House staffer in America’s capital:
Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.
What should we make of this GQ article? Polymeropoulos is clearly far from being an unbiased source. An avowed Russia hawk who turned the entire Europe and Eurasia Mission Center’s focus onto Russia, he makes no effort to hide his opposition to Trump’s Russia policy, which made his “head explode.” Intelligence officials are not above acting less than honestly to alter public opinion. As the GQ article says, it was intelligence officials who leaked the story about Russian bounties on American troops in Afghanistan to the press — bounties that, as it later turned out, probably never existed. As for the children twitching in unison in Philadelphia, that story is at best second-hand, attributed to three unnamed government sources.
Four years later, in summer 2021, Havana Syndrome saw its last great flare-up. In Vienna, dozens of US personnel, including diplomats, intelligence officials, and children of American employees, were afflicted. Due to Austria’s long-standing policy of neutrality and the many international organizations headquartered in Vienna — including OPEC and the International Atomic Energy Agency — Vienna has long been the haunt of spies from around the world. British, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean spies are all tolerated by Austria so long as they target each other and not Austria. At the time of the “anomalous health incidents”, Vienna was hosting indirect talks between the US and Iran about reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, adding to the city’s importance to spies.
The last notable appearance of Havana Syndrome was in Vietnam in August 2021, when the U.S. chargé d’affaires told U.S. personnel that people had “experienced anomalous acoustic incidents here in Hanoi.” At least two diplomats were medically evacuated. The report briefly delayed Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to the country, but little public information is available on these incidents.
A Microwave Weapon?
Shortly after speculation of a sonic weapon ran rampant in the media, media speculation began about another sci-fi explanation for Havana Syndrome: a directed microwave weapon. This speculation was triggered by a 1.5-page column in the IEEE “Health Matters” series by James Lin, Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois Chicago.
Lin’s column is more akin to a letter to the editor than to a scientific paper. It contains no data, no model, no equations, no literature review. Out of the 8 references, 3 are his own papers, and the other 5 are news articles. In this brief column, Lin suggests that Havana syndrome could be due to the microwave auditory effect, also known as the Frey effect. For reasons that are still incompletely understood, shooting pulsed microwaves at someone’s head can cause them to hear clicking, buzzing, hissing, or knocking. One possible mechanism is that each pulse heats portions of the brain by a tiny amount — in the range of millionths of a degree — and this rhythmic heating produces sound waves that travel to the ear. The sound is real, but because they are generated inside the head by the microwaves instead of coming from the outside world, nobody else can hear them.
One big problem with this explanation is that as far as we know, no Havana Syndrome sufferer has ever claimed that the sound they heard was unrecordable. As we saw above, at least eight recordings exist, all of which have been identified by the 2018 JASON report as insects and two of which have been identified as the West Indies cricket with near certainty. The same report notes that it is “highly unlikely [that] pulsed RF mimics acoustic signals in both the brain (via the Frey effect) and in electronics (through RF interference/pickup).”
Another big problem with the microwave hypothesis is that it flies in the face of our understanding of physics and biology. Like visible light, microwaves are made up of photons — particles of electromagnetic energy. These photons are thousands of times less energetic than their visible counterparts, and thousands of times too weak to break the bonds that hold together atoms. This is unlike ultraviolet light, which, being more energetic than visible light, can break apart molecules in the body; it is even less like X-rays and gamma rays, which are millions of times more energetic and can break apart atomic nuclei.
What microwaves can do is to heat everything that contains water by forcing water molecules to rotate. Here, it is more helpful to think of the microwave as an electromagnetic wave: an oscillating electric and magnetic field. Because water is an asymmetric molecule, with the negatively-charged oxygen atom in the middle and the positively-charged hydrogen atoms sticking to it like rabbit ears, a microwave’s oscillating electric field spins the molecule in different directions billions of times per second. In the process, the molecule bumps into its neighbors, giving them random motions in all directions. This random motion is heat, and induced rotation is how microwave ovens heat food, as well as how the microwave auditory effect is produced.
The fundamental problem of explaining Havana Syndrome with a microwave weapon is that it is not clear how heating someone up can cause nausea, vertigo, or concussion, and decades of research (including several years of dedicated research by the Pentagon) has produced neither a plausible theory nor any convincing evidence of any non-thermal way microwaves can harm a person. What heating can do is cause unbearable pain, which is the operating principle behind the non-lethal Active Denial System. The Active Denial System, used for crowd control, has exactly the opposite properties from the putative Havana Syndrome weapon: it causes a burst of unbearable pain but no long-term injury, as opposed to no immediate pain but permanent long-term brain damage.
There are numerous other problems with the microwave hypothesis. Microwave ovens are big, and any weapon would likely need to be even bigger, especially if it needs to include its own power source. According to the Washington Post, multiple branches of the US military have tried to develop such anti-personnel microwave weapons, but none have succeeded. Without either a theoretical reason for how a microwave weapon can cause Havana Syndrome or a practical demonstration that it is possible, this explanation is best considered science fiction.
The Later Investigations
Cuba’s reaction to Havana Syndrome appears to have been full-blown panic. Now that the hard-won normalization of relations with the United States was finally at hand, the last thing the Cubans wanted was for it to be derailed by a medical mystery. Cuba spun up a massive investigation, hiring 2000 scientists and police officers. They interviewed 300 of the afflicted diplomats’ neighbors (who were themselves unafflicted), analyzed air and soil samples for toxic chemicals, listened to the sound recordings, examined whether electromagnetic waves could be the culprit, and generally left no rock unturned. The Americans, suspecting that Cuba may be responsible for the syndrome, refused to share medical records with the Cubans or allow them to conduct tests in diplomats’ homes. In 2021, the Cubans released their conclusion: “the evidence used to support the ‘mystery syndrome’ narrative is not scientifically acceptable in any of its components”, and the narrative has only survived “thanks to a biased use of science, in which dissenting points of view have been suppressed.” The report claims that diseases that affect the general population can explain most of the symptoms; that only a minority had confirmed brain dysfunction, which originated from their pre-Havana days; that no known form of energy can cause brain damage at a distance with laser-like precision; and that the Americans rejected psychogenic explanations out of hand even though “all conditions for the psychogenic spread of the discomfort were present, including a likely inadequate initial medical response, early U.S. government backing for that theory and sensationalist media coverage.”
In 2020, the National Academy of Sciences released their long-awaited report, which claimed that the syndrome is consistent with a microwave weapon:
The committee found the unusual presentation of acute, directional or location-specific early phase signs, symptoms and observations reported by DOS employees to be consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy. Many of the chronic, nonspecific symptoms are also consistent with known RF effects, such as dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive deficits, and memory loss. Patient clinical heterogeneity could be due to variability of exposure dosage conditions, differences in interpretation of non-physiological vestibular stimuli, and anatomical differences that could influence individual exposure and/or response.
The report was met with skepticism by a number of scientists, in particular bioengineer Andrei Pakhomov:
None of the panel members seem to have much experience in biological effects of microwaves, which might explain their willingness to consider a Frey-like effect plausible, said Old Dominion University bioengineer Andrei Pakhomov, who said he was skeptical based on his four decades of research in the area. “There are many reports of biological effects from radio frequency fields, but there are no reliable ones.”
University of Pennsylvania bioengineer Kenneth Foster, who first described the mechanism behind the Frey effect, is equally skeptical:
The report does not make a coherent argument why microwaves should be involved” […] The effect requires very high power levels to produce barely audible sounds, he said, and it’s not known to cause injuries. “Maybe someone went to the trouble to truck in a large microwave transmitter to cause the employees to hear ‘clicks,’ but there are simpler ways to harass people than that,” he said.
The National Academy of Sciences investigation was not the only questionable American effort. In March 2021, the State Department appointed foreign service officer Pamela L. Spratlen to head the department’s response force. Just six months later, Spratlen left the task force — supposedly because she “reached the threshold of hours of labor” that she could perform as a retiree, but it does not take much reading between the lines to suspect she was forced out merely for refusing to dismiss the possibility of mass hysteria:
On the call, Spratlen responded to a question about an FBI study that found no evidence of an attack and determined that the staffers were most likely to be suffering from mass psychogenic illness, or mass hysteria.
Spratlen responded by saying she had read the study but did not indicate that she agreed or disagreed with its findings — a response that sufferers on the call later described as “invalidating.”
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer who says he was hit by Havana Syndrome in Russia in 2017, wrote Tuesday on Twitter that declining to rule out the “mass hysteria” theory was “insulting to victims and automatically disqualifying” from leading the task force.
The “FBI study” that the article refers to is almost certainly the Behavioral Analysis Unit report of 2021. A New Yorker article claims, without citing sources, that the study was based on “transcripts of previous interviews that the F.B.I. had done with the patients, and on ‘patient histories’ compiled by the victims’ doctors, including neuropsychologists and other specialists, who had already ruled out the idea of a mass psychogenic illness: many of the victims didn’t know about the other people who were sick, and their bodies couldn’t have feigned some of the symptoms they were exhibiting.” On December 9, 2021, the New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the report, which the FBI denied. The Times sued, and won — in January 2024, a court ordered the FBI to hand over a redacted version of the report within 21 days. Soon, it seems, the public will find out what was in the report.
Spratlen’s less-than-voluntary resignation notwithstanding, the State Department received a report from JASON in 2021 that corroborated its 2018 report. This time, the group of elite scientists’ findings included:
- “85–90% of the reported incidents are consistent with common and known symptoms of pathophysiological or environmental origins; the remainder appear more complex and defy a straightforward explanation at present.”
- There is no compelling evidence of traumatic brain injury
- “The government’s response to the reported incidents may be causing additional stress to the affected individuals and may exacerbate normal psychological responses that are almost certainly present.”
- “Ionizing radiation, electromagnetic energy below 500 MHz and above 30 GHz, and sonic (infrasound/audible/ultrasound) energy delivered from a distance can, with high confidence, be eliminated as potential causes.”
- Short-pulse radio frequency (RF) radiation primarily in the range of 500 MHz to 30 GHz cannot be ruled out conclusively as a modality for a subset of the incidents at this time. However, it is unlikely given that there is no well-documented or broadly accepted mechanism to induce lasting neurological or other damage with focusable RF energy that would not produce a sensation of heating on the skin.
- Sounds associated with cranial acoustic sensations due to pulsed RF waves (the “Frey effect”) cannot produce brain damage by mechanical means at tolerable sound levels. Further, such sensations cannot be recorded by electronic microphones and, therefore, cannot be associated with any recorded acoustic phenomena
In 2022, the CIA released its interim assessment of 1000 cases and found that the syndrome is not due to “a sustained global campaign by a hostile power” and that most cases had natural causes, such as pre-existing medical conditions and stress. Only about two dozen cases remain unresolved. This assessment predictably did not please Havana Syndrome sufferers:
In a statement, a group that represents U.S. officials who have reported suspected incidents said, “The CIA’s newly issued report may be labeled ‘interim’ and it may leave open the door for some alternative explanation in some cases, but to scores of dedicated public servants, their families, and their colleagues, it has a ring of finality and repudiation.”
Following up on the interim assessment, in March 2023, the US intelligence community released a joint assessment of the “Anomalous Health Incidents.” Five agencies unanimously agreed that the incidents were not due to the attack of a foreign adversary. Instead, they attribute the incidents to “preexisting conditions, conventional illness, and environmental factors”, having identified “medical, environmental, and social factors that plausibly can explain many AHIs reported by US officials.” The assessment mentions the methodological limitations in the first JAMA study, and reports that “JASON panel’s review of preliminary data from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) longitudinal study on AHIs in 2021 does not convey a consistent set of physical injuries, including neurologic injuries such as TBI.”
The NIH study that the intelligence agencies refer to is likely actually a pair of studies published in JAMA in March 2024. To date, they are the largest and most thorough scientific studies of Havana Syndrome. Both studies showed no brain damage or physiological illness. The first study examined 86 patients with the syndrome and compared them to 30 people with similar backgrounds but no symptoms. No significant differences were found in hearing, cognition, eyesight, or blood tests, although syndrome sufferers had more balance problems and reported higher levels of fatigue, stress, and depression. NIH researchers say that the balance problems are consistent with both external injury and psychological distress. The second study imaged the brains of 81 of the same patients and compared them with 48 controls, finding “no significant differences in imaging measures of brain structure or function”.
In the end, then, the American intelligence and scientific communities came to the same conclusion as the Cuban Academy of Sciences in 2021.: Havana Syndrome is not a well-defined illness, its sufferers show no signs of physical injury, and it is not due to the attack of a foreign adversary. Rather, preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and social factors (a nice way of saying “mass hysteria”) explain the overwhelming majority of the phenomenon.
On mass hysteria
Mass hysteria is one of the strangest and most poorly understood social phenomena. Countless times throughout the ages, across all cultures, physically and mentally healthy people have mysteriously fallen ill merely from seeing others around them fall ill. Mass hysteria is a mental epidemic: given the right conditions — typically a combination of fear and stress — it spreads from an index case to his or her contacts, who then spread it to their own contacts, triggering an exponential growth curve. Each new case multiplies the pre-existing fear and stress of the patient’s social circle, making the conditions even more favorable for mass hysteria.
Wikipedia’s list of mass hysteria cases (by no means complete) is 60 long and includes cases from the 15th century to the 21st, from countries as varied as China, Nepal, Kenya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Scandinavia, and America. Typical examples include:
Blackburn faintings (1965) — In October 1965, several girls at a girls’ school complained of dizziness in Blackburn, England.[34] Some fainted. Within a couple of hours, 85 girls from the school were rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital after fainting. Symptoms included swooning, moaning, chattering of teeth, hyperpnea, and tetany.[34] A medical analysis of the event about one year later found that outbreaks began among the 14-year-olds, but that the heaviest incidence moved to the youngest age groups.[34] There was no evidence of pollution of food or air.[34] The younger girls proved more susceptible, but disturbance was more severe and lasted longer in the older girls.[34] Using the Eysenck Personality Inventory, those affected had higher scores for extroversion and neuroticism.[34] It was considered that the epidemic was hysterical, that a previous polio epidemic had rendered the population emotionally vulnerable, and that a three-hour parade, producing 20 faints on the day before the first outbreak, had been the specific trigger.[34]
And:
Emirates Flight 203 (September 2018) — 106 of 521 passengers on a 14-hour flight from Dubai to New York reported symptoms including coughing, sneezing, fever, or vomiting. The pilot notified airport ground staff, and personnel from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met and quarantined the plane in New York and evaluated passengers, 11 of whom were sent to the hospital. A few passengers on the “flight from hell” turned out to have common colds or flu, with the other passengers coming to the belief that they were also sick after observing those around them.[67][68]
The specific symptoms of mass hysteria vary depending on the symptoms of the index case, but some symptoms are more common than others. Timothy F. Jones of the Tennessee Department of Health tallied the most common symptoms across nine mass hysteria outbreaks, affecting 1571 people. 67% of patients reported headache; 46% dizziness or light-headedness; 41% nausea. Fatigue (31%), chest tightness (12%), and inability to concentrate (11%) were also common symptoms. It is striking how well these symptoms match those of Havana Syndrome.
Watching nearby people fall sick one by one is stressful enough on its own. As the Blackburn faintings and Emirates Flight 203 demonstrate, it is more than enough to trigger an outbreak of mass hysteria. If intentional harm is suspected, however, the amplified fear and anxiety creates an ideal environment for psychogenic illness. In spring 2022, British police received a wave of reports about needle attacks in nightclubs. The phenomenon spread across the channel by the end of the year, with French media reporting on the “attacks” as breathlessly and credulously as the British media had months prior. Out of the 1300 supposed attacks in Great Britain and 300 in France, not a single attacker has been caught and convicted; not a single “victim” has tested positive for incapacitating agents. The 100% success rate of the attacks is all the more remarkable because being stabbed with a needle causes a sharp, easily perceptible pain, and because the needle would need to be held in position for several seconds to inject its contents.
Needle spiking panics are nothing new. As Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead note in their Skeptic article, they have been occurring for more than a century. A major scare took place in the United States in 1914; similar scares took place in the UK throughout the 1920s and 1930s. There were so many reported attacks in 1932 — hundreds in the first half of the year alone — that police suspected a drugging gang out to kidnap young girls. Needless to say, no such gang was ever found.
Havana Syndrome shares striking resemblances with the typical outbreak of mass hysteria. The conditions were ideal: the first patients were CIA officers newly arrived in a communist police state that had for decades been a mortal enemy of the US, and that Trump was determined to make an enemy once again. One can imagine few jobs that are more stressful or paranoia-inducing. Mass hysteria spreads as a social rather than biological epidemic, and Pro Publica reporting shows Havana Syndrome spreading in exactly this way. Recall that Bob had been hearing sounds in his backyard for months without thinking they were anything worse than unfamiliar insects and without falling sick in the slightest, yet within days of meeting Alex (the CIA officer who was the first person to report Havana Syndrome), he was being medically evacuated to Miami. He and his wife would be “diagnosed with a wide array of concussion-like symptoms, ranging from headaches and nausea to hearing loss.” These symptoms are characteristic of Havana Syndrome, and at least the first two are equally characteristic of mass hysteria: headaches and nausea are the first and third most common mass hysteria symptoms on Dr. Jones’ list. To be fair, both are also common symptoms of a host of physiological illnesses, but Havana Syndrome shares one final similarity with other mass hysteria cases: the lack of any plausible physiological explanation for the illness or any plausibility in a widespread attack. Extensive investigations have turned up no toxin, no pathogen, no sonic weapon, no microwave weapon, no indication that either sonic or microwave weapons can produce the described symptoms, and no evidence that the Cubans working for the Americans were at all affected. Even if sonic or microwave weapons existed, Cuba would have nothing to gain and everything to lose by attacking American and Canadian diplomats. If Russians are the culprit, it stretches credulity to suggest they can attack American diplomats in dozens of countries around the globe, including the most surveilled areas of the world’s most highly surveilled police states, without ever being caught.
Reflections
Havana Syndrome was not simply a medical mystery. It was a medical mystery intertwined with the shadowy world of spycraft and a complex web of domestic and international interests. To a conspiracy theorist, it may seem awfully convenient that Havana Syndrome sabotaged the rapproachment between the US and Cuba right after it began. Was it all made up by anti-Cuban deep state CIA officers, desperate to sabotage the thaw at any cost? After all, the first four sufferers of Havana Syndrome were all CIA officers.
But there is no need to resort to conspiracy theories to suggest that domestic American politics had a less than salutary role in the Havana Syndrome saga. Trump’s hostility to Cuba was clear well before the first voter cast the first ballot in November. Could his administration’s determination to “expose the crimes of the Castro regime”, as he put it, prevented them from investigating Havana Syndrome objectively?
If so, the Trump administration could almost be excused for their bias, considering how many other authorities failed in their duties. The journal JAMA published a paper which found the Havana Syndrome patients were impaired — by using a fatally flawed methodology that would categorize 40% of the world’s population as impaired. One newspaper article after another breathlessly reported Havana Syndrome first as a sonic attack, then as a microwave attack. Almost invariably they cite the JAMA paper, but either do not mention mass hysteria at all, or mention it to mischaracterize and ridicule the possibility. Havana Syndrome sufferers, determined to avoid the stigma of mass hysteria, forced the State Department Ambassador heading the investigation to resign merely for refusing to dismiss mass hysteria out of hand. The National Academy of Sciences claimed that a microwave attack was the most plausible hypothesis, yet none of its panel members had much experience in the biological effects of microwaves. The Center for Disease Control was tasked with investigating the syndrome, but could produce nothing but a “case definition” — a summary of the symptoms. They did not even have the data to identify any “mechanism of injury, process of exposure, effective treatment, or mitigating factor.”
Adding to the geopolitical mess was the matter of Russia. During the 2016 election campaign, rumors swirled about Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia and his denial of Russian interference in American elections. In a debate, Hillary Clinton memorably called Trump a “puppet” of Putin. Trump’s defenders found these charges outrageous, and although special prosecutor Robert Mueller would later exonerate the president of colluding with Russia, Mueller’s report did not come out until March 2019. It was in this atmosphere of deep suspicion of both Russia and domestic political enemies that Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA operative and determined Russia hawk, reported being attacked in his Moscow hotel room. It was this atmosphere in which CIA director Gina Haspel accused “Russia House” of “just trying to stir up trouble”, and in which GQ reporter Julia Ioffe accused Haspel of hiding Russian malfeasance from Trump out of fear of his reaction.
Was “Russia House” really hiding pertinent information from Haspel, lying to her, and “just trying to stir up trouble”, as Haspel alleged? It is impossible to know, but one does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine why agents who dedicate their careers to countering Russia would be strongly incentivized toward believing extraordinary tales of Russian malfeasance. Was Trump too reluctant to hear about Russian malfeasance due to his own biases? Again it is impossible to tell, but given the history of Russiagate and his continued denial of Russian election interference, such a bias would hardly be surprising.
Havana Syndrome was an outbreak of mass hysteria. The sonic weapons and microwave beams were not real, but just as in other cases of mass hysteria, the suffering very much was. Said suffering spread to over a thousand people and was prolonged to months, then years, by the across-the-board failure of American institutions — from the State Department to the CDC to the CIA to the media to scientists — of correctly diagnosing the syndrome. Whether because of political pressure, pressure from sufferers, or mere incompetence, Havana Syndrome caused needless pain to American diplomats and and strained relations between two historical enemies that had just started to reconcile. For the sake of not repeating history, I hope Havana Syndrome becomes a textbook case of how a society should not react to a medical mystery.