UPDATE: More Evidence Ties Russia to Havana Syndrome Attacks
60 Minutes: New FBI, DNI, CIA sources point to Moscow and GRU assassins unit 29155
Nearly 60 years after U.S. scientists began secretly investigating the effects of Soviet microwaves on American diplomats in Moscow, Washington officials are still reluctant to blame Russia for wounding scores of CIA, FBI, State Department and other U.S. and Canadian officials with a weapon that causes a debilitating malady popularly known as Havana Syndrome.
But a collaborative project by 60 Minutes and other news outlets produced evidence Sunday suggesting that Unit 29155, a special assassinations arm of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency is responsible for the attacks, the most intriguing piece of which was an accounting slip from the unit showing one of its officers had received a bonus for work on potential capabilities of “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
Another thread leading to Moscow was discovered during a 2020 car chase near Key West, Fla., the show reported. The arrested driver was Vitalii Kovalev, a Russian who turned out to have some sophisticated electronics in his Mustang. Not only that, but further sleuthing by one of the reporters found that Kovalev, who had immigrated to America as a chef, had “studied in the military institute. He started radio electronics with a particular focus on use within the military of microelectronics. He had all the technology knowhow that would be required for somebody to be assisting an operation that requires high technology.”
Kovalev did time for the car chase then returned to Russia and disappeared. He may have died in the Ukraine war, the show reports—or, having spent time under questioning by the FBI, may well have suffered the fate of other Russians suspected of collaboration with Western agencies.
Retired Lt. Col. Gregory Edgreen, who ran the Havana Syndrome investigation for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2021 to 2023, told host Scott Pelley that all kinds of intelligence it gathered pointed to Russia as the culprit of the attacks on CIA, FBI, NSA, State Department, White House and other government personnel. A Unit 29155 agent was in Tbilisi, for example, when an American was felled there by some kind of electronic attack. She got a glimpse of a suspect car and person outside her house—a Russian 60 Minutes had obtained a photo of.
“One of the things I started to notice was the caliber of our officer that was being impacted,” Edgreen told Pelley. “This wasn't happening to our worst or our middle range officers. This was happening to our top 5-10 per cent performing officers across the Defense Intelligence Agency, and consistently there was a Russia nexus. There was some angle where [the victims] had worked against Russia, focused on Russia and done extremely well.”
While stopping short of absolute proof of Russian responsibility, the weight of the story, a joint reporting project of 60 Minutes, Germany’s Der Spiegel and The Insider (a Russia-focused news outlet), amounted to a significant, undeniable advance in that direction.
Our Friday story continues here:
A plethora of recent reports had virtually dismissed the likelihood of both foreign sponsorship and directed energy weapons involvement and suggested most of the roughly 1,000 overseas Americans who’ve reported being felled by something that seemed to pierce their brains were suffering from other causes, including mass hysteria, at posts where sick bay reports were numerous, as in Havana. 60 Minutes managed to track down and interview more credible victims who went public for the first time.
Underlying this is six decades worth of scientific, government and journalistic reports illuminating Russia’s experiments with, and deployment of, directed energy weapons. In any event, a 60 Minutes finding that any adversary has indeed wielded such a weapon flies in the face of a recent U.S. intelligence report declaring it was “very unlikely” a foreign adversary was responsible for what it calls “Anomalous Health Incidents,” in which as many as 1,000 U.S. government employees and officials have reported falling ill with symptoms including splitting headaches, nausea and cognitive dysfunction, preceded by loud, mechanical sounding noises.
The initial incidents in Cuba between 2016 and 2018 gave rise to the Havana Syndrome moniker, but since then similar events suffered by Americans have been reported in Russia, China, India, Germany, Latin America and Washington, D.C., including in the White House campus.
Mark Zaid, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who has long helped U.S. intelligence agents untangle problems with their agencies, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in 2021 that “these cases started LONG before Havana, Cuba in 2016. Evidence exists tracking back these symptoms & incidents 50 years. My first client #MichaelBeck, a @NSAGov employee, was impacted in 1996.”
“In fact,” the NSA “admitted to me in writing back in 2014 that it knew of intelligence from 2012 abt these incidents,” Zaid continued, linking to “the memo they gave me.” He added, “We know @CIA has classified info from 1980s & 1990s without doubt.“ In his X thread, he also displayed “CIA purported kodachrome slides, which appear to date abt 1970, clearly show use of InfraRed & Microwave technology, for purposes unknown,” showing it “was something they were investigating.”
But several conflicting reports and investigations since the Havana incidents have only muddied the waters.
A 2020 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, commissioned by the State Department, said the Havana incidents coincided with the Obama’s administration’s resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2016. State crooked a finger at Moscow, saying there “was significant research in Russia/USSR into the effects of pulsed radio frequencies, which could have resulted in the development of a portable, nonlethal, covert weapon designed to exploit something called the Frey Effect, in which microwaves cause a victim to hear “clicks, buzzing, hissing or knocking”— symptoms reported by U.S. diplomats and spies.
But when hard scientific, medical or other evidence failed to materialize, officials began blaming the victims’ own “psychogenic” issues as a cause, i.e., stress, neuroses and the like. Or a head injury. Blame was being deflected away from machines or devices that might have caused the health issues, even, contradictorily, as Cuba’s communist regime was being blamed for causing them.
“No one I know - NO ONE - believes #Cuba was responsible for 2016 incidents,” Zaid wrote. “Havana was just location. Just like w/China, Russia, Colombia, Australia, England, Poland, Austria, Vietnam & list goes on. This issue has significantly damaged our relations w/Cuba for no good reason.”
Asked for comment on the upcoming 60 Minutes story Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred SpyTalk to its March 11 report, which said, “We continue to closely examine anomalous health incidents (AHIs), particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis. Most IC agencies have concluded that it is very unlikely a foreign adversary (my italics) is responsible for the reported AHIs.” Evidence of adversary attacks,” it added, was “not borne out by subsequent medical and technical analysis.
Two more studies, by the National Institutes of Health, released March 18, also said they could not detect any physical damage among individuals who had reported debilitating AHI-style incidents.
But that doesn’t prove anything, Dr. James Giordano, a prominent neuroscientist and chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at the Georgetown University Medical Center, told SpyTalk. Advances in technology allow a pulsed microwave or ultrasound beam to disrupt brain functions without leaving evidence of an intrusion.
“In other words…they induce functional disruptions, not necessarily structural ones,” he told SpyTalk in a phone interview. It’s like “what happens with decompression sickness,” commonly known as the bends, he said. It disrupts without a trace, not much different, from a forensic point of view, than a passing stomach ache.
“[Y]ou may get micro-necrosis where small areas of the tissue die” after a pulsed microwave or ultrasound attack, he said, “but that's not gonna necessarily be evident”—i.e., show up—in an MRI or more advanced imaging test.
“So what we've said with regard to the Havana syndrome was very simple, and I'll go to my death saying this: Something happened to the people in Havana. It doesn't surprise me that the NIH report says that we don't find any structural indications of damage to their brain. Neither did we.”
But an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, says Dr. Giordano, who is also a professor in Georgetown’s departments of Neurology and Biochemistry and chair of a subprogram in Military Medical Ethics.
“Did we ever use the word weapon?” he says. “Nope. I never used the word weapon in a report—that was something that was superimposed upon things that I put in my initial report.”
But, he added, “you have to take a look at what nations are doing research work in research development, test evaluation and possible applications for use of these devices. And they include the United States and some of its international industrial as well as military intelligence allies and international cooperators, as well as our transpacific competitors and our transatlantic competitors.”
And that’s been going on for decades.
“So …in other words,” Giordano continued, “if the big three—the United States and its allies, [plus] China and Russia, all possess ongoing research development, test evaluation and prior, if not current-use programs in these technologies, the question then becomes: is it therefore possible that individuals in Cuba…were exposed to this type of technology somehow, some way?
“My answer to that question was not only is that possible, that is highly probable,” Girodano declared.
But could such weapons, particularly microwave emitters, which require huge amounts of energy from oversize generators, be surreptitiously moved around and placed near embassies and the homes of U.S. diplomats and spies without being detected?
“LRADs [long range acoustic devices] can certainly be scaled to the point of being fieldable and operationalizable,” Giordano said. “That's a given, I mean, that's without a doubt.” Small scale versions, designed to repel household mice and other vermin, he pointed out, are commercially available. Five or so years ago, he said, you’d need a power source “the size of a dump truck” to deploy a weaponized version. But today, “you can have a much more compact power source, which then would render this type of a microwave device, or similar quasi microwave or something along the spectrum…far smaller and yet maintain the integrity of the waveform, which would then be fieldable. And if something's fieldable, it's operationalizable.”
Much of the American work is “high side”—classified, said Giordano, who in response to a question said he also possesses a security clearance.
Patent Permits
Public records show the U.S. has granted scores of patents for the development of directed energy weapons and deterrents, including one in 1989 for “Microwaves to the head” and another in 2002 for “Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors.” And many more like those.
One was granted to Karl Kiefer, president, CEO and founder of Invocon, an R & D firm in Conroe, Texas, near Houston, who got a patent and Marine Corps contract to develop a weapon in 2005. His project directed an electromagnetic force onto micro hairs in the ear, “and all of a sudden those hairs move and it tells the brain that the guy's someplace where he is not.” It was tested on mice.
“It’ll really do a number on you,” he told SpyTalk in a phone interview, but “all we were trying to do was, in a non-lethal way, make somebody so damn sick that they couldn't even think about fighting.”
The Marines “said thanks a lot, but no thanks,” Kiefer said—but not because the technology didn’t have promise for use on humans. It was “because they spent all their money on that damn microwave” that Honeywell, a major defense contractor, was developing. For the Marines, he said, “it was the difference in dealing with a small company in Houston that nobody had ever heard of, and Honeywell,” which has “got more friends in Washington, D.C. than we do, that's pretty sure.”
Smell Test
Mark Zaid says the government is “completely lying” about its knowledge of such weapons development.
“If we take what the IC is saying, particularly the CIA, that there's nothing there, there's nothing to look at, no foreign adversary is using this against us, then why are all these publicly available [patent] solicitations, particularly from within the Defense Department,” Zaid asked in a phone interview. “And if they're doing it there, you know they're doing it in the IC.”
Given Russia’s longtime deployment of microwaves, going back to beams it directed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s, which may well have been the cause of higher rates of cancer and other maladies among its denizens, Zaid says it’s ridiculous for the government to keep asserting that a regime headed by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who’s adopted assassinations as a foreign policy tool, wouldn’t have pushed his military scientists to develop a portable microwave or sonic weapon.
“If we're trying to get our people to develop it, are we supposed to believe that the adversaries are so stupid that they wouldn't be doing the same thing?” Zaid asks. “I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. It's so insulting to our intelligence.”
Washington doesn’t want to admit what it knows about Russia’s likely sponsorship of Havana Syndrome attacks for a number of reasons, Zaid maintains. One is that it would be “an act of war” by Russia—which the Biden administration would feel obligated to respond to. Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s CIA director, reportedly shied away from delivering bad news about the Russians to the White House and downplayed the Havana Syndrome problem. Biden’s CIA director, William Burns said he warned Moscow during a visit in 2021 that there would be hell to pay if evidence showed it was behind the incidents.
“They're attacking our people, and they have violated the age-old rule about not harming fellow intel officers, even on the other side,” Zaid said. “And they're doing it not just to our intel officers, but to their family members, including children and pets.“
Pets?
“It hasn't really gotten any press,” Zaid says, “but there have been” odd health problems with embassy employees’ cats and dogs (who of course can’t explain why they feel bad). The CIA can’t claim the animals fell ill from “mass hysteria and psychogenics or whatever crap,” he says. “I mean, that's just ludicrous.”
There’s another reason for avoiding blaming microwave or sonic weapons as the cause of the incidents, he says.
“I believe we've known about it for a long, long, long time, and we haven't done anything to protect our people. So it's gonna be really embarrassing to reveal that they've been letting people go into harm's way—even if it wasn't a weapon back in the day, and it became a weapon or it became weaponized.”
It’s possible that the U.S. itself was experimenting with the technology as an offensive or defense weapon and accidents happened, he volunteers. Or that the Russians didn’t know how lethal the technology was: What was maybe intended as a tool to merely harass Americans with low level radiation—”like a tire slash,” Zaid said— turned out to be far more dangerous. But then, as hostilities with Washington deepened over election interference and Ukraine, a theory goes, they embraced it.
In 2021, Congress passed the Havana Act to compensate victims for “brain injuries from hostilities while on assignment.”
Moscow Rules
The U.S. knew as far back as 1965 that the Soviets were conducting tests showing that “humans subjected to low-level (non-thermal) modulated microwave radiation, show adverse clinical and physiological effects,” according to a Top Secret memorandum written by Richard Cesaro, an official with DoD’s Advanced Research Project Agency. So of course the White House ordered up a program of “intensive investigative research” on “higher primates,” code-named TUMS (for Technical Unidentified Moscow Signal), to see if we could replicate the phenomenon “to supply some data base for possible use in a protest action” against the Kremlin, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the private National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The Soviets continued to bombard the American embassy in Moscow with microwaves, and without protest from the U.S., which then, as now, apparently, wanted to avoid a diplomatic or military crisis with Russia. Only after a new ambassador, Walter Stoessel, arrived in 1974 and threatened to resign unless everyone was told about it did the issue explode into the open, the BBC reported in 2021. "That caused something like panic," a later U.S. ambassador, Jack Matlock, recalled. “Embassy staff whose children were in a basement nursery were especially worried. But the State Department played down any risk. ” Only after Stoessel himself fell ill, “with bleeding of the eyes as one of his symptoms,” the BBC said, did Secretary of State Henry Kissinger accept that his illness was linked to the microwaves and very quietly protest to his Russian counterpart, saying "we are trying to keep the thing quiet". Stoessel died of leukemia at the age of 66. "He decided to play the good soldier," and not make a fuss, his daughter told the BBC.
For the past half century, the U.S. and its adversaries have been in a supersecret “brain weapons arms race,” journalist Sharon Weinberger said in a September 2022 edition of the now defunct "Conspiracyland" podcast. Weinberger, author of The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, said “one of the working theories was that [the Soviets] knew something we didn't know, that they had uncovered some secret of weaponizing microwaves. And so we had to catch up with them, and we had to have our brain weapons.”
I have no direct or indirect knowledge of these events or weapons. However, I was a physics student for four years and I do remember a listening device in Moscow that depended on beamed microwave energy to activate a passive microphone to return information. So, I see the possibility that this is a surveillance device and less of a weapon, if not both. And with capacitors or such energy sources, they can be run with a smaller power source. Perhaps some population is more sensitive and likely to notice the effects.
This is an excellent review of the Havana Syndrome story, which sadly goes back a long way. Mark Zaid’s comments point out the unavoidable conclusions anyone should draw from even a cursory connecting of the dots. So why the government’s denial over so many years? That’s harder to comprehend and has to stop. As a physician, I have encountered a number of genuine illnesses that for decades were denied to exist by the medical profession because nothing showed up on “objective tests.” That’s because the tests weren’t invented yet! It’s like the classic searching for your car keys in the parking lot underneath the lamppost because it’s easier to look there where there’s plenty of light. Assuming the existence of a directed energy beam attack, it would likely cause diffuse micro damage that is simply not visible to standard imaging technology, like MRIs. All the studies that didn’t find any damage just used MRIs. However, now there’s more nuanced technology, such a SPECT, that can see it. Aside from all the other issues associated with Havana Syndrome, what about the absence of treatment? As a psychiatrist, I cannot claim expertise in neurology. That said, it always seemed clear to me that Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment (HBOT), would be worthwhile trying. It happens that I met with a former IC employee who described having experienced an Havana Syndrome attack here in Northern Virginia. He was smart enough to get HBOT treatment by an out-of-town expert and it did help him tremendously. Maybe it can help others. A pilot study must be done. Accepting the reality of these attacks is the first step to solving this awful mystery and can lead to helping its victims as well as putting a stop to more of these terribly damaging assaults. Congratulations on this SpyTalk article, a welcome step in the right direction. I look forward with great anticipation to the 60 Minutes revelations. We need more light shed on Havana Syndrome by not limiting our search only to just under the lamppost.