Achi news desk-
This was the first known case of what has since been called ‘Havana syndrome’, a mysterious illness that sickened over 80 American spies, diplomats, government staff, and their families in the years after the US The United States reopened its embassy in Cuba in 2015, for the first time in 54 years.
Some described being plagued in their homes by strange clicking and grating noises that felt as if they were “coming to them”, or a constant humming and humming that was so annoying that they felt compelled to turn the TV up full to try and drown it out. .
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For others, the effect was more debilitating.
They felt dizzy, nauseous, developed severe headaches or migraines, loss of balance, nosebleeds, tinnitus, memory impairment, fatigue, or suffered strange sensory disturbances – hearing sounds like metal grinding, or feeling as if the air inside a car were moving even with the windows closed.
In some cases, people became so impaired that they had to stop working.
Since then, around 1000 reports of similar symptoms have emerged around the world, including among US officials who attended the Nato summit in Lithuania last year.
A joint investigation earlier this week by CBS, Der Spiegel, and The Insider now traces the first suspected cases to Germany in 2014, and suggests that victims may have been targeted by an intelligence unit Russian using a sonic bioweapon.
One woman – an FBI agent – described feeling as if she had been struck by a powerful force in her home in Florida 2021.
The sound in her ears was “like a dentist drilling on steroids” and eventually she died, going on to develop problems with memory and concentration.
Since reports of ‘Havana Syndrome’ first hit the news in 2017, the controversial saga has hovered precariously between military and medical explanations.
In 2018, an FBI investigator concluded that the case was probably a mass psychogenic illness – a form of social contagion caused by paranoia in which symptoms spread through a group without any physical or environmental cause, but because they become convinced that they are being exposed to something harmful.
In other words, the discomfort is real but the cause is psychological.
This was backed up by a second classified report (eventually revealed in 2021 as a result of freedom of information requests) which found the “mysterious sounds” reported by some staff – who at the time had been counseled to be over- aware of any unusual sounds – were actually the mating calls of a species of cricket.
On March 18 this year, two new reports published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) rekindled the mystery once again.
The studies, conducted over five years by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), compared more than 80 US government employees and their adult family members, mostly based overseas and a who had experienced these “abnormal health events” (AHI), versus a control group of age- and sex-matched healthy volunteers who had been on similar assignments without experiencing AHIs.
MRI scans found no evidence of brain injury, or any significant biomarker differences, that could explain the symptoms of the AHI group.
The absence of structural brain damage does not necessarily prove that what happened was psychogenic, however.
Dr Jon Stone, professor of neurology specializing in Functional Neurological Disorders (FND) at the University of Edinburgh, said he was not surprised by the findings.
FND is “something between neurology and psychiatry”, he says.
Patients tend to show neurological symptoms such as seizures, weakness in their arms, numbness or chronic dizziness, but brain scans will not detect any structural damage as they would for epilepsy or multiple sclerosis.
In the past, such conditions would have been stigmatized as “psychosomatic”, or “hysteria”, but medical science is now tracing them to “a problem with the software of the nervous system”, says Professor Stone.
Speaking to the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast in March, he said: “Usually there might be a recognizable event at the start which might be a minor head injury or an episode of vertigo from a viral infection, which is scary and surprising to the person, but when that problem settles down instead of the brain adjusting back to normal health the brain is stuck in a state as if the dizziness trigger is still happening.”
Professor Stone noted that 24 of the 80-plus participants in the AHI group were diagnosed with FND, and that many of those with Havana Syndrome – like FND patients – described worsening symptoms over time.
He added: “We know that functional disorders are usually triggered by an abnormal sensory experience and, speaking to people who know about directed energy weapons, I understand that it is much easier to produce an abnormal sensory experience or remotely unpleasant… It wouldn’t cause brain damage, but it would be enough to trigger a functional disorder.”
On March 31, the latest twist came as a CBS-led investigation alleged that members of a Russian military intelligence unit – known as 29155 – may have attacked the brains of US government personnel with “directed energy” weapons.
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Greg Edgreen, a military researcher, told the channel’s 60 Minutes program that victims often “worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and did extremely well”.
The program also reported that evidence placed members of unit 29155 in cities around the world at times when US personnel experienced Havana Syndrome-like events.
The Insider – who collaborated on the investigation – said that an officer in unit 29155 had been rewarded for their work developing “non-lethal acoustic weapons”.
The Kremlin has dismissed the “baseless accusations”, and plenty of skepticism remains – not least because no smoking gun, so to speak, has been found.
No one denies that what victims have experienced is, as the NIH scientists put it, “very real … protracted, disabling and difficult to treat”.
Exactly what caused it, however, remains unclear.
