A startling revelation has reignited speculation that ‘Havana syndrome’, the mysterious ailment affecting American diplomats and spies, could be the work of covert Russian technology.
Russian Intelligence Unit 29155, supposedly tasked with “subversion, sabotage and assassination” programs against the West, may be responsible for these grisly and still unexplained health incidents, according to a joint investigative report.
For years, the alleged deployment of secret directed energy weapons against US officials has been linked to migraines, nausea, memory lapses, hearing loss, balance problems and dizziness, and now more vivid symptoms have come to light.
An FBI counterintelligence agent tasked with tracking down Russian spies in the country described her alleged contact with the covert weapon as feeling like “a dentist practicing on steroids.”
The encounter left her with memory problems, trouble multitasking and chest pains, she said, and at one point the alleged energy weapon left her unconscious.
“My baseline changed,” as he told 60 Minutes. “I wasn’t the same person.”
Retired Army Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen (above), who led a Pentagon investigation into the Havana Syndrome incidents, told 60 Minutes that he is “confident” Russia is behind the attacks.
“There is no environmental cause that causes the body damage I saw,” an anonymous PhD source told DailyMail.com last year. “I don’t know how you create damage inside the body, like what was seen, that appears suddenly and that could be called ‘pre-existing conditions.'”
C.B.S. 60 minutes, german magazine Der Spiegel and a Latvian journalism team called The Insider have joined forces for the new investigative collaboration.
Its main scoop is based on explosive findings from Insider’s Christo Grozev that Russia’s secretive Unit 29155 was “rewarded for successfully testing ‘non-lethal acoustic weapons'” on American public officials and spies.
But the team’s successes have also revealed new case studies, expanding public understanding of what “Havana syndrome” might be and how it affects the body.
One affected U.S. government employee, former CIA deputy chief of operations in Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropoulos, said Mirror who had first confused his symptoms with “food poisoning” six years ago.
But, when the painful “attack” occurred again a few days later, Polymeropoulos realized it had to be something else.
The former CIA deputy chief told the German magazine that it felt like “a vise in my skull” and that at times his vision had become so bad that he couldn’t even drive a car.
“We were portrayed,” Polymeropoulos said of himself and the dozens of other U.S. government employees who have suffered from Havana syndrome, “as people who had been victims of mass hysteria.”
Above, an old American car passes the US embassy in Havana on December 17, 2015.
A Georgetown neurologist told DailyMail.com that his own 2017 and 2018 analysis of Havana syndrome patients for the US Special Operations Command found lasting problems in the patients’ brain function, but not in their brain structure, similar to so-called “mini strokes.”
In March of this year, a government study that followed more than 80 victims of “Havana Syndrome” found no signs of brain injury, despite also identifying “real symptoms” of the mysterious ailment that researchers called “pretty profound.” ” and “disabling.”
As one Georgetown neurologist said, Dr.James Giordanowho conducted early research into the syndrome for the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, told DailyMail.com, this absence should not be taken as evidence of “mass hysteria.”
Dr. Giordano, who teaches neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., said the findings were published last month they risk creating “a false conclusion that nothing happened to these people’s brains.”
That study, published last month by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), performed MRIs on 81 of 86 State Department employees and their adult family members who reported “abnormal health incidents (AHI).”
The research team, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland, compared the results of these MRIs with the MRIs of 48 control participants.
According to the report, persistent dizziness and balance problems were among those actual symptoms for 28 percent of embassy officials and other patients studied.
In a statement made a year ago in March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said that “the symptoms reported by US personnel were likely the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as pre-existing conditions, conventional illnesses and environmental factors”.
“One of the considerations here was that if, in fact, these individuals were exposed to some type of electromagnetic and/or acoustic stimulus,” Dr. Giordano explained, “the nature of the damage would be functional, rather than structural.” ‘
He described the new study as consistent with his own 2017 and 2018 analysis of Havana syndrome patients for the US Special Operations Command, which found lasting problems in patients’ brain function, but not their structure. brain, consequences similar to so-called “mini strokes”. ‘ or cases of transient ischemic attack.
“Let me be very definitive: we are not talking about a functional neurological disorder, but a psychosomatic disorder,” Dr Giordano told DailyMail.com.
“We’re talking about an alteration of neurological function, which then created a series of effects, including physiological downstream effects that manifested at cognitive, motor and behavioral levels.”
Unlike the “mass hysteria” explanation that has plagued Havana syndrome victims that the State Department has reported, the neurologist compared the findings to a variety of other long-term brain conditions where physical evidence of the Damage dissipates quickly.
For its part, Russia has previously denied any involvement and today dismissed the allegations as “baseless.” Above, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council via video link in Moscow on March 29, 2024.
After U.S. embassy officials and staff reported hundreds of cases in nearly 70 countries, new reports of Havana syndrome decreased dramatically beginning in early 2022. But the mystery of what caused the ailments and alarm persists. (Above a chronological map of key incidents)
“Sometimes when a mini-stroke occurs,” Dr. Giordano said, “very often what is a structurally evident artifact (in the brain) that is long-lasting is not produced.”
“Some early changes may be seen during TIA (transient ischemic attack) in the course,” he added, “but they resolve over time.”
Cases of “decompression sickness,” or curvatures, he noted, have also manifested as mini-strokes or Havana syndrome, causing lasting impairments in brain function that were not accompanied by visible forms of lasting brain damage.
For its part, Russia has previously denied any involvement and today dismissed the allegations as “baseless.”
‘This topic has been talked about in the press for many years. And from the beginning it is most often linked to the Russian side,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a news conference.
But retired Army Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, who led the Pentagon investigation into the Havana syndrome incidents, said 60 minutes that he is “certain” that Russia is behind the attacks and that acknowledging the potential use of sonic weapons would raise security questions.
Lt. Col. Edgreen said the burden of proof under the Trump and Biden administration was incredibly high, explaining, “I think it was set so high because we, as a country and as a government, didn’t want to face some very hard truths. .’
‘Can we protect America? Are these massive counterintelligence failures? Can we protect American soil and our people on American soil? Are we being attacked and if we are attacked, is that an act of war?’
Lieutenant Colonel Edgreen also claimed that the attacks are part of a global mission by Russia targeting US officials to “neutralize” them.