With ‘Havana Syndrome’ whitewash, CIA puts bureaucracy before officers

When it comes to the CIA’s newly released interim report on the so-called “Havana Syndrome,” the agency task force responsible did not seek the truth. Rather, it sought a means to evade the truth.

The report has put the CIA’s bureaucratic reputation front and center. It puts avoidance of the risk of escalation with Russia ahead of its officers.

Here’s a bet: Havana Syndrome incidents will now escalate in number.

This report is quite obviously a whitewash. I’ll explain why, but first, some context.

Havana Syndrome refers to anomalous health incidents that began being reported in 2016 by U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba. Since then, reports have extended across the globe, from France to Germany, China to Russia, Colombia to India, and even Washington, D.C. A 2020 National Academies of Sciences report identified common symptoms as “a sensation of intense pressure or vibration in the head, and pain in the ear or more diffusely in the head … sudden onset of tinnitus, hearing loss, dizziness, unsteady gait and visual disturbances.” The report noted that these symptoms are “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”

The CIA task force responsible for investigating these incidents and delivering this interim report says that “it is unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, world-wide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or mechanism.” The task force adds that only two dozen cases and another batch are now being investigated as truly compelling and unexplained. Hundreds of other reported cases have been identified as the likely results of preexisting health conditions, stress, and environmental exposure.

Here we see the first indication of the report’s whitewash: the use of any available excuse to clear the slate of reported incidents and limit the strategic consequences of the issue.

Notably, the interim report never outright denies the possibility that some incidents are the result of a weapon or other technical capability employed by a foreign power. To do so would be a step too far away from the established evidence. Instead, the report’s parsing of language allows the intelligence community and government leaders past and present, back to at least the 1990s, to say that as of January 2022, we had no good evidence that this was the result of hostile foreign action, so we have no liability for the effects. This is a bureaucratic Get Out of Jail Free card, absolving officials of their own failure to address this concern earlier and support the victims.

Don’t get me wrong — many reported Havana Syndrome cases could well involve case-specific explanations — but not as many as the two dozen victims that the CIA says it is still focused on.

Moreover, the task force did not take possible victim reports seriously. As I reported in December, it is highly possible that George W. Bush’s delegation was targeted with a Radio Frequency/Microwave weapon during the 2007 G-8 summit in Germany. I respect that this is an extraordinary suggestion, but considering the symptoms described by the delegation while they were in the inner ring of the G-8 security bubble, exactly matching Havana Syndrome specifics, the 2007 incident deserves attention. I have it on good authority that the CIA task force did not even conduct a cursory investigation or interview those affected.

Here we see the second indication of a whitewash: a failure to pursue possibly relevant information that contradicts the preferred finding. You don’t need to go to spy school to know that this constitutes a basic analytical failure.

The intelligence community, State Department, and Pentagon (albeit lesser so) strategy on Havana Syndrome has had three parts since 2016: Ignore, distract, and now deny. The various government agencies first told the victims that they were delusional (the CIA’s former chief medical officer was central to this approach). Then, when the scale of the reports increased, they said they were taking it seriously but that folks shouldn’t be too worried. But that didn’t work, so now they are using evasive language to avoid the problem.

They fear that a truly serious investigation will lead directly back to the Russians, forcing the White House into an escalation struggle with Moscow that no one in officialdom wants. This is why former Defense Secretary Chris Miller met major internal resistance when, in 2020, he proposed mild steps to confront Russia over escalating and intelligence-supported incident reports pertaining to Havana Syndrome.

There’s one more key sign that this report is a whitewash: It contradicts established information on the existence of an RF/MW weapon. A senior official says that investigations continue as to “whether any device or mechanism plausibly could cause the symptoms reported.” But in 2014, the National Security Agency stated that it possessed intelligence identifying Russia’s possession of RF/MW weapons (though it redacts Russia) back to the 1990s.

Yes, you read that right — and I’ll have more on this whitewash shortly.