US intelligence grapples with nervous system attacks amid heavy Russia suspicions

The significant majority of those who have investigated this issue, or suffered from it, believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is responsible for the RF/MW attacks.

The question of RF/MW attacks on U.S. personnel first beamed into the public consciousness with the emergence of the late 2016 “Havana syndrome.” U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers assigned to the recently reopened embassy in Havana, Cuba, described hearing strange sounds. Some experienced ailments such as headaches, nausea, auditory and sleep disruptions, balance issues, and cognitive difficulties. It was just the start. Similar incidents have since been reported by U.S. government and military personnel serving globally. The incidents are ongoing.

But the year 1996 and the name Mike Beck are, perhaps, the best places to start.

A retired NSA officer, Beck believes he and a colleague, Charles Gubete, were targeted by an RF/MW weapon while on a weeklong trip to a “hostile country” in 1996. Beck cannot disclose the identity of that country, but entirely separate sources tell me that it was Russia. Both Gubete and Beck suffered from early onset Parkinson’s disease. Gubete died in 2013. Multiple sources told me that they believe Gubete and Beck were used by the Russians as guinea pigs for their offensive RF/MW program, which has since advanced.

In 2016, then-NSA Counterintelligence Director Kemp Ensor told other NSA officials that intelligence evidence supported the conclusion that Beck and Gubete had been targeted with an RF/MW weapon. (An effort to contact Ensor, who has now left the NSA, was made via one of his current colleagues. He did not respond.) Beck, Ensor argued to the officials, deserved the NSA’s support in his claims to the Department of Labor for related medical and pension compensation. The NSA has steadfastly refused to provide that support. As a result, Beck has had to pay out of pocket for his medical costs. In a conversation this week, Beck and his wife described the “devastating” suffering their family has endured. From my conversation with the couple, and context from other sources, I believe Beck was indeed targeted with an RF/MW operated by elements of the Russian government. His treatment by the NSA has thus been tantamount to the military telling a service member who had lost his legs to an improvised explosive device to find a wheelchair, pay for it personally, and shut up.

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, the NSA contests this description. It asserts that the “NSA has been unwavering in its commitment to ensuring the health and well being of the NSA workforce. That commitment goes well beyond the Coronavirus-19 pandemic and extends to virtually every issue that puts Agency employees at risk regardless of their geographic location. Mr. Beck is a valued member of the NSA family, and we are grateful for his years of service. Historically, NSA provided documentation to Mr. Beck that he has used to support his claim. NSA is providing its employees with resources on what to do in case they experience or have experienced an anomalous health incident. Employee health and safety is a top priority.”

A more recent suspected RF/MW victim is former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos. As the executive operations officer responsible for operations in Eurasia, Polymeropoulos was targeted during a 2017 liaison visit to Moscow. Polymeropoulos has since been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. While Polymeropoulos has been treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the CIA veteran, whose global service included Afghanistan, had to fight a grueling internal battle to access this care. While the CIA insists that it is taking this issue far more seriously, a pledge to which new director William Burns’s early conduct attests, the anger among some agency veterans remains palpable.

A more positive example comes from former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller. Miller and his chief of staff, Kash Patel, ensured military personnel were able to access appropriate medical care at Walter Reed military hospital. Some of these service members suffered very serious wounds; even a short-duration, high-intensity RF/MW attack can have life-changing impacts.

So, what on Earth is happening?

A 2020 National Academies of Sciences report found that the Havana victims’ symptoms “are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.” A number of active and former government officials I have spoken to, from all the U.S. agencies listed earlier, or suspected victims of these incidents, confidently share the National Academies of Sciences assessment. A government source with deep knowledge of the issue tells me that compelling evidence of an RF/MW attack was collected in real time and has been assessed by the nation’s Measurement and Signature Intelligence apparatus.

But if the likely cause of these ailments is now understood, the culprit remains unidentified. This is deeply aggravating to some active and former government officers. They believe sufficient evidence exists to establish that Russia is to blame. One government official told me that the State Department, in particular, has gone to “amazing lengths” to conceal evidence both on the incidents and of Russian culpability.

What does the evidence actually tell us?

While investigating this issue is now a top CIA priority, I understand that the agency does not believe it has the evidence to reach a higher-confidence assessment of the cause of these illnesses or who is responsible for them. I believe this assessment caution is in good faith.

This is just part of the intelligence parchment, however. Other active and former government officials say there is compelling evidence to link Russia’s GRU military intelligence and FSB domestic-predicate intelligence services, in particular, to RF/MW attacks on U.S. personnel. When it comes to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, the evidence is less clear. As one Western intelligence official put it to me, the SVR likes to see itself as a class-cut above the GRU and FSB in class and action. Under its current director Sergey Naryshkin, the SVR is attempting to restore the more elite Russian intelligence service tradition of the KGB’s early Cold War glory days. That means an SVR focus on its illegal (nondiplomatic cover) officer and agent networks abroad, covert political influence campaigns, and traditional intelligence collection.

Let’s return to Mike Beck.

A 2014 NSA note I have reviewed says that it “confirms that there is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr. [Mike] Beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence. The 2012 intelligence information indicated that this weapon is designed to bathe a target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system.”

Again, the country is Russia. Other NSA, CIA, and open-source evidence point to a sustained Russian intelligence service penchant for RF/MW weapons. One government source tells me that the RF/MW platforms are variable in form: operable either from longer range, such as from a building to another building, or from a car against a person on the street/in a building. It is possible that at least one weapon variant can be concealed and employed by a single individual. Relevant to the incidents in Cuba, one former senior government official tells me that when the State Department relocated U.S. personnel in Havana into residences further from public access routes (roads, in particular), the attacks stopped.

Geography also helps paint a picture. Numerous suspected RF/MW incidents involving U.S. personnel, some previously reported and some unreported, have occurred in Moscow. This bears attention in that the FSB maintains persistent “Moscow Rules” surveillance of suspected foreign intelligence officers in Russia. (Witness the Russia-tour favorite of returning home to find unpleasant gifts and rearranged furniture. Sometimes, the FSB even engages in physical harassment of U.S. personnel.) This makes it highly unlikely that a third-party actor could be regularly operating RF/MW weapons against Americans on Russian territory. Also compelling, vis-a-vis geography, is the fact that some more recent, higher-confidence-assessed RF/MW attacks have occurred against Americans in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. These are locales where Russian intelligence services have ease of transit and are granted wider latitude by host-nation sympathizers.

This perceived Russian freedom of action remains a serious issue. Leaving some details out for national security reasons, I can report that former acting Defense Secretary Miller pushed for a far more proactive response to the Russians before he left office. This approach was, and continues to be, resisted by the national security establishment (that said, other new lines of effort are now underway). Regardless, Miller’s legacy does seem to have endured with the Pentagon’s March 2021 contract request for a wearable RF weapon exposure detector.

Next up, there’s the geolocation data analysis that places GRU and FSB officers in transient proximity to U.S. persons and residences within the time period of their suffering of radio-frequency-related symptoms. GQ’s Julia Ioffe has previously documented some of the time and place proximity evidence tying the FSB to incidents. But the evidence against the GRU and FSB runs deeper when the broader portfolio of metadata is included. Of particular importance here is the NSA’s capacity to collect vast amounts of metadata, which can then be run through pattern analysis software to back-trace movements and activity. Following the GRU’s 2018 attempted assassination of former British intelligence agent Sergei Skripal, intelligence coverage of GRU officers was prioritized by both the NSA and its British sister service, GCHQ.

What of the guys on the ground?

One government source told me that the GRU’s attempted April 2018 hack of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, Netherlands, provides an excellent guide for the modus operandi or “tradecraft” used by the RF/MW teams. The only real difference, the source said, is that the OPCW hack involved an effort to intercept, rather than project, radio waves along the electromagnetic spectrum.

During the April 2018 attempt, a small team of GRU officers flew into the Netherlands, met personnel from the GRU’s embassy residence, and hid its equipment in the back of a locally rented car. The team planned to hack into the OPCW via its peripheral Wi-Fi network. Dutch security services intercepted the GRU team before it could attempt the breach. The attempted OPCW hack is also relevant to the RF/MW incidents in that the Dutch were heavily supported in their investigation by GCHQ intelligence efforts, which specifically target GRU officers in Russia and globally. This GCHQ capability is truly world-leading and near symbiotically operated alongside the NSA. GCHQ also uses NSA capacity to store collected intelligence, which can then be reexamined for later analysis.

Yet intelligence activity is rarely a perfect art.

I understand that the Russians have not been caught in a dead-to-rights Zimmermann Telegram-style event. While Russian intelligence officers have been identified in proximity and time to U.S. persons who have suffered RF/MW attacks, they reportedly have not, for example, replicated the FSB’s action in the immediate aftermath of their botched August 2020 operation against dissident journalist Alexei Navalny. Those FSB officers blew the lid on their nerve agent assassination attempt by making panicked phone calls with their Moscow headquarters.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Russian intelligence services retain a passion for RF/MW weapons. These weapons are one of the more successful elements of a Russian intelligence interest in a wide range of psychologically targeted weapons (some highly spurious in ambition).

An April 2012 article in the Russian government gazette, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, describes how “the [intelligence services] were mainly engaged in generators that influence the psychophysical state of an individual with their fields and rays.” With reference to “beam, wave and psychophysical weapons … in a number of areas not long ago our specialists were far ahead of the Americans.” Equally interesting, a 2019 Russian army article identified how the utility of RF/MW weapons was formerly limited by their large size. But the Russian army notes that “recently such devices have significantly decreased in size and can be installed on a tank turret and even at the head of a tactical missile … The person begins to hear non-existent noises and whistles … When exposed to low frequency electromagnetic radiation, the human brain releases chemicals that regulate its behavior. They can cause symptoms of various diseases, make a person fall asleep instantly, or, conversely, stay awake for a long time.”

Sound familiar? And consider this: If you can put an RF/MW weapon on the head of a small missile, might you also be able to carry it under a large coat or in a specially designed bag?

Suspicion against Russia is furthered by the lack of evidence against other prospective actors. This is relevant in that the most high-profile RF/MW incidents involving multiple U.S. personnel occurred in Havana and, in late 2017, in Guangzhou, China.

Some sources suggested to me that the significant operational skill and scale of Cuba’s DI intelligence service means that the Russians would have needed at least tacit cooperation from elements of the DI to carry out a multi-month operation targeting U.S. personnel. But no source indicated to me that there exists evidence of DI participation in any RF/MW operation targeting Americans on Cuban soil.

Nor did any source say he or she had seen evidence to implicate the Chinese Ministry of State Security or the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff in these attacks. While the Ministry of State Security is known for taking a brutal stance against Chinese citizens suspected of anti-regime espionage, its officers traditionally apply a less aggressive physical posture against U.S. government personnel.

Similarly, while the People’s Liberation Army has harassed U.S. military personnel in Africa and the South China Sea (shining lasers into the cockpits of U.S. aircraft, for example), those incidents appear to bear no action-evidence crossover links to the RF/MW attacks. RF/MW attacks on U.S. personnel would likely also be judged by Beijing as detrimental to China’s standing objective of earning Washington’s appeasement on other concerns such as trade and human rights. Perhaps noteworthy, one source tells me that the Russian Consulate in Guangzhou, located very close to the U.S Consulate, is known to retain a heavy intelligence presence.

All of this begs a question. If there is significant, albeit often circumstantial, evidence indicating Russian state responsibility or numerous RF/MW attacks, why hasn’t more testimony been given to that effect?

One reason is easily understandable: a lack of clarity as to whether and when some attacks have actually occurred. A late 2019 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, Cuba unexplained events investigation – Final Report, encapsulates this problem. Released to the Washington Examiner in early 2021 under a Freedom of Information Act request, the report lists “one challenge with this investigation is the lack of a well-defined medical diagnosis and an uncertain source of exposure attributable.” The CDC found that “of the 95 persons whose medical records CDC evaluated, 15 had illness that met the criteria for a presumptive case definition. CDC classified 31 others as possible cases and the remaining 49 as not likely to be a case.”

These are legitimate but limited concerns. The evidence in some suspected RF/MW cases is highly compelling.

What of suspected RF/MW attacks on U.S. soil, as reported by Ioffe, and last week by CNN?

If these attacks did indeed occur, we can be confident the culprits were not under surveillance at the time. This hints at a broader problem: Due to a heavy shifting of domestic counterintelligence resources toward Chinese targets over the past four years, the FBI’s Russia-focus resourcing is more limited. That might be relevant for two reasons. First, because Russian intelligence officers on U.S. soil have shown impressive countersurveillance tradecraft. Second, because close-target covert surveillance takes at least seven to 10 people at any one time.

I concur with numerous sources who suggested to me that Russia is almost certainly enjoying this situation. The RF/MW weapons offer a means to impose significant physical and political harm on Moscow’s “main enemy,” America. Add to this Russia’s recent threats of “asymmetric” retaliation against U.S. sanctions, and the Biden administration’s desire for a Biden-Putin summit, and Moscow has reason to believe Washington is timid. We should not exaggerate the import of U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia since January. They have been limited in scope.

The stakes are high.

The Russian Federation appears to be engaged in attacks against civilian government and military personnel of the United States. The global scale and physical seriousness of these attacks mean they could quite reasonably be considered acts of war. To borrow a metaphor in terms of the traditional rules of the intelligence game, Russia wouldn’t simply have crossed the Rubicon, it would be publicly defecating in the river. As former national security adviser John Bolton put it to me, “If the source [of these attacks] is Russia, they will continue until they see a response, some retaliation.”

An added risk is that other hostile actors such as Iran might start to replicate these “gray zone” attacks for their own ends. If so, what follows? Are we ready to abandon America’s global diplomatic and intelligence presence in favor of a bunker mentality?

At a minimum, more efficient intelligence-sharing between the State Department, intelligence community, and the intelligence committees is needed. Those wounded in the line of duty also deserve far better. Beck’s medical costs should retroactively be covered. The NSA also owes him an apology. Internal and, where necessary, external investigations should establish if senior officials failed to support personnel appropriately since at least 2016. Some careers and pensions should disappear.

Most importantly, if and when more evidence is gathered, Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, and their officers must be held to account.