In late December 2016, reports began trickling in from American diplomats stationed in Havana, Cuba, of strange noises and vibrations at their residences. This wasn’t merely a nuisance; the people who heard the noises experienced acute symptoms including hearing loss, headaches, and dizziness. When the Americans stepped away from the specific areas where the noises and vibrations occurred, the symptoms seemed incrementally to subside.
Medical examinations were already underway when more of the bizarre cases occurred. “It wasn’t until early February when new incidents were reported that there was sort of this moment of ‘We’ve got something bigger happening here,’ ” then-diplomatic security assistant director Todd Brown told a Senate subcommittee this year. On February 6, 2017, the first patient was evacuated from Havana. Over the next two months, 40 more individuals would be evacuated and a specialist from Miami flown in to examine even more personnel in Cuba’s capital.
As the medical examinations continued, an unusual pattern of injuries emerged: The patients’ symptoms resembled brain injuries found in people who had experienced a concussion, but these patients lacked any signs of physical head trauma. Between March and mid-April, a new cluster of U.S. personnel in Havana experienced similar incidents and corresponding symptoms. The Canadian government also removed diplomats and their families from Havana after the same symptoms emerged among Canadian personnel.
In August 2017, two more Americans who reported health problems left Cuba, bringing the total number of diplomats reporting the same concussion-like symptoms to 24. The United States government had finally seen enough. It was around the same time that the State Department began referring to these incidents as “health attacks,” a catch-all term rarely, if ever, used by U.S. officials. By late September, all nonemergency U.S. personnel were evacuated from the Caribbean island and within weeks the Trump administration expelled 15 Cuban diplomats.
Twenty-one of the American diplomats who reported symptoms were evaluated at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. According to several articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) earlier this year, symptoms including cognitive, balance, auditory, and visual dysfunction as well as headaches and sleep impairments persisted in a majority of these patients even several months after the strange “attacks” in Havana.
“This group looks extremely like the concussion group, just without the concussion,” Dr. Douglas Smith, director of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the Perelman School, said on a JAMA podcast. With rehabilitation and other treatments, all 21 of the patients showed signs of improvement. “The good news is when they had rehab, uniformly they improved. They’ve all improved,” Smith said. But many unanswered questions remain. Nearly a year after the incident, the condition of 14 of these diplomats had not improved enough for them to be cleared to go back to work. “We’re really just at the beginning of this,” Smith added, saying [concussion] “is not a real diagnosis, it’s really a description of the symptoms.”
Stranger still is the fact that almost a year after removing American diplomatic personnel from Havana, officials are no closer to determining the cause of or motivation for these health attacks. The Security and Privacy Research group at the University of Michigan has posited that the high-pitched noises might be unintentional interference created by eavesdropping devices and a “second inaudible ultrasonic source.” Researchers were able to replicate the high-pitched noises (thought to be similar to the ones diplomats heard in Havana) from a recording released by the Associated Press (AP), but this hasn’t explained how such noises could cause the symptoms the Americans experienced. According to the AP, after “months of investigation and four FBI trips to Havana, an interim report from the bureau’s Operational Technology Division says the probe has uncovered no evidence that sound waves could have damaged the Americans’ health.”
The Cuban government has been unhelpful, to say the least, blaming the strange illnesses on everything from mass hysteria to field crickets, as PBS NewsHour noted. Some Cuban officials have gone so far as to accuse the U.S. government of deliberately lying about the incidents. Dr. Randel Swanson, who led the medical evaluation of the diplomats, rejected the notion that this group suffered from a form of mass hysteria: “The characteristics of a group of patients who experience [mass hysteria is] such that the symptoms are short-lived and often benign in nature and there aren’t consistent physical exam findings, which is completely the opposite of what we see in this patient population,” Swanson said on the JAMA podcast. Additionally, Smith argued that mass hysteria often presents the exact same symptoms in each patient, something that did not occur in the 21 diplomats he evaluated. Smith and Swanson also ruled out possible causes such as infection or exposure to toxins.
Elected officials haven’t entirely ignored the mystery of these diplomatic health attacks. During a hearing early this year into the events in Cuba, Senator Marco Rubio, chairman of the foreign relations subcommittee that covers events in the Western Hemisphere, asked State Department officials whether the government was aware of any technology that was capable of launching the alleged attacks in Havana.
“If someone in the U.S. government says, ‘We want to cause these symptoms in people,’ that technology doesn’t exist,” Rubio said. “We don’t know of that technology. Is that accurate? We are not aware of a technology that does this? We’ve never seen a technology anywhere in the world that does this to people?”
“That’s my understanding, senator,” Todd Brown replied. “When going to the subject matter experts both in government and outside government, we have not seen this.”
Yet during the hearing, State Department officials were adamant that even though the United States isn’t sure who launched the attacks, the Cuban government likely is aware of the culprit. “Cuba’s a security state,” then-acting assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs Francisco Palmieri told the subcommittee. “The Cuban government, in general, has a very tight lid on anything and everything that happens in that country.” Then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson also believed the Cubans knew who perpetrated these alleged attacks. “The Cuban government, someone within the Cuban government can bring this to an end,” Tillerson told the AP.
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However, in late May, the mystery dilated when reports surfaced that at least one U.S. diplomat in China’s southern city of Guangzhou had experienced physical symptoms similar to a concussion after months of exposure to abnormal auditory stimuli. According to a health advisory posting issued by the State Department, the victim “reported subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure.” The diplomat was sent back to the United States in April for evaluation by the same physicians who examined U.S. personnel stationed in Cuba. An embassy spokeswoman told reporters that preliminary “clinical findings” on the patient “matched mild traumatic brain injury.” In the weeks following, the New York Times reported that two more U.S. diplomats had fallen ill in Guangzhou with similar symptoms after hearing unexplained auditory stimuli.
The “medical indications” of the first reported victim in China were “very similar and entirely consistent with the medical indications that have taken place to Americans working in Cuba,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 23. “We are working to figure out what took place both in Havana and now in China as well…We’ve asked the Chinese for their assistance in doing that, and they have committed to honoring their commitments under the Vienna convention to keep American foreign service officers safe.” The State Department established a task force earlier this summer to investigate the health attacks.
It’s no secret that, like Cuba, China is a surveillance state, one with far more advanced technological surveillance capabilities than Cuba. China already tracks its citizens using sophisticated facial recognition technology and Internet monitoring, for example. If the U.S. government is so certain Cuba knows who perpetrated these alleged attacks, why wouldn’t the government also be certain that China knows as well?
Some of the diplomats sickened in the attacks clearly aren’t confident the federal government will solve this mystery. As the Miami Herald reported in June, 8 of the 24 U.S. personnel affected by the incidents in Havana have hired a lawyer to help them pursue their health claims given the confusing signals they’ve received thus far regarding their treatment. “Are they being treated or are they being studied? It’s not entirely clear what is happening,” the group’s lawyer told the Herald.
Writing in Commentary in 1961, Philip Roth observed, “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Roth was describing—and lamenting—the difficulty of matching the absurdity of the early ’60s in fiction, but with these recent health attacks, our current reality seems to be taking cues from a Cold War novel.
Given the public’s interest in “fake news” and Internet conspiracy theories (and how avidly it consumes true-crime podcasts and television shows), it’s odd that Americans are so sanguine about this real-life mystery. Each new reported case, each new statement from the government, raises far more questions than answers. Meanwhile, experts continue to posit competing theories with what little information is available, leaving the public—and the diplomats sickened by these attacks—with partial truths and no clear path forward.
