From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Micah Loewinger filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. We begin the show in Havana, Cuba, in the fall of 2016.

Tony: I’m just lying on my bed on my laptop, watching this show… 

This is a CIA officer, going by the pseudonym Tony.

Tony: and then all of the dogs in the neighborhood started barking… And then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom. It started really loud, ear piercingly loud… The pressure started in the head, and the discomfort in the ear… then the severe, severe ear pain started. If you take a q-tip, you get that jarring AHH. imagine taking a sharp pencil and poking that off the eardrum. 

Micah Loewinger: Tony says the sound was directional –– it stopped when he moved out of his bedroom. But that was just the beginning...

Tony: I was at the top physical psychological emotional place that I could’ve ever been in my life. And I was gung-ho to do my job. And within six months, I was a zombie, and non-functional as a human being. 

Micah Loewinger: He was one of the first patients for what we now call Havana Syndrome, a mysterious affliction that seemed to spread among American diplomats in Cuba and then across the globe. 

 Tina Onufer: I felt paralyzed. It felt like I was in a dream and couldn't move… 

Mark: I thought maybe I had early-onset Alzheimer’s… 

Micah Loewinger: These are the voices of American diplomats interviewed for a new podcast series from Vice called Havana Syndrome. What was done to them? Were they being attacked? And if so....By whom? With what kind of weapon?

 

Micah Loewinger: In this hour, you’ll hear about three audio mysteries, and about the people trying to make sense of sonic clues - some audible, some not; sounds that hum and buzz all through our natural and built environments. We’ll start with Havana Syndrome, a 7-year-old mystery, still driving headlines.

News clip: A new assessment by U.S. intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana Syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon… 

News clip: …To make the assessment that it’s likely not a foreign adversary I think is very bad intelligence tradecraft…. There is nothing in this latest report that disproves the possibility that this is a foreign adversary.

Micah Loewinger: The Intercept reported just last week that the Pentagon has requested $36 million to treat patients of Havana Syndrome, and to continue studying its origins. That story came days after Fox News ran this primetime segment ..

News clip: Do you feel confident that the government is covering this up? 

Dr. Benford: Ugh… It sure sounds like it to me… I think their motives could be that they want to cover it up because an attack on American embassy personnel is an attack on the United States. It’s essentially an act of war. 

Micah Loewinger: Which is to say, there are a range of theories about what really happened, and which theory you go with comes down to who you put your faith in…

 

Jon Lee Anderson: The first victims of Havana syndrome were afflicted by a similar range of symptoms, jarring, a paralyzing pain, a sound in their heads that apparently wasn't audible to others as far as they knew, but was to them. 

Micah Loewinger: This is Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer with The New Yorker, who traveled to Havana with Adam Entous, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, to try to solve the mystery once and for all...

Adam Entous: …It was the first time Jon Lee and I were on the island together. 

Jon Lee Anderson: …Havana’s my favorite city in the world, and I hadn’t been back in a long time. 

Micah Loewinger: They laid out their findings in that new podcast series from Vice. Adam and Jon Lee say the story really began in December 2014, before anyone got sick…

President Barack Obama: Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba, in the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years.

News clip: …The President ordered the opening of a US embassy in Havana for the first time in more than fifty years. 

Micah Loewinger: Then, in the fall of 2016… Almost two dozen US spies and diplomats reported experiencing a similar array of symptoms. The story went public at a State Department press briefing on August 9 2017. 

Heather Neuert: So some US personnel are working at our US embassy in Havana Cuba, on official duties. They reported some incidents. 

Heather Neuert: We don’t have any definitive answers about the source or cause of what we consider to be incidents. 

Micah Loewinger: The words “attack” or “weapon,” weren’t used by the State Department, but within 48 hours the media coverage had taken on a distinctly militarized tone…

News clip: It reads like a cold war spy novel ….

News clip: This was a terrorist attack against US diplomats and their families in Cuba. They used a sonic weapon…

News clip: We’ve learned of these acoustic attacks in Cuba… who is responsible for the acoustic attacks? Russia? Cuba?

Rex Tillerson: We have not been able to determine who is to blame. 

Micah Loewinger: That last voice was Donald Trump’s secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who was leading the administration’s dismantling of the State Department. 

News clip: It’s being described as the White House cleaning house. CNN just learned four top state department management officials have been fired by the Trump administration. 

News clip: President Trump has fired another government watchdog… Steve Linic, the inspector general of the state department was dismissed… 

Rachel Maddow: Latest plans from the administration call for a 37 percent cut to the agency’s budget – 37%. 

 

Micah Loewinger: Trump and his anti-communist surrogates seemed happy to exploit the ambiguities of the Havana mystery…

Marco Rubio: We can say that we don’t know how it happened. We can even say we can’t know for sure who did it. But two things we know for sure: people were hurt and the Cuban government knows who did it. 

Marco Rubio: 224 US government employees and their dependents in the most heavily monitored city in… the Western Hemisphere… and the idea that someone could put together some sort of action against… them and the Cuban government not see it or know about it - it's just not possible. And so it leads you to conclude that the Cuban government either did this or they know who did it and they can't say. 

News clip: The Trump administration announced Friday that it is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana. 

Jon Lee Anderson: Donald Trump is … busily tearing down any aspect of Obama's legacy he can find.

John Lee Anderson: including, the rapprochement with Cuba…   And then over the reports of the Havana syndrome It's sort of used publicly as the reason for which the embassy is finally closed down.  

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, the US government reached out to a group of physicians at the University of Pennsylvania to study the Havana patients. 

News clip: Doctors treating the victims… have found abnormalities in the white matter of their brains… This is the most specific finding so far about physical damage caused by those sonic attacks. 

Adam Entous: Dr. Smith at the University of Pennsylvania is an expert in studying and helping people who suffer from concussions…

 

Micah Loewinger: Adam Entous sees similarities between this kind of damage and what he sees in the concussion cases … involving professional sports players. 

 

Micah Loewinger: Over the next couple years other diplomats and intelligence officers continued to report incidents. And not just in Havana.

News clip: There are now more than 130 possible cases of Havana syndrome, including in China and Russia…. 

Micah Loewinger:  In Vienna. Even Outside the White House!! In their podcast, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson explore the popular explanations for these incidents. Like the sonic weapon theory...

Micah Loewinger: A team of researchers in the UK and US quickly identified this sound, recorded by a patient in Havana, as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.

Adam Entous: Yeah… the Cubans brought me in to meet with their team of scientists that were trying to analyze it. And in that meeting, they said that they believed that it was crickets.

Micah Loewinger: Many experts argued that sound can’t cause brain damage, not without deafening everyone in the area. So if not a sonic weapon, then what?

News clip: 19 top experts from the national academies of scientists conclude the most likely explanation: directed pulsed microwave energy, consistent with a directed radio frequency energy attack
NBC: Microwave energy from some sort of external source. They don’t really know what that source is. 

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee Anderson sees some Cold War precedent for this theory.

Jon Lee Anderson: …there was this long history of the Russians having directed barraging the US embassy in Moscow...going back to virtually the Stalin years.  

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee and Adam interviewed officials who had been stationed at the Moscow embassy in the 50’s when microwave attacks occurred…

Jon Lee Anderson: the reason behind the KGB barraging the US embassy with microwaves wasn't apparently to necessarily harm the Americans, it was directed at some kind of interference with the CIA's own electronics, maybe eavesdropping equipment located inside the US embassy buildings.

Robert Bartholomew: If somebody douses your room right now with microwaves, your wi-fi system would probably shut down. There's a good chance your computer would turn off.…Microwaves would literally heat your brain.   

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew, is a journalist and a professor of medical sociology at the University of Auckland. He doesn’t think it was a microwave weapon.

Robert Bartholomew: They asked those early victims to record their attacks, and they did. And microwaves cannot be recorded…

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew told me he was frustrated by all the coverage of that University of Pennsylvania study, which found white matter changes in the brains of the patients:

Robert Bartholomew: That study should never have been published... White matter tract changes are common in everything from migraine to depression to normal aging.… brain anomalies do not equate to brain damage. 

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to any of the foreign adversary theories...Bartholomew isn’t convinced.

Robert Bartholomew: For six years, the US government went down a rabbit hole searching for secret weapons and foreign conspiracies. And when they reached the bottom of that hole, all they found were rabbits. 

Micah Loewinger: And in fact his analysis aligns with a report published last month from several intelligence agencies which…

News clip: ...Found it very unlikely a foreign adversary was responsible. Very unlikely a weapon or any device caused the symptoms. And there’s not even a consistent set of physical symptoms that could be characterized as Havana Syndrome. 

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew says that in his opinion the best explanation for the symptoms experienced by all those spies and diplomats is the one he wrote about in his 2020 book Havana syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.

Robert Bartholomew: …It is a collective stress response that's based on a belief. We all have beliefs, therefore we are all potential victims. 

Micah Loewinger: He points to the original Havana patients, who lived incredibly stressful lives.

Robert Bartholomew: when American diplomats and spies have been in Cuba in the past, they had a long history of harassment. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd find cigarette butts on your kitchen table and you don't smoke. Or you'd see dog poo on your kitchen floor and you don't have a pet… And at the same time…they were being told you're being targeted with a sonic weapon and don't stand or sleep near windows…that prolonged anxiety can trigger anomalies in the brain. And that's exactly what happened in the Cuban cohort.

That’s not to say he discounts their pain.

Robert Bartholomew: …their symptoms are as real as any medical condition out there and that they are genuinely suffering. But… if you've been told you have brain damage from some… secret weapon, you're not going to get well as fast as you would if you believed that it was psychogenic in origin.

Micah Loewinger: They heal slower, he says, because of something called the “nocebo” effect..

Robert Bartholomew: if I give you a sugar pill, tell you you’re going to feel better. Often you will…. But if I give you a sugar pill and tell you you're going to feel better, and then someone rushes in and says, “Oh my gosh, that sugar pill I just gave you, it's been contaminated with rat poison.” There's a good chance that within a few minutes you might get headache, nausea, dizziness, you might even vomit.

Micah Loewinger: You've described … mass psychogenic illness… as one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized conditions in medicine. In earlier decades it was commonly called “mass psychogenic hysteria.” And that term hysteria is very loaded because historically, doctors had said it came from a sickness caused by a, quote, “wandering uterus.”
I'd love to hear you respond specifically to the idea that there is this fraught history of telling female patients that they are not experiencing what they say they're experiencing and that it's just stress.

Robert Bartholomew: I have never claimed that the victims are crazy or are suffering from some type of mental disorder. Mass psychogenic illness is much more common than people realize. It affects normal, healthy people. Adam Entous recently described Havana syndrome victims as serious people who had no incentive to make up a story. Well, that shows me that he doesn't understand mass psychogenic illness. Mass psychogenic illness is not people who are crazy or mentally ill or weak minded. It is a collective stress response based on a belief.  

Micah Loewinger: In the Vice podcast, Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of the UPenn study told Adam and Jon Lee why he didn’t buy the psychogenic theory...

Dr. Douglas Smith: In mass hysteria, you have to be essentially contaminated or influenced by someone else with the same symptoms. … That doesn’t work here… because many of these patients had never met the other patients. They just independently had the same history of exposure and then they had these symptoms, independently describing the same type of story without seeing another patient. 

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew says that mass psychogenic illness is not a conscious collusion between patients. But its a moot point in this case because.....

Robert Bartholomew: …the majority of cases in Havana syndrome, whether in Cuba or around the world, was not mass psychogenic illness. It was simply people being told they might be the targets and then redefining an array of preexisting health conditions under a new label, Havana Syndrome… to be a part of this is one of the most exciting things in history.

Micah Loewinger: Some of the patients bristled at this theory on 60 Minutes last year saying that their suffering was sidelined by officials who did not see evidence of a weapon.

News clip: I’m tired of the gaslighting that keeps coming from the US government. I’m watching new friends and colleagues I’ve trained with… being sent to these countries and coming back a shell of their former selves. We need to help them and we need to stop this. 

Adam Entous: The work of Dr. Bartholomew and others who have been pushing this psychogenic argument… they're providing an armchair analysis without actually… having done any hands-on research with these individuals…

Robert Bartholomew: It's actually even better to look at it from afar, because what's happened is you've got people…who got so close to these victims saying things like, oh, I've talked to these victims. They're really suffering. You want a degree of emotional separation... Wherever we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.  

 Adam Entous: Seriously, the criticism here … is that we interviewed the patients?… Would you want us to cover the earthquake in Turkey without interviewing the victims?... you do really want to talk to the you want to talk to the affected... That's the job of the journalists…

Micah Loewinger: No, I agree...I'm just trying to play out the logic of the argument.. I don't think it's simply interviewing the patients... Some of the patients seemed primed to believe that it was an attack...  

Adam Entous: Well that’s true…you're right that some of the patients, more than others… have strong opinions and beliefs about what they believe happened to them without evidence…. They can describe… the experience that they had, but they have no unique information about… what caused it… that said, it could be that it is psychogenic in some cases, you know, honestly… I was an agnostic when I started on this process. And frankly, I still remain agnostic today. 

Micah Loewinger: But Adam’s reporting partner Jon Lee says on the podcast that he believes a pro-Castro contingent within the Cuban government could have conspired with the Russians in Havana to target American diplomats with a microwave weapon.

Jon Lee Anderson: If Russia had the technology and it worked in Havana, why not take it on the world, especially if your goal in the life is to fuck with the US? … It’s about messing with our heads, anyway they can. 

Adam Entous: I hear what you’re saying Jon Lee, but I really think we need to stick with the facts. And there’s just not many of them. There’s a bunch of people who say they've been hurt but the CIA has been unable to find any communications intercepts in which officials in Russia or Cuba talk about what they did… I think it’s really strange they haven’t been able to collect anything like that.… 

Micah Loewinger: Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jon Lee how he felt about ending up on the same side of the debate as Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who he interviewed for their podcast..

John Bolton: It certainly, from all outward appearances, it was an attack on American personnel, first in Cuba, then in China. We can’t tolerate that…

Micah Loewinger: This guy has a reputation as a warmonger. He seems like the exact kind of person who would be very invested in there being a secret Russian weapon behind all of this.

Jon Lee Anderson: I totally agree with you. He's almost a cartoonish anti-communist cold warrior… He didn't really make me feel more convinced of my hypothesis at all, although he echoed some of the same conclusions. The Russians… are the most neurotically belligerent to the Americans, and they're the only ones, again, who had something relatively similar in terms of… experimenting with microwaves against Americans in the past. So, two plus two equals four basically for me.  

Micah Loewinger: For me, it does not add up. After listening to their podcast and reporting this piece for the past couple of weeks, I’m leaning towards the conclusion reporter Jack Hitt came to when he investigated this story for Vanity Fair in 2019.

Jack Hitt: I think … the Occam’s Razor explanation, the one that accounts for all of the facts as we know them in the simplest possible way—but for journalists, the least satisfying—is what’s known as mass psychogenic illness. 

Micah Loewinger: He’s speaking here on the New Republic podcast.

Jack Hitt: Conversion disorder is the other phrase that's often used - 

Micah Loewinger: I don’t know what it feels like to be a spy or diplomat living abroad, facing regular harassment. Or what the symptoms of the Havana patients felt like. We can study the arguments for this and that theory, but we can’t say with certainty what happened to them. But, oddly enough, while working on this episode, I had a kind of minor mental breakdown and had to take time off from work. I’d get an awful headache and feel sleepy every time I thought about doing my job. I think it’s burnout and I’m working on it. I know, wah wah woe is me, another Millennial journalist who feels bad for himself, but that’s really how I felt. The more I watched and heard interviews with the Havana Syndrome patients, the more I came to see this as a story about the physical and mental toll of work –– a toll we’re taught to minimize, explain away, and hide from one another. 

Jack Hitt: it's called conversion disorder because intense stress under pressure is converted under pressure into real physical illness and really the key thing that the scientists and doctors I spoke to said...is that these are real symptoms. Conversion disorder makes you sick. 

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, how the police can use that buzzing sound from your fridge to help solve crimes. This is On the Media.

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