The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion (October 19, 2020)
He was a senior CIA official tasked with getting tough on Russia. Then, one night in Moscow, Marc Polymeropoulos's life changed forever. He says he was hit with a mysterious weapon, joining dozens of American diplomats and spies who believe they’ve been targeted with this secret device all over the world—and even at home, on U.S. soil. Now, as a CIA investigation points the blame at Russia, the victims are left wondering why so little is being done to help them.
Marc Polymeropoulos awoke with a start. The feeling of nausea was overwhelming. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. He tried to stand up and fell again. It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow hotel room was spinning around him. His ears were ringing. He felt, he recalled, “like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time.”
Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as “grizzled.” Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America’s long war on terrorism. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time.
A loyal soldier of the CIA even after his untimely retirement, Polymeropoulos has never detailed publicly what he calls his “silent wounds.” But in the year since he left, he has become increasingly frustrated by the Agency’s reluctance to give him and the other CIA officers affected with the medical care they need. “It’s incumbent on them to provide the medical help we require, which does not include telling us that we’re all making it up,” he told me. “I want the Agency to treat this as a combat injury.” He has also grown alarmed that the Agency and this administration are neither investigating nor pushing back against the apparent perpetrators who are targeting his old comrades—and other Americans—in increasingly brazen ways.
It wasn’t until Polymeropoulos got home to the Virginia suburbs that it occurred to him that what had happened in Moscow was possibly the result of something far more sinister that what he’d originally suspected. In February, after a few weeks of relative normalcy, he started feeling an intense and painful pressure that started in the back of his head and radiated forward into his face. He went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who, Polymeropoulos says, thought it might be a sinus infection. But Polymeropoulos’s scans were clear, and a course of antibiotics did not alleviate the pain. If anything, it was growing steadily worse. The vertigo and nausea came roaring back. His ears started ringing again. His brain was swathed in a dense fog. By March, his long-distance vision started going and he could no longer drive. Repeated MRI and CAT scans showed nothing suspicious, but Polymeropoulos was now feeling so ill that he started calling out sick.
But as his symptoms grew worse, Polymeropoulos and his Agency colleagues noticed that his symptoms lined up with those of American diplomats who had apparently been attacked in Havana.
In late 2016, some two dozen Americans stationed in the revived embassy in Cuba began reporting strange new phenomena. Some heard a strange noise—sometimes high-pitched, sometimes low—and felt a sudden pressure in the skull. Others heard nothing at all, but many of them developed vertigo and nausea, and had trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, persistent headaches, and changes in vision and hearing. Like Polymeropoulos’s constellation of symptoms, some of these effects waxed and waned at seemingly random intervals, while others seemed impossible to cure—all to maddening effect.
Meanwhile, the roster of victims was growing ever longer. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department evacuated nearly a dozen people from Guangzhou, China, where American diplomats and trade representatives reported feeling symptoms eerily similar to those their colleagues had experienced in Cuba. One victim, Catherine Werner, said that her symptoms began in late 2017, just as Polymeropoulos’s had: a splitting headache, nausea, loss of balance. When her mother went to Guangzhou to help her, she, too, fell ill. Even Werner’s dogs were affected, her mother told NBC News. They began vomiting blood and avoiding the room where Werner and her mother heard the sounds and felt the symptoms start.
In September 2018, a California physician and scientist named Beatrice Golomb published a paper that tried to link the suffering of American diplomats to directed microwaves. She connected what came to be known as the Frey effect—using microwaves to create the false sensation of sound—with the fact that some, but not all, of the diplomats in Havana reported hearing the kinds of noise described by Allan Frey. This would suggest that these symptoms were not the result of sonic attacks, as some had speculated. She also offered an insight that could explain Polymeropoulos’s persistent migraines. “Brain injury may be a predisposing factor for…[microwave] injury,” she wrote. That is, people like Polymeropoulos, who was frequently around explosions in his time in Middle Eastern war zones, may be especially vulnerable to brain injury from directed microwave weapons.
Polymeropoulos was still in touch with his friends and colleagues at Langley, and what they told him alarmed him. Apparent attacks were continuing around the world. Two sources with knowledge of the situation—and who asked for anonymity to discuss matters that they did not have authorization to disclose to the press—told me about the ongoing attacks. In the fall of 2019, two top CIA officials, both in the clandestine service, traveled to Australia to meet with officials in that country’s spy agency. (Australia is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance with the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand.) While in their hotel rooms in Australia, both of the Americans felt it: the strange sound, the pressure in their heads, the ringing in their ears. According to these sources, they became nauseous and dizzy. They then traveled on to Taiwan to meet with intelligence officials there. They felt it again while in their hotel rooms on the island.
By now, this was no longer a novel occurrence, and CIA people had come to call it “getting hit.”
Whoever was behind the attacks also began going after Americans on American soil. An American diplomat and his spouse, who had been hit when they were stationed in China, traveled to Philadelphia to get specialized treatment at the University of Pennsylvania. One night in June 2018, according to three government sources, the couple was startled awake by a sound and pressure in their heads similar to what they had felt back in China. On the advice of FBI agents, the family moved to a hotel, but on their second night there, they were again awoken in the early morning hours. Terrified, the parents ran into the room where their children were sleeping to find them moving in their sleep, bizarrely and in unison. In the weeks afterward, the children developed vision and balance difficulties. The family members, whose identities GQ is not revealing for privacy reasons, declined to be interviewed for this story. “I can’t say anything about that,” says attorney Janine Brookner, who represents the family.
Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.
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Attacks may be caused by pulsed directed radio frequency energy or microwave energy (such as cell phones or cell towers)
David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study, told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an interview:
There is a literature that describes health effects of a particular form of microwave energy, which is pulsed and directed. And that literature now goes back a number of decades, and was published largely by the former Soviet Union. That literature does mimic and is consistent with a number of the clinical findings that we noted … The view of some of the world’s most-renowned neurologists was that among the various possible mechanisms that would explain these cases, there was one that stood out. And that was pulsed directed radio frequency energy, or microwave energy. In other words, it could be focused on one room and not another room in the same house. That’s the nature of how this kind of energy can be delivered.
Note from GIHN: Have any of the Havana Syndrome victims checked for elevated levels of radiation from their cell phones (or was there a cell tower in close proximity) at the time of the attacks?
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Havana Syndrome might be caused by microwave radiation attacks.
CIA Doctor Hit by Havana Syndrome Says He Was in “Disbelief’ as he Suffered What he Was Investigating (September 25, 2022)
CIA physician Dr. Paul Andrews was one of the first people sent to Havana, Cuba, to investigate a spate of mysterious health incidents that were impacting embassy and agency personnel in 2017 when he was struck by the same set of debilitating symptoms, he told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in his first public interview for a CNN Special Report: “Immaculate Concussion: The Truth About Havana Syndrome.”
Andrews, who is using a pseudonym in order to speak publicly, had already been studying the first victims of what has come to be known colloquially as “Havana syndrome,” or officially as “anomalous health incidents.” Physicians in Florida had recorded a series of symptoms that hinted that victims were suffering from a brain injury that was impacting their balance, among other things. Andrews traveled to Cuba to investigate about two months after he became aware of the first cases.
He wasn’t too worried for his own safety, at first. On his first night, he went to sleep around 11:30 p.m. in his hotel room. But shortly before 5 a.m., he was awakened by severe pain in his right ear, nausea and a terrible headache. Then he began to hear a clicking noise that past victims had reported hearing at the onset of their symptoms — a sound that Andrews had previously only heard on audio clips.
Five years later
More than five years later, Andrews still suffers debilitating symptoms. He still has balance and vision problems that have made it almost impossible for him to function normally. He has trouble reading, going hiking or jogging as it makes him nauseated, and forget being in a crowd at a museum: turning his head left and right to look at the art and avoid bumping into other patrons makes him dizzy and sick.
“It gets to the point where you just don’t want to go out of the house because you say what’s the point? I want to go do this, but I know it’s going to make me sick,” he said. “I don’t want to be nauseated. I don’t want to be tripping and falling.
“It’s very frustrating that all those things you want to do, you can’t,” he said.
Andrews has been examined by a battery of physicians, who have found damage to his vestibular structures — the parts of the body that govern balance and orientation. But like many AHI victims, Andrews lacks one single, clear diagnosis. Some victims have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, which he questions because even though he says AHIs are clearly brain injuries, they appear to him to be a different kind of brain injury than doctors have seen before.
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Havana Syndrome: The History Behind the Mystery (April 1, 2024)
Possibly up to 1,500 American officials at home and abroad have suffered brain and other injuries in recent years from a mysterious malady that is reported to have begun in Havana in 2016 and has since been known as Havana Syndrome.
While aspects of these health incidents remain a mystery, they recall a series of historically documented Soviet technical operations against the US embassy in Moscow that began in 1953 and lasted for decades, providing credible evidence of serious harm to numerous diplomats and other US officials.
Even former President George W. Bush and his delegation may have suffered similar attacks in 2007 as the President was on his way to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany. Former First Lady Laura Bush, in her 2010 book Spoken from the Heart, wrote that:
By the afternoon of [June 7] I could barely stand up. My head inexplicably throbbed; I was horribly dizzy and nauseated. I went to bed, pulled up the covers, and for several hours felt so awful that I might die right there in the hotel room … Nearly a dozen members of our delegation were stricken … For most of us, the primary symptoms were nausea or dizziness, but one of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear.
On August 26, 2021, a trip to Vietnam by Vice President Kamala Harris was delayed for over three hours after the US embassy in Hanoi reported “a recent possible anomalous health incident” there, as the administration began to call the attacks.
As of the end of 2022, perhaps up to 1,500 US officials had complained of having suffered such debilitating and disabling symptoms as constant headaches, dizziness, loss of memory and vision, nausea, insomnia, and vertigo.
“Effects can be long-term and debilitating, with some victims using hearing aids to help counteract the constant ringing in their ears,”according to Psychiatry.com, posted on 2 March, 2023.
No American officials, no matter how high ranking, were apparently immune from exposure. In July 1959, while Vice President Richard Nixon was visiting Moscow, the Russians subjected him and his wife Pat to dangerous ionizing radiation, bombarding the bedrooms at the American ambassador’s residence known as Spaso House. These attacks are described in detail in declassified Secret Service documents obtained from the Nixon Presidential Library in California and released in September 2022 by the National Security Archive.
After the Secret Service “swept” the areas using equipment known as Radiac dosimeters, they detected the high levels of radiation. The agents, assuming the quarters were being bugged and that they were being overheard, loudly complained about “dirty tricks by their hosts.” The radiation quickly “settled down” to more normal levels—the first instance of effective action being taken to stop the attacks—and the last for a long time.
Some sixteen years after Nixon’s visit, on December 9, 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was finalizing his plans to visit Moscow for talks on arms control. On that day, he placed an “urgent” telephone call to the Soviet’s affable and popular ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kissinger emphatically told him, “I want to talk to you about the signal. That beam you are beaming into our Embassy in Moscow … Maybe you could turn it off until I get there.”
On March 31, 2024, a joint, yearlong, extensively documented report by CBS’ “60 Minutes,” The Insider, and Der Spiegel, was broadcast and released, which “uncovered evidence suggesting that unexplained anomalous health incidents, also known as Havana Syndrome, may have their origin in the use of directed energy weapons.” It describes new, heretofore unreported attacks on Americans, including a possible incident involving “a senior US Department of Defense official [who was] was targeted as recently as July 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania,” long after the attacks appeared to have been halted.”
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