Microwave weapons are prime suspect in ills of US embassy workers

During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control.

 

More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.

 

Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late 2016, hit more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. The Cuban incidents resulted in a diplomatic rupture between Havana and Washington.

 

The medical team that examined 21 affected diplomats from Cuba made no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published in JAMA in March. But Douglas H Smith, the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a recent interview that microwaves were now considered a main suspect and that the team was increasingly sure the diplomats had suffered brain injury.

 

“Everybody was relatively skeptical at first,” he said, “and everyone now agrees there’s something there.” Dr Smith remarked that the diplomats and doctors jokingly refer to the trauma as the immaculate concussion.

 

Strikes with microwaves, some experts now argue, more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety.

 

In particular, a growing number of analysts cite an eerie phenomenon known as the Frey effect, named after Allan H Frey, an American scientist. Long ago, he found that microwaves can trick the brain into perceiving what seem to be ordinary sounds.