The mystery of the 'Havana Syndrome'

A new book investigates the mysterious Havana Syndrome, examining alleged Russian involvement, unexplained injuries among US officials and claims of a government cover-up.

The Havana Syndrome:Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time

By Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados

Published by Crown

306 pages $33

 Let’s say you are an official of the American government. One evening, while resting in your living room after a long day of work at the United States (US) Embassy in Tbilisi, you are hit by a wave of pulsing energy. Soon your head is aching or ringing. Perhaps blood begins to gush from your ears and nose. What should you do?

 Based on the dozens of US soldiers, spies, bureaucrats, spouses, and innocent bystanders whose experiences have been catalogued by the CBS journalists Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados in their startling exposé The Havana Syndrome, there is some advice you can follow. First, get away from wherever you are. Second, secure your children and pets. Third, expect to fight for health care and recognition for the rest of your life.

 

 Rey and Zill first began reporting on Havana syndrome as investigative producers for 60 Minutes, and they make the strongest case yet that these hits — some officials estimate there have been thousands — are intentional attacks by Russian agents and their proxies, using a futuristic and sinister energy weapon. The US intelligence community, however, and especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the authors convincingly argue, have been desperate to conceal the damage done to Americans as they have served their country abroad, and occasionally at home.

 The term “Havana syndrome” was coined in 2017 by a Belgian blogger-cum-nuclear-physicist to describe a set of unusual press reports of traumatic head injuries with no readily evident physical cause. Multiple US intelligence officers and diplomatic officials claimed that they had been hit by some kind of invisible attack. Many of them had been on the job in the Cuban capital when they fell ill, hence “Havana.” In August 2017, journalists raised the issue at a White House news conference.

 Soon, more cases began popping up all over the world — China, Georgia, Vietnam. Who was behind the attacks? In an internal 2019 report that only came to light in 2024, the FBI, working in concert with the Cuban government, called the cases a potential result of “social contagion,” or as Rey and Zill put it, “mass hysteria.”

 This characterisation seemed to be bolstered by the fact that the weapon left no bullet or chemical behind. “It’s not like a pistol where it leaves traces”, an anonymous government source told the authors. “It’s hard to detect the signal.”

 Other services were quick to follow in the FBI’s footsteps: In 2022, the American intelligence community, led by the CIA, issued an interim report arguing that, in all likelihood, no dirty deeds had been done.

 The result is that Havana syndrome is one of the best-known stories in contemporary espionage, but one of the least understood. The authors have clearly worked closely with the victims of these attacks, some of them CIA officers who have come from the shadows to talk about their experiences. The authors’ descriptions of their pain, in horrific, visceral terms, feel all too real, and medical analyses of the victims, including MRIs, appear to show signs of head trauma. Some have had to go through extensive surgery to relieve their symptoms.

 To get to the bottom of Russia’s involvement in the attacks, Rey and Zill partner with the Bulgarian investigative reporter Christo Grozev and his team at the news site The Insider. With Grozev’s help, they are able to track a secret unit of military intelligence assassins and a wild cast of thugs and spies who seem to have been involved in the assaults, including a general’s son with piercing eyes whose youthful appearance earns him the nickname “the murder intern”.

 Rey and Zill also give a fascinating history of the Kremlin’s efforts to build a microwave weapon, which was, they write, likely tested on Russian prisoners. They also flesh out a story first broken by CNN earlier this year, reporting that such a device had been bought on the black market by US agents around August 2024 and was now being tested on animals at a military base stateside.

 The authors’ work is admirable and compelling, but they don’t follow every thread. The lack of discussion about the mysterious weapon, for instance, that US troops allegedly used — and that President Trump called “the discombobulator” — in the raid to capture the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January feels like an omission.

 More significant, they don’t delve into one of the biggest questions at the heart of their story: Why, as the authors allege, were US officials so keen to cover up the attacks? Rey and Zill float a suggestion that the government hasn’t looked deeply into the reports because acknowledging the existence of a direct Russian assault on US service members could trigger a dangerous confrontation between the two nuclear powers.

 At its core, The Havana Syndrome is about the failures of the United States government to take care of its own. It’s a sharp indictment of a government that spends about a trillion dollars a year on defence, but would rather avoid spending money figuring out how to keep its officers safe on an increasingly uncertain global battlefield. 

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The reviewer is the author of The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

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