Compass Points from PBS News

Unsolved mystery or cover-up?

What started out as reports of sonic attacks on American diplomats... This was clearly the most terrifying moment of my life.

...Evolved into a phenomenon affecting at least 1500 people across six continents.

Tonight, a new book about Havana syndrome and why the authors say there could be a government cover-up.

Tonight on "Compass Points."

♪ Narrator: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Camilla and George Smith.

The Dorney-Koppel Foundation.

The Gruber Family Foundation.

And Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, moderator Nick Schifrin.

Hello and welcome to "Compass Points."

One decade ago, U.S.

personnel in Havana, Cuba, began to suffer mysterious symptoms.

Piercing head pressure, dizziness, nausea, loss of balance, even cognitive decline.

So-called Havana Syndrome cases then spread to China, across the world, even inside the United States.

The victims include some of the U.S.

's most talented spies, as well as other American officials.

Some of whose lives have never been the same.

And the U.S.

government response has at times downplayed, even rejected their symptoms, and questioned what or who is behind it.

That is the story documented in the new book, "The Havana Syndrome.

"Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-up, "and the Greatest Spy Mystery of our Time."

The authors are "60 Minutes" producers, Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados.

And they join me now.

Thanks very much.

Rey: Thank you.

Zill: Thank you.

Schifrin: Appreciate it.

You start the book with a very key point, that Havana Syndrome, ironically, is a misnomer.

Why?

Zill: Well, we were able to find out, over the course of a 10-year investigation for "60 Minutes," that the cases didn't start in Havana.

We found cases from Frankfurt, from Belgrade, from other places around the world, earlier than 2016.

Which is when the people, the... mostly CIA officers at the beginning, began reporting these incidents in Havana, Cuba.

So, we were able to track some cases, even from the 1990s, that may have been an earlier version of a similar technology.

We don't know for sure, but that's the theory that we've been told.

So, Havana, it's stuck in the public consciousness.

Rey: That's where we found out about it, basically.

Zill: Right, exactly.

And not only did it not, perhaps, start in Havana, but the spread.

I mean, the map that you guys have in your book is extraordinary.

Every continent, except Antarctica, all of those red dots are where you're reporting incidents.

I mean, this is not about Cuba at all, Michael, is it?

Rey: And those are just the ones that we know about.

And we know there's a lot more, and we think there's a lot more.

We wrote "misnomer" because Havana was just one cluster of what we believe is many.

I mean, we have cases in Tbilisi.

Vienna, Austria, we think, was the largest single cluster of cases.

As many as 80 people out of the embassy in Vienna were affected by this.

So, though it's stuck in the public consciousness as the Havana syndrome, we weighed whether we should even use that term because it's really expanded everywhere.

And not only has it expanded, you know, the people who you guys have talked to, who I've talked to over the years, who have suffered this.

I mean, it is debilitating.

It's extraordinary.

Let me show a graphic, by the way.

I'm not going to read all of these, but these are some of the symptoms.

I mean, look at all of that long list of symptoms.

And Mark Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, was hit in Moscow.

You featured his story.

This is how he described it to me back in 2020.

I didn't hear any noise, but I did wake up to something, which turned out to be right away feelings of intense vertigo, ringing in my ears, incredible nausea.

I couldn't stand up.

I was kind of falling down on the floor.

And, look, I spent a long time in war zones in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

And this was clearly the most terrifying moment of my life.

The attack ended Poly's career, as we call him.

Did everyone who you talked to, all of these victims from various places, did they all describe this the same way, even though many of them didn't know each other?

Zill: Well, a lot of people, most people, I would say, definitely feel some kind of pressure.

And it's sudden and severe and painful.

So I would say... We think that there are two different kinds of cases.

One is we call the sledgehammer, which is a very quick pressure to the head.

And the person is ill and the symptoms keep getting worse.

And then in China, the cases we looked at were... it was clear that their apartments were being bathed with a lower level of this for months and months and months.

So they knew something was off.

They started getting sicker and sicker and sicker.

And those are considered bathing incidents.

So it might be using a lower level and long period of time of exposure.

And this has ruined some people's lives, careers.

I mean, these are intense.

Rey: Ended careers, ended careers.

One of the first cases we discuss in the book is a woman named Joy, who is the wife and spouse of a Department of Justice employee who was posted overseas.

And she's a civilian.

Like actually, unfortunately, many of the victims that we met and spoke to were civilians.

And she was hit at home.

And now that was in 2021, 2020.

This many years later, she's had three brain surgeries, plates put in her head.

Schifrin: And that's her, right there is a photo of her after one of those surgeries.

Rey: She was kind... That's not her real name.

But she was kind enough to share her experience with us because she really wants people to know kind of what she's gone through, the extent of the injury.

Now, the injuries have varied.

We think it depends on exposure, has a lot to do with human physiology as well.

So you see that long list of symptoms, but it's... not everybody has everything.

Schifrin: Let's talk about the government responses and what I would say the doubts started early.

The FBI concluded early on it was likely a case of mass hysteria.

How did that study color a lot of the government response and how did the doubts continue?

Zill: Yeah, I mean, that study was interesting.

The FBI sent a criminal investigative team down to Cuba to investigate.

They didn't find anything.

It was kind of a cold case investigation by that point because the homes had already been cleared.

The Cubans, while saying they were cooperating, didn't provide CCTV footage, etc.

Then the FBI handed it over to this behavioral scientist who never met any of the victims.

He just went through their written transcripts of their initial interviews and came to the conclusion that they were lying and making it up or that they were under stress and thought they had these symptoms, both of which the victims themselves refer to as gaslighting.

Basically, they couldn't find anything in Cuba, so they turned it on the victims.

Now, we have since done reporting that shows that there was a lot of other intelligence about Cuba that never made it to that FBI team and certainly never made it to the behavioral scientist.

But then the report he issued, which said it was mass hysteria, as you said, that report was used in higher-level CIA officials.

It was used by them to basically say, "OK, we're going to make this go away.

"Let's use this mass hysteria argument."

Rey: And it's stuck.

You still hear it every day.

Unfortunately, a lot of the victims feel like they've been gaslit.

They're told they've been crazy, which is unfortunate.

One of the things you point out is that, OK, some of these symptoms could be common, right?

You have headaches, that kind of thing.

But throughout, there were victims who gathered evidence, high RF readings in their apartments, CCTV footage of intruders.

Why didn't that move the needle?

Why didn't that suddenly become evidence that it wasn't mass hysteria?

Rey: That's the key question.

That's the key question.

From our understanding, there is a great deal of intelligence.

Somebody recently told us there was a mountain of intelligence that indicates that there were intelligence operatives in the area of some of these events, at the time of some of these events, that there is actual CCTV footage of events, that there is what we call in the intelligence community SIGINT, which is signals... Schifrin: Signals intelligence meaning picking up cell phones.

Rey: Phone calls and recorded conversations that provide context to some of these incidents.

So there is that information out there.

Why it hasn't come to the public's attention, it can be chalked up to classification in the intelligence community, which is understandable.

But what the FBI investigation did in Havana is lay the foundation for what we believe was an effort by the intelligence community to come up with a quick explanation for what's going on.

"It's a complicated issue, "and here's a potential answer."

I just want to add quickly to that point that we don't believe anybody is making this up, but we certainly believe there could be symptoms, there could be people who've had experiences that may not be related to this that were reported.

So in as much as 1500 cases have been reported, not all of them may carry the Havana syndrome.

Schifrin: Fair enough.

But you're getting at a point which your reporting has really tried to delve into over the last decade or so.

For example, one victim diagnosed by doctors at Walter Reed with traumatic brain injury, you report the language was softened.

And then you report there were CIA agents who believe they were being blocked from care.

So let's listen to a clip from one of your and Scott Pelley's "60 Minutes" pieces with former CIA officer John Thorne, who uses the acronym for Havana syndrome, AHI, for anomalous health incidents.

So one of the very first things I heard when I arrived at the AHI unit was our job is to bring down the temperature on AHI at headquarters.

And by bring down the temperature, they meant what?

It basically was saying, "Hey, we're going to work "towards this being an atmospheric and environmental "issue versus it being a state actor."

And so they did not want people talking about it being a state actor.

How important is that statement?

Zill: Incredibly important.

I mean, John Thorne, as we call him, that's not his real name.

He gave us insight into the unit inside the CIA that was in charge of investigating.

And we were really surprised by some of the things he told us, including the fact that, you know, by the time he joined, which I believe was in late 2020, 2021.

Sorry, it's a long and complicated timeline.

By the time he joined, they were sort of wrapping things up and they had already concluded that they were going to push environmental mass hysteria, push those arguments and not do further investigation.

So that was something we were really surprised by, because we knew 2021 was the biggest year and there was so much investigation that needed to be done into all of these cases.

And what we basically found out from him was that investigation wasn't happening.

Rey: One of the details, quickly, from that is that the unit that investigated within the CIA was called the GHIC, the Global Health Incident Cell.

And they were basically told not to speak to victims.

So though they may have interacted briefly, they never took reports from the victims about what happened, who they might have seen, if there was counterintelligence incidents going on around them, if they were being watched, that information was never shared within the GHIC.

I've been reporting on this since, you know, 2018, 2019.

Talked to U.S.

officials recently after reading the book.

And I will say that they argue today what they've been arguing for a long time, that they have taken this incredibly seriously, that the safety of everyone is their top priority, that they have, at least measured by the number of countries and regions they visited, this was a larger investigation even than bin Laden because they had to spread out so much.

And that one official said to me, "Look, we wanted to find a boogeyman.

"We never did.

We don't think there is."

And that's what they're still saying to me today, as they, I'm sure, have said to you many times.

What's been your response to that?

Rey: So we on the cover line of the book, we say "cover-up."

We don't mean to say that this is five guys in a dark room smoking cigars coming up with a master plan.

We think this is a confluence of events over a very long period of time within the bureaucracy.

Schifrin: Over multiple administrations.

Rey: Over multiple administrations.

Trump, Biden, Trump.

Uh... And from what we understand from insiders like John Thorne and others, we have multiple sources that we haven't put on television and haven't wanted to go on television who have told us there was a lot of information in it that was not shared up through the investigation in terms of operatives from adversarial countries being engaged in these operations.

Again, we have CCTV footage.

There's SIGINT.

Lots of OSINT.

Schifrin: Open source.

- Open source intelligence.

Russian research that indicates that there's been quite a bit of work done on technology like this.

Schifrin: So let's get to that point.

That's where we are in the story.

What ties all the cases together?

Zill: What do you mean exactly?

Schifrin: Meaning the victims.

Tell us more about the victims.

Tell us about how the nature of the victims begins to point to a certain adversarial country, certain Russian involvement.

Zill: Well, I mean, the story I always like to tell is the group that worked in Ukraine, in Kiev embassy in 2014.

So this was a group that was working at the CIA station in Kiev and was actively working against the Russian interests there, which was to keep their president in power.

Schifrin: And, of course, 2014 is the moment when revolution of dignity in Kiev, right?

Ukrainians overthrow a pro-Russian president and Russia comes into Crimea.

Right?

With an invasion annexation.

It was a huge moment.

Zill: Yeah.

It was a prelude to the current war.

And it was also... The U.S.

officials were blamed for that revolution that ousted the Russians.

Schifrin: Putin was blaming the CIA, as he always does, for another color revolution.

Oh, he fomented these protests.

Zill: And we were able to document that at least three of those CIA officials were later attacked with this weapon.

We believe weapon.

And so... Rey: In new postings.

Zill: Yeah.

So they had gone.

One was in Hanoi.

Another was... his family member was affected in England.

And another was in Tashkent.

And those people were gravely, gravely wounded and their careers were derailed in some cases.

And all of them believe that it has something to do with their time in Ukraine.

Rey: And there's a consistency in terms of the intelligence officers having expertise in Russian language and Russian issues.

So clearly there's a motive there.

You kept going on that line of track.

And let me show a clip that you worked with the journalist Christo Grozev about a particular Russian intelligence unit.

Narrator: It's a piece of accounting.

An officer of 29155 received a bonus for work on, quote, "Potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons."

Which told us that this particular unit had been engaged with somewhere, somehow, empirical tests of a directed energy unit.

There it is.

There it is.

Written down in black and white.

It's the closest to a receipt you can have for this.

What else did you find that built the case towards suggesting Russian involvement?

Rey: So with Christo's help and the folks at theinsider.ru, which is a group of exiled Russian journalists, we were able to access phone records, internal emails from Russian officials, GRU officials, government officials, that indicate travel patterns that match Havana Syndrome incidents.

So Christo came to us with that information.

We had our database of incidents from our reporting.

And we found a few moments where there was travel of suspicious intelligence officers who might be capable of this kind of work that coincided with incidents that we're aware of.

Schifrin: Meaning you could track their phones and you could put them in the same place or reasonably in the same place tied to the incident.

Zill: And sometimes it was even more complicated than their phones.

It was, you know, these are intelligence officers.

So they were flying to a different city, then renting a car and driving to the other city.

And we were able to really get into the details and map out where they went.

And another thing that you kept on going, the answer to the question, "Well, how could you possibly do this "moving around with individual units?"

I remember reporting in 2019, you guys reported that there was an assessment in the U.S., "Oh, you couldn't possibly create this weapon "in something larger than a trailer tractor truck.

"So, OK, you guys go find evidence, "the trailer tractor truck."

But you find that the U.S.

government tried to find a smaller weapon, a miniaturized weapon, eventually found one as well.

And in that first occasion, right, they went to Colombia.

And you guys write this in the book, right?

You couldn't they couldn't find the device in Colombia.

But, quote, "It showed that the technology "had proliferated "beyond the hands of Russian intelligence.

"It suggested a stealth weapon with no known defense "could be used against anyone, "anywhere in the world at any time."

This weapon had been created so that you could move around with it.

Right?

Rey: Correct.

That's what we believe.

So they had been reported.

I'm sorry.

I'm jumping on.

It's a partnership, a long partnership.

CNN's report and others have reported that the U.S.

government has obtained a device that's capable of creating the symptoms that have been found in victims.

Now, was that device used in a specific Havana syndrome attack?

Likely not.

But what it shows is that it can be made in multiple different forms and used in different ways, used by proxies.

So a country like Russia or an adversary can find local bad guys to do their work for them with this technology.

Zill: Well, I was just going to say about the proliferation of it.

We don't actually believe one guy or two guys have to carry this around the world to use it.

It can be multiple.

You know, it's like a gun.

You could make 20 of them and give it to each guy.

So this is not something that you would have to move around the world.

And I think the agency was looking for the wrong thing.

They were looking for big.

They were looking for vans.

They were looking for... Because the science maybe had gone a little advanced beyond in Russia, beyond what they thought the Russians had.

So, honestly, you know, I believe that at this point, obviously, there still needs to be more testing.

But I think, you know, we're moving down.

We're moving forward with the science.

Schifrin: Earlier this year, Tulsi Gabbard, who was the director of national intelligence, released a memo criticizing former assessments as having excluded relevant intelligence, suppressing an alternative analysis and relying on an ethically flawed medical study.

It did not assign blame.

What has changed in the last few months on this story, if anything?

Rey: Quite a bit.

So there was a unit within the Department of Defense, Department of War, called the Cross Functional Team, which was engaged for the last few years in investigating attribution, the science and also care for victims within the Department of Defense, of which there are many.

It's not just CIA intelligence officers.

That unit has been restructured.

Some people have been fired.

There's questions now about what kind of work is actually being done on this issue.

If it's sort of on hold for political reasons.

One thing that that came out of the Tulsi Gabbard report was a full rescission of the intelligence community assessments.

And that's a big deal in the intelligence community, to have those kinds of reports fully flipped over.

Now, the motivation is still up in the air.

You know, DNI Gabbard left office with a lot of questions still to be asked.

And that's one of them is why did she do that?

In fact, as she did it, and our understanding from sources within the intelligence community is now the onus is back on the IC to get back to work and do another assessment.

Schifrin: Do you think that these incidents are still happening?

Zill: Yes, we have reporting that indicates that there have been recent incidents.

The peak year was 2021, just before the invasion of Ukraine in February of the next year.

After that, cases dropped off a lot.

And still, though, we have heard every year since then.

We know of incidents and we've heard of incidents just in the last month.

I want to end with a big idea that you guys tried to tackle.

We've been talking about what led up to this moment of understanding what continues to be the U.S.

government doubting, sometimes rejecting victims.

And you ask why, throughout your reporting, you've asked why, about Russia and all that.

And I want to play a piece that you guys did about why multiple administrations might not have wanted a finger to be pointed.

Narrator: Greg Edgreen, who ran the military investigation, told us he had the Pentagon's support.

But in the Trump and Biden administrations, he says the bar for proof was set impossibly high.

I think it was set so high because we did not, as a country and a government, want to face some very hard truths.

And what are those?

Can we secure America?

Are these massive counterintelligence failures?

Can we protect American soil and our people on American soil?

Are we being attacked?

And if we're being attacked, is that an act of war?

What's the answer to those questions, especially bottom line, can we protect our people?

Zill: I mean, I believe that the U.S.

eventually will get to the place where they understand the science and develop countermeasures.

I hope that's the case.

I don't want to see any more victims.

I've talked to more than 70 and many of their lives are ruined.

Rey: As far as we know, there's only one defense, which is getting off the X. Schifrin: Getting off the spot where the waves are pointed.

Correct.

And people can do that, but that doesn't mean that we can help defend them.

What's the implication of that?

Rey: I think there's a great deal of concern.

And we're hopeful that our reporting and other reporting on this issue will help goose the government to get to the bottom of it.

Michael, Oriana, thank you so much.

The book is called "The Havana Syndrome, "Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, "and the Greatest Spy Mystery of our Time."

Really appreciate it.

And that's all the time we have for now.

Thank you at home for joining us.

I'm Nick Schifrin.

We'll see you here again next week on "Compass Points."

Narrator: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Camilla and George Smith.

The Dorney-Koppel Foundation.

The Gruber Family Foundation.

And Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪ You're watching PBS.