Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. This week, we’re going to talk about the so-called Havana Syndrome, a mysterious set of medical symptoms first experienced by U.S. diplomats stationed in Cuba in late 2016. Since then, hundreds of diplomats and intelligence officers around the world have reported similar symptoms, debilitating headaches, dizziness, and memory loss.

What started as a medical mystery has become a major national security concern. The CIA under President Biden has made it a priority to investigate the causes of these incidents, but what have they learned so far? To discuss these efforts, I’m joined by Julian E. Barnes, a national security reporter for The New York Times covering the intelligence community. Julian, welcome to the show.

Julian Barnes:

Thanks for having me on.

Preet Bharara:

So, you’ve been all over this for a long time, and I really appreciate the service of your reporting. Can we start with something very basic? What exactly is the Havana Syndrome as we know it? What’s the frequency of it? What’s the magnitude of it?

Julian Barnes:

So, those should be easy questions, but they’re not. The Havana Syndrome is a set of symptoms which you described, reoccurring headaches, dizziness, which are associated with mild traumatic brain injury. So the confirmed cases in general will show up on a brain scan or other tests as an injury. Now how frequent is it is an open question.

At one time we thought this was 40 people who had served in Havana. Then we thought it was 100 people in Cuba and China, and then we thought, oh, is this 1,000 people who had served around the world? Now, earlier this year, the CIA did an interim finding that kind of brought that universe of people down much smaller and said, look, there are a few dozen, a couple dozen cases that we are still investigating.

But many of these can be explained by other things, environmental factors, undiagnosed medical conditions. Nevertheless, there is a smaller group. Is it 24? Is it 36? Is it more? We don’t know. But it’s a smaller group of people who have had injuries in different spots in Havana, probably in Vienna, in Belgrade, other places around the world that we do not know exactly what caused it, and it was potentially caused by a hostile action.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Let’s unpack some of that. But before we do that, what’s your understanding of how serious these symptoms are? Are they mild? Do they vary from person to person? Are they quite serious? Are they debilitating?

Julian Barnes:

They vary from person to person. Some people cannot work anymore. They have a level of disability that has forced them to retire from government service, and they are not able to hold other jobs. They just too many headaches, too much dizziness at random times. Other people were forced to retire from the CIA, but can take other work, other kind of work where they can accommodate the headaches.

So it’s a real range and we don’t know why it’s a range. Some people say it’s because of how many head injuries you might have had beforehand, like a concussion. The third concussion is worse than the first. It might be exposure, how long you were exposed. Some people believe they were exposed for a long time to some sort of external force.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So let’s talk about the external forces and what the theories are, energy waves, radio waves, microwaves. What’s the best theory that if it’s true, that some of these people were the targets of some malfeasance, what the source is.

Julian Barnes:

So the best document we have on this right now is the executive summary of the scientific review that was overseen by the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council. This tried to pair American intelligence experts with outside scientists who had access to classified data.

This group said it is unlikely that this is psychosomatic injuries. This is unlikely to be just stress that caused it and said the injuries are consistent with what could be caused by some sort of directed energy. Now, could that be microwave or could that be radio wave or something else on the electromagnetic spectrum? Hard to tell. Many victims really highlight this report and say, look, this shows that this is likely what caused it. But it’s not that clear. It’s not a conclusion that said it was this. It’s just that it could be this and we better not discount that.

Preet Bharara:

But can you explain, do you have some understanding of how that is even accomplished and how we might have come up with that as a possibility? Is it something that US scientists or military or national security officials have replicated somewhere? And if so, how do you test the negative effects of radio waves?

Julian Barnes:

Yeah, so there have been some tests on this at different government labs. We do not know the full results of those. We do know that the Soviet Union experimented with these kinds of weapons during the Cold War, and there are some documents that talk about those weapons causing sort of similar injuries. But one of the problems here is that the US government has not figured out what kind of weapon might exist or what kind of device might exist that would do this. They can’t collect intelligence that says, aha, the Cubans have this weapon. The Chinese have this weapon. The Russians have this weapon. They don’t have that. I mean, this would be an easier issue if they had collected something that said, aha, we know the Russians have this and this device was in Cuba in 2016 and 2017.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s all speculation at this point. Is there anything about the pattern of incidents and the geography of them, you mentioned obviously Havana, Vienna, Belgrade. Is there anything to that geographical pattern that tells us anything about whether this is from natural sources or from an enemy?

Julian Barnes:

So the CIA’s conclusion was that this was not as a result of a global campaign by a hostile foreign actor. And so it’s important to kind of break that down and say, well, what are they thinking if they say that? And that tells me that they do not think that whoever did something in Cuba is necessarily the same person who did something in Vienna or Belgrade. So it might be a mistake to think about these as all one series of incidents as opposed to different discreet incidents that have different causes or different intentions.

Preet Bharara:

Or different enemies.

Julian Barnes:

Or different enemies. Yeah, absolutely right.

Preet Bharara:

Can you explain something. If it is the case that one or more of the US’s adversaries is launching this campaign, what’s the point? What is the strategic benefit to an adversary to do this? It doesn’t make any sense. Can you make any sense of it?

Julian Barnes:

Overall, no, I can’t make any sense. And that’s one thing that policy makers have struggled with. Why would this occur in China? What does that have to do with Vienna and what does that have to do with Cuba? But if you look at individual incidents, you can at least come up with a plausible explanation for each one. When the CIA came into Cuba, there were the Cuban intelligence and Russian intelligence certainly did not want the CIA operating inside Cuba. They had long, long distrusted the CIA for ample historic reasons.

So there’s a plausible explanation of why harassment would’ve happened in Cuba. In China, it is harder to make a case of why Russia would feel so free to do something. But might China have wanted to eavesdrop on American diplomats? That’s certainly possible. Vienna is one of the cities that has the most spies in it of the world all listening to different things.

Preet Bharara:

What does eaves driving have to do with it? Are you saying it’s possible that it’s not a directed attack, but it’s a side consequence of eavesdropping?

Julian Barnes:

This does not seem to apply to Cuba. It is hard to see that this would… Cuba seems like there is evidence that there was harassment going on, but in Vienna and in some of the other locations, it is possible. Some lawmakers have said that there was a device that was meant to be an eavesdropping device, some device to pick up sound, amplify recordings or connect with hidden microphones, something like that, that was miscalibrated and caused injury over long exposure. So in China, a lot of these injuries occurred in apartments that were assigned to diplomats and they were assigned… The Chinese government knew who was in each apartment. So it’s possible that there were listening devices or listing mechanisms set up that were calibrated. But it’s a theory. We don’t have definitive proof.

Preet Bharara:

And so if it is the case that one or more US adversaries are responsible for this, who are the suspects and in what order of likelihood?

Julian Barnes:

Well, again, important to say that the best guess or best assessment of American intelligence is that there’s not one person here. So then we’re back into theories. So we’re back into theories that Cuba or Cuba and Russia might have had a role in the Havana attacks. Some people believe Russia was involved in China, but others say it probably was just… If a hostile adversary was responsible, then it was probably China itself.

Then in the European ones, there are people who are convinced that it is Russia because there were Russian… Some people say there’s evidence that Russian intelligence operatives were in each of the spaces where these things happened. The problem with that is these are American spies, and where there’re American spies, there are also Russian spies. They tend to go to the same places, and so is that really evidence that they were responsible or evidence that they were just there? So it’s hard to tell. There’s a lot of different motivations.

Preet Bharara:

I want more answers, Julian.

Julian Barnes:

I know it’s a mystery without an answer. That is the frustration of this story. For those who are trying to get to the bottom of it. They’ve tried to find a secret that they can steal. They’ve tried to-

Preet Bharara:

We should have that weapon.

Julian Barnes:

Exactly. There aren’t any intercepts of Russians talking about a campaign to produce Havana syndrome symptoms in American spies. That just doesn’t exist. Some people thought that existed, but it doesn’t.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any kind of political or diplomatic pressure to draw one conclusion over another?

Julian Barnes:

Well, there is a lot of victims who want answers and they have put pressure on, or they have made their case to Congress. And Congress has heard them and Congress is deeply sympathetic to them, and so Congress is definitely put the pressure on the US government to find some answers. But in the Trump administration, there was a lot of people who were dismissive of it. Now, to be sure, there were lots of people, especially within the Pentagon, who thought this was something that needed a lot of attention quickly. But overall, there was skepticism in the Trump administration and the Biden administration came in and did increase medical care for people. It did set up new groups to sort of take a look at this, so they have put resources into trying to find an answer. It’s just frustrating to victims that there’s not a clear answer yet.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned increased medical care. Overall what’s the perception of how the victims of this have been treated as a medical matter?

Julian Barnes:

Early on, there was a lot of people who wrote this off as psychosomatic functional illness, like it was caused by stress, and that meant that some people did not quickly get medical attention. Now, that appears to be much better now, and both changes in the CIA’s office of medical services to make it more responsive to the needs of injured officers and changes of access to Walter Read Military Medical Center have helped a lot of people who did not get treatment and had complained about not getting treatment, did get to go see the world experts on brain injury.

Preet Bharara:

Got it. Are there any lawsuits yet?

Julian Barnes:

Yeah, there are some different lawsuits. It’s very hard to sue the sue the government. There are some lawsuits that are working their way through on workers’ compensation against the State Department that could yield some more information. Unfortunately, kind of a lot of what we want to know is hidden behind classification, and that’s frustrating.

Preet Bharara:

You can get over that. You can get around that, but it’s not easy. Final question, is it the CIA that remains the primary investigator of this, and if so, when can we expect a final report or a final set of conclusions?

Julian Barnes:

That is my belief. My perception right now is that the bulk of the energy is with the CIA. And there’s upsides and downsides of that. The upside is they have a lot of resources and they have a lot of analytical heft to put against this, but there’s also not a culture of creating a final report that we see. The next big piece of information that I think we hope we get is the full report by the outside experts. We’ve only gotten a one or two page executive summary, and there’s a meaty report to kind of dive into there, but putting a timetable on a final result of a intelligence mystery is very difficult.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. The government doesn’t like to provide timetables. Well, this is fascinating, disturbing, complex. Thank you for covering it. Thank you for being on it, and as we learn more, I hope you’ll come back and explain more of it to us. Julian Barnes, thanks for being with us.

Julian Barnes:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues, making the headlines become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members, get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I co-host with former US attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet, or you can call and lead me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The editorial producers are Sam Ozer-Staton and Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Wiener, and the cafe team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.