There’s a new development in the years-long international mystery surrounding Havana Syndrome: The U.S. received it and has preserved it test a device which officials believe may be related to the debilitating condition.
Sources said the device was quietly seized by the Department of Homeland Security in late 2024, nearly a decade after U.S. Embassy staff in Cuba first reported symptoms of so-called Havana syndrome. Since then, the Pentagon has been testing the portable, backpack-sized device, which emits pulsed radio frequency energy and contains components of Russian origin.
The sources told Homeland Security Researchers believe it may be able to reproduce the effects described by victims of Havana Syndrome. The Pentagon and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the CIA declined to comment.
Here’s what you should know about the mysterious illness.
“My brain is broken”
The term Havana syndrome is derived from the cases first reported by U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials in the Cuban capital. After the US embassy opened there in 2015, media outlets began reporting strange medical symptoms affecting US embassy staff working in the country: dizziness, fatigue, memory problems and vision problems. Other symptoms include nausea, migraines, pressure in the head, dizziness and ringing or clicking in the ears.
Many people with Havana syndrome describe hearing a very high-pitched, painful noise that seemed to subside when they moved to another location Impact so severe for some, they were ultimately forced to quit their jobs.
“My brain is broken,” said former CIA analyst Erika Stith said CBS News in 2022.
“We got this because we served our country. And we deserve to be taken care of,” she said.
The U.S. government is calling the cases “abnormal health events,” or AHIs, and officials have not confirmed what caused them.
But “60 minutes“ has spoken to experts who believe the incidents were targeted sound or microwave attacks.
Many sufferers assume that they were injured by a secret weapon that fires a high-energy microwave or ultrasound beam.
Some victims of Havana Syndrome have spent more than a decade raising awareness of their cases, often accusing the government of failing to provide enough support or access to specialized medical care.
Who is affected?
More than 1,500 US officials have reported suffering from the disease since 2016, including White House staff, CIA officers, FBI agents, military officers and their families. Cases have occurred in dozens of countries and have even been reported in Washington, DC
In 2021, a Havana Syndrome-style incident was reported in Vietnam shortly before then-Vice President Kamala Harris visited Hanoi. The U.S. Embassy there said at the time that a “potentially abnormal health event” required the evacuation of at least one official for medical care, and that prompted Harris to postpone her arrival.
“60 Minutes” later learned that 11 people said they were affected: two officials at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and nine others who were part of a Defense Department team preparing for Harris’ visit. While Harris was uninjured, some of the injured U.S. personnel were recovered from Vietnam.
In another case, a State Department security official working at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China, told “60 Minutes” that he and his wife developed symptoms in 2017 after hearing bizarre noises in their apartment.
Security guard Mark Lenzi described the sound as a “marble” circling through a “metal funnel” and said he heard it four times – always in the same place at the same time of day: over his son’s crib as he put him to bed at night. He described the noise as “pretty loud” and like nothing he had heard before. Shortly after hearing the noise, he and his wife began to feel sick.
Lenzi said he believed he was targeted because of his work with top-secret equipment analyzing electronic threats to diplomatic missions.
“This was a targeted, standoff attack on my apartment … it was a weapon,” he told correspondent Scott Pelley. “I think it’s RF, radio frequency energy in the microwave range.”
Questions about Russia’s possible role
“60 Minutes” reports In mid-2024, on a major development in the Havana Syndrome investigation: a suspected link between attacks in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a top-secret Russian intelligence unit, as well as evidence that a reliable source called a “receipt” for acoustic weapons tests conducted by the same intelligence unit.
Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who led the Pentagon’s investigation into those incidents, told “60 Minutes” at the time that he was confident that Russia was behind the attacks and that they were part of a global campaign to neutralize U.S. officials.
“If my mother had seen what I saw, she would say, ‘It’s the Russians, stupid,'” Edgreen said.
US ratings
A U.S. intelligence assessment published in 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found It was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for the illnesses – a conclusion reiterated in one updated review published a year ago. This review found that most intelligence agencies continued to view foreign involvement as highly unlikely.
However, two agencies reversed their positions, saying there was a “roughly even chance” that a foreign adversary had developed a device that could harm American officials and their families and stopped short of directly linking such a device to the reported AHIs.
In 2024, the House Intelligence Committee concluded in a report that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2023 assessment “lacked analytical integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation.” The report said it “appears increasingly likely that a foreign adversary is behind some cases of what officials are calling “anomalous health incidents.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it has conducted a review of the intelligence community’s investigation into the incidents to date and “remains committed to sharing the findings” with the American public once completed.
Former senior CIA intelligence officer Marc Polymeropoulos said that “a new, full analytical review is now warranted and the DNI must demand one.”
Polymeropoulos, who has spoken publicly about the symptoms he suffered after suffering a stroke in Moscow in 2017, criticized authorities for what he said were disingenuous previous investigations.
“The CIA has always claimed that this technology doesn’t exist at all, that there is no device, and they based their (assessments) on that,” he said, “so all of their analytical assumptions are now blown up.”
