Will the American People Be Told the Truth About Who is Responsible?

That’s me in front of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, in Dec. 2000. It is one of the locations where the syndrome has reportedly been experienced. Symptoms include hearing a sudden loud noise, pain in one or both ears, feeling of pressure or vibrations in the head, tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, nausea, cognitive difficulties, sleep deprivation/insomnia, fatigue and dizziness: Photo by Spider Martin

By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The mysterious Havana Syndrome, called an “alleged set of medical symptoms with unknown causes experienced mostly abroad by U.S. government officials and military personnel,” is so mainstream now that it has its own Wikipedia page. So it can’t be a “conspiracy theory,” right?

It is clearly the result of a directed energy source weapon, most likely some frequency and power of electromagnetic pulses, which Naval Intelligence in Pensacola, Florida began to research and I wrote about 30 years ago (see below).

The question now is, how can the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) claim not to know about it, and why is it still being treated as a such a mystery by some of the top mainstream news outlets in the United States?

The symptoms range in severity from pain and ringing in the ears from hearing a sudden loud buzzing noise to cognitive difficulties, pain in one or both ears, feeling of pressure or vibrations in the head, tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, nausea, cognitive difficulties, sleep deprivation/insomnia, fatigue and dizziness, partial blindness and brain damage, and were first reported in 2016 by U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba. Beginning in 2017, more people, including U.S. intelligence and military personnel and their families, reported having these symptoms in other places, such as China, Europe, and even Washington, D.C. in and outside the White House.

“The cause and validity of the illness has yet to be determined,” according to the online encyclopedia.

I’ve been following these stories carefully, but have so far not written about it myself, in part because I do not specialize in covering the spooky world of spies or the science of health. Plus, I try to shy away from anything that might be called a “conspiracy theory,” for obvious reasons these days in this era of mass manipulation on social media by misinformation and propaganda.

But now that this story has hit a mainstream broadcast news channel on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” perhaps it is time to weigh in and reveal what I know about this.

What could be causing “Havana Syndrome” cases on U.S. soil?

Intelligence reporters for The Washington Post have been covering it, as usual depending on inside spy sources and official U.S. government sources for information.

The latest?

External energy source may explain ‘Havana syndrome,’ panel finds, renewing questions about possible foreign attack

The finding by experts convened by U.S. intelligence agencies suggests that a foreign power could have mounted attacks on U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers and military personnel serving overseas

“An external energy source may explain disorienting and sometimes debilitating symptoms suffered by U.S. government personnel, a panel of experts has found, reaching a conclusion that, while not definitive, suggests a foreign power could have mounted attacks on U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers and military personnel serving overseas,” The Post reported on Feb. 2, 2022.

“The findings by the expert panel, which was convened by U.S. intelligence agencies, are the latest attempt to solve the years-long mystery of what, or who, is behind a constellation of symptoms known as ‘Havana syndrome.’ In late 2016, personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba’s capital reported a range of sensations including ringing and pressure in the ears, headaches and dizziness. Personnel in China later experienced similar symptoms, which have now been reported by hundreds of people serving at official posts around the world.”

An earlier interim report from the CIA found that a foreign country is probably not mounting a global attack aimed at U.S. personnel. People who say they are victims of Havana syndrome strongly criticized the agency’s findings.

But the CIA report didn’t expressly rule out a foreign hand, at least behind some small number of cases for which investigators have found no cause or plausible explanation.

The expert panel’s finding was consistent with earlier conclusions from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which found that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases.”

That study was chaired by David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, who also worked with the intelligence community’s panel of experts. The panel did not attribute any cases to a specific device or country.

The experts included people from within and outside the U.S. government, with expertise in science, medicine and engineering. They were given access to classified government information on reported incidents and trends, and met with individuals who shared their personal experiences and medical records, according to intelligence officials familiar with the panel’s work, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules established by the intelligence agencies.

As a starting point, the panel examined “the plausibility of five potential causal mechanisms” for the syndrome, which government officials have termed “anomalous health incidents.” These included acoustic signals, chemical and biological agents, ionizing radiation, natural and environmental factors, and radio frequency and other electromagnetic energy.

In the end, the experts determined that “pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radio-frequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics” of the health incidents. That finding was not definitive, and “information gaps exist,” the panel wrote in a summary of its findings. But “there are several plausible pathways involving various forms of pulsed electromagnetic energy, each with its own requirements, limitations, and unknowns” that could be making people sick.

Sources of energy exist, the experts wrote, that “could generate the required stimulus” on the human body, and that could be concealed and have “moderate power requirements,” suggesting that the energy could come from a portable device.

Such a device would apparently not be common, but it could be effective. “Using nonstandard antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials,” the summary stated.

Some people who have reported the symptoms said they came on suddenly while they were in offices and hotel rooms. Others have reported the onset while they were outside.

“Ultrasound also plausibly explains the core characteristics,” the experts found, but probably only at close range. The experts’ analysis of ultrasound suggested it might not explain the cases where people fell ill inside a building.

“Ultrasound propagates poorly through air and building materials, restricting its applicability to scenarios in which the source is near the target,” the experts wrote.

Skeptics of a directed-energy attack, perhaps with some form of weapon or surveillance device, have raised the possibility that Havana syndrome victims are actually suffering from some mass delusion or a psychological condition.

But the experts panel cast doubt on that hypothesis.

“Psychosocial factors alone cannot account for the core characteristics, although they may cause some other incidents or contribute to long-term symptoms,” they wrote.

Those core characteristics were helpful in narrowing down the investigation and focusing on aspects of symptoms that “were particularly difficult to explain through other means,” the experts wrote. There were four characteristics, including sound or pressure in the ears; “nearly simultaneous” symptoms such as vertigo, loss of balance and ear pain; “a strong sense of locality or directionality” to those symptoms; and the absence of any known environmental or medical conditions that could have caused them.

The panel acknowledged that some of these symptoms are common in known medical conditions. But the combination of all four “is distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature, and so far have not been associated with a specific neurological abnormality.”

What’s more, the “location dependence,” or the way symptoms can appear suddenly, and go away quickly, argues for a “stimulus that is spatially and temporally discrete.” All those signs appear to point to some source of energy that is aimed at someone and causes the effects people experienced, the summary shows

An advocacy group of people who say they were the victims of an attack said the new report “reinforces the need for the intelligence community and the broader U.S. government to redouble their efforts to fully understand the causes” of the incidents.

In a joint statement, two top U.S. intelligence officials said the investigation into the cause of the health incidents will continue.

“The U.S. government remains committed to providing access to care for those who need it, and we will continue to share as much information as possible with our workforce and the American public as our efforts continue. Nothing is more important than the well-being and safety of our colleagues,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and William J. Burns, the director of the CIA, said in a statement.

My Original Contribution

This story interests me because of a story I covered 30 years ago for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast, a story that would eventually result in getting me fired after an admitted CIA agent got himself hired as my editor and maneuvered me out, causing considerable damage to the reputation of the newspapers in the process.

It ultimately didn’t harm me or end my career, since I just moved to Tuscaloosa, obtained a master’s degree, and moved on up the line.

I got the first tip about this story in October, 1991, when some fans of my writing about the environment and politics on the Fort Morgan Peninsula in Baldwin County, across from Mobile Bay, called me at The Islander newspaper office and reported some strange research being conducted on migrating birds, which were periodically trapped in nets for research purposes on their way to and from Central and South America on their bi-annual trans-Gulf flights.

Research ruffles birders’ feathers

While that first story was about my favorite in the series of about 40 stories I ended up writing about the EMPRESS II, the Electro Magnetic Pulse Radiation Environmental Stimulator for Ships, second generation, it was buried on the back page of the weekend edition in all six papers and did not get much of a reaction.

But as I continued to conduct research looking into the program, I developed something I would later call a “Red Flag Lede,” alerting the public to the danger.

Navy plans to put device off coast: Some fear electromagnetic pulse equipment will harm local environment

“Unless opposition from the public and members of the Alabama congressional delegation surfaces soon, the U.S. Navy plans to begin testing a high-voltage electromagnetic pulse device off the Alabama Gulf Coast that some think may disrupt sonar in dolphins and the migration patterns of birds, disorient endangered sea turtles and other threatened species and possibly submit humans to waves of electricity harmful enough to cause leukemia or cancer.”

That set off an investigation that resulted in a federal military program involving the use of electromagnetic pulses being defunded and placed in mothballs. I tell the whole story in my book, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

The upshot is, all my coverage set off a public furor. After that second big story my phone at the newspaper office started ringing off the hook from lawyers, activists and local property owners, worried about the value of their beach houses.

Senators, Congressmen, city councils and chambers of commerce got involved, prompting the Navy out of Pensacola to hold a public hearing in Gulf Shores to try to ease people’s concerns.

It didn’t work, but the comprehensive coverage I gave it ended up winning the Alabama Press Association’s top award in 1993 for in-depth news features in 1992.

Empress hearing draws large crowd

I also wrote a version of the story for the wire service UPI, which prompted CNN to cover it, and it ultimately got covered in USA Today and other national newspapers.

So when this Havana Syndrome story hit the newspapers, and now 60 Minutes on CBS, I decided to go back to revisit my research from back then and update it.

I remembered that one of the scientists on the panel in Gulf Shores was a researcher who was a consultant to author Tom Clancy on his spy novels. John O. deLorge even bragged about being cited by name in the dedication of the Cold War era book The Hunt for Red October, which was made famous by Ronald Reagan and later made into a movie with Alec Baldwin playing the CIA agent Jack Ryan.

When I began my research by looking up deLorge, I discovered his obituary in the online version of The Pensacola News-Journal.

“John Oldham deLorge, Ph.D., died unexpectedly on September 11, 2012, in Waynesville, N.C. He was born on December 14, 1935, to Albert and Eugenia deLorge of Jacksonville, Florida, and was one of ten children. At seventeen, John quit high school and joined the Army, proudly serving as a paratrooper. The G.I. Bill allowed John to earn a B.A. in Psychology from Jacksonville University. He later earned a M.A. from Hollins College and the Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“After teaching at the University of South Alabama, John enjoyed a distinguished research career of 25 years at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola. He retired as the Director of Research and later served as manager of an Army research facility at Brooks Air Force Base. Dr. deLorge published numerous papers on animal behavior and the effects of electromagnetic fields. He was an international consultant to both government and private institutions.”

I remembered discovering while covering the EMPRESS II controversy that there was research into using this technology to develop offensive weaponry. That is mentioned prominently in some of the stories, including this one.

Read the jump

But in the days before use of the internet became widespread and public, there was no way for me to get the information about this technology out far and wide at the time. I figured it would come out eventually.

In 1993, however, before starting my graduate education at the University of Alabama in 1994, I sat down and wrote most of a novel modeled after John Grisham’s thrillers, only instead of a lawyer hero, the protagonist was a journalist with a lawyer counterpart.

The title of my novel is “Operation Zapped.” I never tried to publish it at the time, because I moved on to conducting research into media effects on public opinion in grad school. But while spending the winter of 2020-2021 hiding from Covid in Knoxville, Tennessee, I revisted the novel and turned it into a movie or series pitch that could work on one of the streaming services such as Netflix.

Clearly the story still stands up, and now the word is out on this technology. Maybe someone would be willing to help me develop the story and get it picked up as a movie or series?

Now thanks to the internet, you too can look up the research of Dr. deLorge.

He began with titles such as, “Behavioral and Cognitive Effects of Microwave Exposure,” and the technology was tested on rats.

One of his colleagues was John D’Andrea, and some of the more recent research as of 2021 involved research into the effects on humans.

The effect of exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields on cognitive performance in human experimental studies: A protocol for a systematic review

In my novel, I had surmised that the device would ultimately end up being reduced to something the size of a hand-held phaser like the ones used on the original “Star Trek” series.

We know that a larger version of this technology exists. A weapon to mimic the electromagnetic pulse effects of an atmospheric nuclear blast was used to zap the electronic equipment on the Soviet airplanes used by the Iraqi Air Force, which crippled the planes in the airport in Bagdad during the first Gulf War and in Operation Iron Hammer in 2003. I once saw an episode about this on the Learning Channel. It featured such a device mounted in a Huey helicopter much like Marine One used by the President of the United States, and an F-4E “Wild Weasel” fighter jet equipped with “electronic warfare equipment”.

Someone, somewhere now has a smaller version of the device, and is testing it or using it on U.S. intelligence personnel and others.

I was discussing this with a colleague recently, trying to explain how the technology works. Imagine using one of these weapons to fry the electronic equipment on planes and ships and aiming at a person’s head at close range.

One of the spies interviewed on “60 Minutes” mentions noticing a suspicious white van when he was hit with a noise that crippled and partially blinded him, causing brain damage and ending his career. Another agent even recorded the sound of the device that crippled and sickened him.

Clearly such a device now exists, and much of the research for it was conducted by the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence, in Pensacola, Florida, starting at least 30 years ago.

So either the weapon is now in the hands of rogue former members of the U.S. military and/or the intelligence community, or it has fallen into the wrong hands by a country that wants to do us harm, most likely Russia or China.

It’s hard to believe it when the CIA claims it doesn’t know about this or believe it could be in the hands of a foreign power hell-bent on disrupting democracy. Vladimir Putin should be a prime suspect. I suspect a coverup. It would not be the first one in this country perpetrated by the CIA.

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.