WEBVTT 00:01.000 --> 00:04.480 BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. 00:05.320 --> 00:07.320 You're about to listen to Havana Helmet Club. 00:07.980 --> 00:11.140 New episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. 00:11.660 --> 00:16.600 But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds. 00:21.100 --> 00:27.280 Mark Polymeropoulos always thought that if his job as a CIA agent ever caught up with him, it would be under enemy fire. 00:27.280 --> 00:32.980 I was dodging rockets from the Taliban and al-Qaeda. You know, I've been in a lot of kind of hairy situations. 00:33.280 --> 00:42.840 He's an old CIA hand, a kind of silverback guerrilla version of Adam, the field agent who set off a crisis in Havana after reporting a strange sound and pressure in his bedroom. 00:43.080 --> 00:51.980 So in December 2017, I was the deputy operations chief for the CIA's Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, which is the equivalent of a one-star general in the military. 00:51.980 --> 00:59.820 He'd never been to Moscow. He set off on a 10-day area familiarization trip to meet with his Russian counterparts. 01:00.020 --> 01:09.000 Because, you know, even in the darkest days of the Cold War, you know, the CIA and the KGB had, you know, had ties. You always want to have these open ties. 01:09.500 --> 01:13.920 But he says that ahead of the trip, the Russians seemed unsure about granting him a visa. 01:13.920 --> 01:18.340 And, of course, our response is, you know, this is not an operational trip. We're not coming to spy on anybody. 01:18.660 --> 01:24.900 They're a bit cranky about it, and they finally acquiesced. But looking back, perhaps that was something I should have listened to a bit more closely. 01:25.640 --> 01:33.880 He sat in on a few meetings, tried out a Russian McDonald's, and took a selfie outside the Kremlin, two days of what he called a pleasantly boring business trip. 01:33.880 --> 01:37.880 And then, on the third night... 01:37.880 --> 01:42.760 I don't remember hearing anything, but something caused me to wake up, and I was in a considerable amount of distress. 01:43.100 --> 01:47.720 I thought it was food poisoning, because I could barely stand up. The room was just spinning wildly. 01:49.820 --> 01:52.440 He dosed up on painkillers and completed the trip. 01:52.900 --> 01:56.940 But he now had a migraine that didn't let up and found himself getting dizzy all the time. 01:56.940 --> 02:02.380 When he got back to the U.S., he went to see medical staff at headquarters. 02:03.260 --> 02:08.940 It seemed to me that it was similar to some of the symptoms I'd heard about from our colleagues at the embassy in Havana. 02:09.800 --> 02:14.340 The Havana crisis was almost a year old, and it had been headline news for four months. 02:15.080 --> 02:19.340 And, as best we can tell, the CIA were taking Havana syndrome seriously. 02:19.340 --> 02:27.980 They had closed up shop in Cuba entirely, and secured care for affected agents at a state-of-the-art facility at the University of Pennsylvania. 02:28.780 --> 02:33.360 But Polymeropolis says that the CIA medical staff refused to send him there. 02:33.880 --> 02:37.560 They put me some rudimentary tests, and they just kept saying no. 02:38.520 --> 02:40.880 He doesn't think the medical staff had any agenda. 02:41.580 --> 02:44.480 He says they just weren't willing to accept that there might be a link. 02:44.480 --> 02:50.500 Why not send you to the place that's studying this kind of thing at the moment, and they can make that decision? 02:50.800 --> 02:52.280 Well, that's the biggest question, Sam. 02:52.360 --> 03:00.080 At the end of the day, the title of my story, I'm joking, there's no book, but all I wanted to do was see a doctor. 03:01.120 --> 03:07.400 In the end, he would be counted among the Havana syndrome victims, and would become perhaps the most outspoken of all of them. 03:07.400 --> 03:15.860 But in those early days, he felt not just like he had fallen through the cracks, but that the CIA had missed something major. 03:16.800 --> 03:22.360 That what was affecting a small cluster of secretive spies in Cuba may just be the tip of the spear. 03:23.180 --> 03:27.340 And that Havana syndrome was now surfacing halfway across the world. 03:27.340 --> 03:33.540 From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club. 03:34.220 --> 03:35.280 I'm Jennifer Ford. 03:35.620 --> 03:38.860 I'm Sam Bungie, and this is Episode 6, The Thing. 03:57.340 --> 04:04.200 At the Perlman School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania, security is tight. 04:04.880 --> 04:07.740 I had a handler with me at all times for the two days I was there. 04:08.260 --> 04:11.520 It's where they developed the technology behind some of the COVID vaccines. 04:12.200 --> 04:20.780 And somewhere in this complex of buildings, there are computers holding the data about the brains of the 22 patients from Cuba, known as the Havana cohort. 04:20.780 --> 04:30.200 Back in late 2017, these American spies and diplomats were spending every day being tested at a clinic here called the Center for Brain Injury and Repair. 04:31.220 --> 04:35.060 The government had been looking for somewhere to bring the patients that could handle this kind of issue. 04:36.100 --> 04:38.260 The CIA reached out to Doug Smith. 04:38.660 --> 04:42.400 It was a holiday weekend in the summer, and I get this very strange email. 04:42.940 --> 04:50.380 Professor Smith, who has a bushy moustache that reminds me of a 1970s American TV news anchor, had been sceptical at first. 04:50.380 --> 04:52.440 I said, did they, you know, hit their heads? No. 04:52.680 --> 04:55.480 They just had some kind of a directional phenomenon. 04:55.840 --> 05:02.740 They felt something, a force, something coming from a certain direction, and they were looking for my input. 05:03.240 --> 05:10.860 Smith had his team of doctors examine the patients, each running their own balance and cognitive tests, all without talking to each other. 05:12.020 --> 05:16.980 Then, sometime in about mid-September, just down the hall here, we had the reveal. 05:16.980 --> 05:25.960 One after another, all the clinicians agreed that their experience with the patients was there was definitely something neurological there. 05:26.480 --> 05:31.280 So, a second group of doctors came to tell the patients that they were showing signs of brain injury. 05:31.980 --> 05:33.700 And they were actually very grateful. 05:33.880 --> 05:37.840 I mean, if you, you know, you think it's kind of odd, you say, we think something was damaged in your brain. 05:37.840 --> 05:44.280 We don't have direct evidence, but these changes suggest that there was something changed in the conductivity of your brain. 05:44.780 --> 05:47.060 And I think that they really appreciated that. 05:48.380 --> 05:52.120 Still, Smith told us he was clear with the patients that he didn't have all the answers. 05:52.780 --> 05:56.820 The problem with concussion is that it's not really a diagnosis as it is right now. 05:56.900 --> 05:58.540 So, concussion is really an opinion. 05:59.280 --> 06:02.480 There isn't a blood test or a scan to objectively prove a concussion. 06:02.480 --> 06:06.560 Also, the term concussion itself doesn't tell you what led to your injury. 06:06.680 --> 06:13.600 A definition of diagnosis is that the name also embodies or implies the underlying cause. 06:14.780 --> 06:20.820 So, there are over 30 official definitions of what it is, but they only ascribe to the symptoms. 06:21.840 --> 06:24.480 Smith says the patients had a sense of humour about it. 06:24.660 --> 06:27.700 They called the disorder immaculate concussion. 06:28.540 --> 06:30.060 I call it concussion without a concussion. 06:30.060 --> 06:31.820 And I said, we're really at the starting line. 06:32.640 --> 06:37.920 You know, by the time I showed up in Penn, I was averaging two to three hours of sleep a night broken. 06:38.240 --> 06:38.960 I was a zombie. 06:41.240 --> 06:47.720 Adam, patient zero of the health crisis in Havana, he says the rehab at UPenn was helping him to turn a corner. 06:48.460 --> 06:52.380 He rented an apartment in the city and went in and out of the clinic along with the other patients. 06:53.180 --> 06:54.960 He began to feel like he was on track. 06:55.500 --> 06:56.900 There was one troubling development. 06:56.900 --> 07:01.760 It began when he got the feeling that he was being trailed, coming in and out of UPenn. 07:03.360 --> 07:05.400 There was someone photographing me and then following me. 07:05.580 --> 07:10.220 It's like out of a movie, running through the city, chasing after this car to get the license plate and look at the driver. 07:10.220 --> 07:13.840 Some days he was convinced his car was being followed. 07:14.420 --> 07:18.820 Other times he says he would return home, certain that his stuff had been rearranged while he was out. 07:19.880 --> 07:24.340 Once Adam showed me a photograph that he took during this time of two men in a cafe. 07:25.040 --> 07:26.340 He says they didn't order anything. 07:26.340 --> 07:32.220 They just sat themselves next to Adam and his friend, speaking in Russian and paying him close attention. 07:33.000 --> 07:36.940 All I saw in the photo was two burly fellows looking awkwardly at the camera. 07:37.740 --> 07:40.340 But Adam has a different way of reading the world from me. 07:41.160 --> 07:47.400 He once operated in a realm where people really do follow you and where you can call a friend in the feds and run a license plate. 07:47.400 --> 07:51.680 We can't do that and we weren't able to confirm his surveillance claims. 07:52.260 --> 07:54.940 But Adam says that's what drove him out of Philadelphia. 07:56.240 --> 08:02.220 I left Penn early because the harassment got so bad and that it was just taking a toll on me mentally. 08:03.080 --> 08:08.020 Adam had a theory as to why his attackers would still be interested in him and his treatment at UPenn. 08:08.920 --> 08:11.680 Are my medical files interesting to them? Yeah, sure. 08:11.680 --> 08:19.800 You're going to try and sell it to other countries and now you've got the results showing this is what happened and, oh, by the way, we closed down the US embassy. 08:20.900 --> 08:21.640 You want to buy one? 08:22.220 --> 08:24.400 You can't get any better marketing material than that. 08:25.660 --> 08:34.400 Adam imagines that he was hit with a weapon that was still in prototype, so innovative that even his attackers were not yet fully aware of what it could do. 08:36.760 --> 08:40.080 But there isn't anything new about the idea of this sort of weapon. 08:40.080 --> 08:46.280 Almost as soon as scientists discovered that they could create energy waves, there were inventors looking to weaponize them. 08:47.060 --> 08:55.780 We came across an article from 1924 in the Scientific American that describes the promise of ray weapons as the true perennial of science. 08:56.580 --> 09:02.400 Plans were shrouded in secrecy, leaving the magazine groping in the darkness for hard evidence that they existed. 09:02.400 --> 09:09.060 But there were rumours that a French inventor had used a beam to paralyze taxicabs in Paris. 09:09.860 --> 09:14.540 Marconi and Tesla, co-creators of the radio, were both said to be on the case. 09:15.440 --> 09:22.760 Tesla claimed that his greatest invention yet would be a beam that would reduce an army to ashes and yet evade all detection. 09:22.760 --> 09:28.320 Alongside these scientists, storytellers let their imaginations run wild. 09:28.900 --> 09:36.740 Recently I came across a story that reminded me of retired CIA agent Suzanne Matthews and one of her strange experiences in Havana. 09:37.340 --> 09:41.280 I was reading the Tintin book, The Calculus Affair, to my seven-year-old son. 09:41.280 --> 09:50.600 In it, Captain Haddock, Tintin's borderline alcoholic companion, is relaxing with yet another glass of whiskey when it explodes in his hand. 09:51.360 --> 09:53.440 In the comic, there's a satisfying explanation. 09:54.240 --> 09:57.960 Outside, somewhere in the gloom, an ultrasonic weapon is being tested. 09:58.880 --> 10:00.840 This book was written in the 1950s. 10:01.380 --> 10:04.820 By then, the idea of an invisible ray gun was old hat in science fiction. 10:05.520 --> 10:07.660 It seemed to hold unlimited promise. 10:07.660 --> 10:12.220 And, as its special allure, it would be untraceable. 10:13.360 --> 10:16.360 The ray gun was the white whale of weapons inventors. 10:17.240 --> 10:20.360 Laws of physics apparently always keeping it just beyond reach. 10:21.340 --> 10:25.200 But Adam was becoming convinced that someone had finally cracked it. 10:25.800 --> 10:27.060 A deniable system. 10:28.000 --> 10:30.340 There's no evidence left that it happened. 10:30.660 --> 10:35.360 There's not a shell casing, there's not an imprint on the wall, there's not shattered glass, there's nothing. 10:35.360 --> 10:37.660 It's just, it's like nothing was ever there. 10:38.920 --> 10:44.480 Googling weapons technology was unfamiliar territory for Doug Smith at UPenn, but he couldn't help himself. 10:44.740 --> 10:48.360 I really spent quite a bit of time looking up what could possibly account for this. 10:48.640 --> 10:53.960 He was trying to figure out how his patients' experiences in Havana might be connected to their symptoms. 10:54.980 --> 11:01.480 Smith believed that if this was a weapon, the sounds almost all the patients reported hearing must be a by-product, 11:01.480 --> 11:07.480 like the sound of a gun firing, because he knew that regular sounds didn't cause the damage he was seeing. 11:08.040 --> 11:10.220 Just audible sound can't hurt the brain. 11:10.380 --> 11:14.160 It can hurt your ears if it's a high enough decibel, but it can't hurt your brain. 11:14.680 --> 11:18.300 If this was an energy weapon, the question was, what kind of energy? 11:18.820 --> 11:20.780 What other energy waves produce sounds? 11:20.780 --> 11:28.780 I looked it up, googled it, and there was some studies of people with, you know, working on sonar or radar facilities 11:29.420 --> 11:32.000 where they could hear kind of clicking or some kind of noise. 11:32.620 --> 11:38.100 Radar operators first noticed this back in World War II, when radar was still newfangled technology, 11:38.780 --> 11:41.600 using pulsed beams of microwaves to measure distance. 11:42.140 --> 11:48.280 The microwaves created sound effects that occurred only inside the operator's head, like ringing in the ear. 11:48.280 --> 11:54.740 If this was what was going on in Havana, it might explain the fact that the neighbours hadn't heard anything unusual. 11:55.440 --> 11:59.740 And of course, sounds like this would not be picked up on those recordings the patients had made. 12:00.200 --> 12:04.040 It might also account for the fact that the patients heard a wide range of sounds. 12:04.360 --> 12:08.860 Some actually described kind of a low, metallic kind of grinding sound, 12:09.100 --> 12:14.440 and others described kind of like a baffling sound, like if you're driving down the highway with the back window open. 12:14.440 --> 12:17.880 So the sound wasn't consistent with all the patients. 12:18.900 --> 12:21.080 Smith had found himself neck deep in a rabbit hole. 12:21.680 --> 12:25.940 But figuring out what had put the patients in his clinic wasn't part of the professor's remit. 12:26.120 --> 12:27.880 That wasn't really our expertise. 12:28.500 --> 12:29.900 We didn't know what that was. 12:29.940 --> 12:31.340 That wasn't part of our investigation. 12:32.100 --> 12:36.920 The team were running the command and control centre for the medical response to Havana syndrome. 12:37.700 --> 12:40.400 They were focused on rehab and getting people back to work. 12:41.160 --> 12:44.880 As Smith understood it, this was top secret for government use only. 12:45.680 --> 12:50.160 Then a few weeks into the project, Smith's contact in the government threw them a curveball. 12:50.860 --> 12:55.340 He said, I think we should make this public, which is really quite surprising to me. 12:55.340 --> 13:01.460 They wanted Smith's team to publish a paper in a scientific journal, which put them in a difficult position. 13:02.300 --> 13:07.140 Ordinarily, they would only publish after a period of careful research under very different conditions. 13:07.140 --> 13:10.880 This was never intended to be a research study. 13:11.300 --> 13:15.400 This was just intended to evaluate and treat the patients. 13:15.400 --> 13:20.880 Many on the UPenn team shared Smith's misgivings, but they rallied on behalf of the government. 13:21.660 --> 13:24.900 The UPenn paper was posted online in February 2018. 13:25.560 --> 13:30.760 It had been peer-reviewed and published in the prestigious Journal of American Medicine, JAMA. 13:31.380 --> 13:35.480 And news outlets jumped on it as an official diagnosis of a novel illness. 13:36.240 --> 13:39.260 We're discussing the mysterious illness known as Havana syndrome. 13:39.260 --> 13:43.680 The Havana syndrome is a set of medical signs and symptoms reported by the United States. 13:43.680 --> 13:46.780 It still surrounds those suffering from what's been called Havana syndrome. 13:47.340 --> 13:49.720 The actual title of the paper was less catchy. 13:50.360 --> 13:58.100 Neurological manifestations among U.S. government personnel reporting directional, audible, and sensory phenomena in Havana, Cuba. 13:59.060 --> 14:05.120 This was not a declaration that directed energy had made the patient sick, but it implied a possible connection. 14:05.940 --> 14:10.380 If the CIA had been worried about going out on a limb by withdrawing from Cuba, 14:10.380 --> 14:14.280 the paper seemed to offer the credibility of scholarly research. 14:15.140 --> 14:18.500 The U.S. government said it was a warning of an ongoing health risk. 14:19.120 --> 14:23.620 Two weeks later, the State Department made the drawdown of the Havana embassy permanent, 14:24.020 --> 14:30.440 designating Cuba an unaccompanied post, meaning no family, a measure usually reserved for war zones. 14:30.440 --> 14:34.760 From the start, this paper was controversial. 14:35.580 --> 14:39.120 Some of the criticism reflected the concerns Smith had about publishing. 14:39.760 --> 14:44.440 He didn't have a control group and no baseline testing of, say, healthy diplomats from Havana, 14:44.840 --> 14:47.680 all things he would usually have in a rigorous research study. 14:48.200 --> 14:50.520 What's more, usually papers share their data. 14:51.220 --> 14:54.280 But Smith says they couldn't do this for security reasons. 14:54.280 --> 14:59.400 So readers struggled to discern for themselves if something really was out of the ordinary or not. 15:00.160 --> 15:04.180 The information UPenn relied on to make their findings had to be taken on trust. 15:04.880 --> 15:06.600 And many weren't prepared to do that. 15:07.220 --> 15:08.140 They said it could be anything. 15:08.720 --> 15:09.940 Some more mundane sickness. 15:10.440 --> 15:11.500 A tropical virus. 15:12.160 --> 15:13.240 A problem with pesticides. 15:13.980 --> 15:15.180 That Cuban insect theory. 15:16.080 --> 15:17.460 NPR gave it all a hearing. 15:18.160 --> 15:19.040 Here's another theory. 15:19.040 --> 15:23.160 The symptoms stem from a kind of collective stress response. 15:23.160 --> 15:29.300 A few Americans heard an unfamiliar noise, maybe just cicadas, and thought it was making them sick. 15:29.700 --> 15:33.940 Through the power of suggestion, dozens of others started feeling symptoms, too. 15:34.580 --> 15:37.640 That's the conclusion of a panel of Cuban scientists. 15:38.040 --> 15:40.880 But after his evaluation, Smith doesn't buy it. 15:41.040 --> 15:46.420 There'd have to be almost like a grand conspiracy to go and research what concussion symptoms look like. 15:46.420 --> 15:51.520 Come before a group of experts and convince each one that they had an issue. 15:51.520 --> 15:55.380 And that's including going through some tests that you can't fake. 15:56.880 --> 16:03.220 If the paper was meant to support these claims of attacks in Cuba, it ended up making matters worse for the patients. 16:03.940 --> 16:06.120 They felt like they were being attacked again, almost. 16:06.660 --> 16:10.980 All these wild claims about they're all making it up or that it was something even subconscious. 16:11.560 --> 16:12.420 That bothered them. 16:13.060 --> 16:14.640 You can't say nothing happened. 16:14.640 --> 16:20.620 This is Mark Polymeropoulos, the senior CIA agent who reported being struck in a Moscow hotel room. 16:21.160 --> 16:23.040 His symptoms weren't getting any better. 16:23.300 --> 16:26.360 I had a headache for, I mean, a splitting migraine that never went away. 16:26.620 --> 16:27.900 I was feeling the pressure on my head. 16:28.160 --> 16:31.720 Occasional bouts of vertigo and occasional bouts of tinnitus, again, ringing in my ears. 16:32.080 --> 16:38.480 He'd followed the fallout in the scientific community to the UPenn paper and thought the criticism was totally unfounded. 16:38.480 --> 16:46.320 You know, how is this person at the top of their game in the espionage business at 30, 40 years old, and literally the next day they can barely function? 16:46.660 --> 16:52.800 Ever since getting back to the U.S., he says he'd been trying to persuade his bosses to send him to UPenn where he could get treatment. 16:53.520 --> 16:55.300 He says they continued to refuse. 16:55.800 --> 16:58.060 So instead of a doctor, he found a lawyer. 16:58.060 --> 17:06.880 I have been on this case now for a decade, long before the incident in Havana. 17:06.880 --> 17:13.160 This is Mark Zaid, a prominent D.C. attorney, representing whistleblowers from the intelligence community. 17:13.880 --> 17:22.060 For many years, until it was revoked during the current Trump administration, Zaid had security clearance privileges to help him investigate cases. 17:22.060 --> 17:31.040 Through his work, Zaid has established a theory that connects Havana syndrome to a shadowy history of covert directed energy use. 17:31.760 --> 17:38.560 In my view, what has been happening, although it has evolved, can trace its history literally back almost 60 years. 17:38.840 --> 17:47.400 This theory began to take shape when he took on a client by the name of Mike Beck from the National Security Agency, an intelligence wing of the Department of Defense. 17:47.400 --> 17:56.480 In 1996, when he was on a work trip with another colleague, they experienced, both of them experienced some sort of incident. 17:56.940 --> 18:01.560 The two agents had been assigned to assess surveillance at a U.S. embassy in a hostile country. 18:02.140 --> 18:10.640 While there, the agents got word from a source that they had ticked off the host government by snooping around a nearby building where they discovered a suspect device. 18:10.640 --> 18:13.100 They braced for retaliation. 18:13.760 --> 18:18.040 That night, Zaid's client believes, he and his partner were targeted in their hotel beds. 18:18.800 --> 18:21.480 The following morning, he woke up feeling like a bowl of jelly. 18:22.800 --> 18:28.640 A full decade later, both agents were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease while still in their 40s. 18:28.980 --> 18:39.260 And he ended up having to retire because he was physically, medically unable to continue to do his required work week. 18:39.260 --> 18:41.940 Zaid's client wanted his help joining the dots. 18:42.580 --> 18:53.660 And we weren't able to get him workman's compensation because we, first, we were struggling with being able to demonstrate that, in fact, he was attacked. 18:54.140 --> 18:58.960 Zaid wasn't officially told which country this incident took place in, though he has a pretty good idea. 18:59.220 --> 19:05.880 I've not been cleared to know, actually, that it was in Russia, but it makes sense. 19:05.880 --> 19:09.380 And that opened up a whole new avenue for Zaid's legal investigation. 19:10.100 --> 19:14.700 As he went deeper, it felt to Zaid like he was uncovering a history that had been deliberately buried. 19:15.580 --> 19:18.280 One day, a friend of his came by with a box of slides. 19:18.780 --> 19:20.860 Kodachrome slides. 19:21.160 --> 19:26.140 You know, the old-fashioned slides, which probably most of the people listening to the podcast don't even know what the hell they are. 19:26.340 --> 19:29.640 This is like the kind of holiday snaps thing where you stick them in. 19:29.640 --> 19:36.260 Yeah, you put it in the machine, and it's a square, and it goes around on a carousel, and, you know, these are slides. 19:36.640 --> 19:40.760 The slides are photographs someone's taken of a series of retro illustrations. 19:41.340 --> 19:45.900 They appear to be diagrams of how energy rays could be beamed from one building to another. 19:46.840 --> 19:50.340 One slide, titled infrared, shows a solid line. 19:50.340 --> 19:53.700 The other, a kind of pulsed beam, is titled microwave. 19:54.680 --> 19:57.660 Both rays are being directed at a building marked Target. 19:58.200 --> 20:02.340 And these slides are from sometime around 1970. 20:02.760 --> 20:08.600 There's no way to prove their provenance, that is, who produced them, why, when, where, and exactly what they're intended to show. 20:09.040 --> 20:14.160 You know, is it for surveillance? Is it weaponized? There's no indication at all. 20:14.160 --> 20:18.360 They even look kind of phony, like they could have been made for an art project. 20:18.840 --> 20:26.040 But Zaid says the slides belonged to his friend's father, who used to work at the CIA in the 1970s, when he says these slides were made. 20:26.820 --> 20:33.600 And at that very moment in history, the CIA was trying to get a handle on an evolving situation in Moscow. 20:33.840 --> 20:37.580 The Soviets were bathing the U.S. embassy in microwaves. 20:37.580 --> 20:39.860 It was called the Moscow signal. 20:40.720 --> 20:46.300 And it seemed to Zaid that these old slides were an artifact from a race between Russia and the U.S. 20:46.860 --> 20:50.020 You've heard of the space race, the nuclear arms race. 20:50.660 --> 20:52.020 Well, there was also the ZapGap. 20:52.680 --> 20:57.860 The American fear that in the race for a microwave weapon, the Soviets were a step ahead. 20:58.420 --> 21:01.360 Whenever you get into microwaves, you get into the unknown. 21:01.680 --> 21:06.480 The Soviets and now the Russians, I have this feeling that they've always been way ahead of us. 21:06.480 --> 21:09.800 So they're doing things that we don't quite understand. 21:10.380 --> 21:14.860 This is former diplomat Jim Shoemaker, who was posted to the Moscow embassy back then. 21:15.320 --> 21:21.080 We got in touch with Shoemaker after reading an article he wrote called Before Havana Syndrome, There Was Moscow Signal. 21:21.400 --> 21:31.960 The things that are similar about Havana Syndrome and Moscow Signal is the possibility that there's some kind of directed energy or microwave connection. 21:31.960 --> 21:39.520 And the other similarity is how initially the U.S. government simply tried to ignore the entire issue. 21:40.320 --> 21:43.260 Shoemaker told us a story that starts in 1945. 21:44.460 --> 21:49.500 Soviet schoolchildren gave a carving of the Great Seal of the United States to the U.S. ambassador. 21:50.000 --> 21:50.520 Very touching. 21:51.260 --> 21:55.140 It hung in the ambassador's Moscow residential office until 1951, 21:55.140 --> 22:00.500 when the State Department discovered that information from private meetings in that room was getting out. 22:01.180 --> 22:05.080 It turned out that the gift from the Soviet schoolchildren was fitted with a bug. 22:05.260 --> 22:10.600 It looked like a kind of a clock with one hand inside the seal itself. 22:10.600 --> 22:14.000 A technician at the residence slept with it under his pillow at night, 22:14.480 --> 22:18.220 fearful the Soviets would steal the bug back before he could unlock its secrets. 22:19.100 --> 22:20.760 There were no wires, no batteries. 22:20.760 --> 22:24.420 The Soviets seemed able to switch this on and off remotely. 22:25.220 --> 22:26.820 The Americans gave it a nickname. 22:27.080 --> 22:27.760 The thing. 22:29.840 --> 22:31.820 People didn't know quite what to make of it. 22:32.520 --> 22:37.920 That's funny because that's what they ended up calling Havana Syndrome before they came up with Havana Syndrome. 22:37.920 --> 22:39.480 No, I didn't know that. 22:42.740 --> 22:45.420 The thing was invented by Leon Theremin, 22:45.860 --> 22:47.860 here playing his most famous invention, 22:47.860 --> 22:51.800 the first ever electronic musical instrument, called the theremin. 22:53.600 --> 22:58.500 Played by waving your hands through a radio signal travelling between two brass orbs, 22:59.200 --> 23:01.440 it became a staple in sci-fi shows. 23:02.320 --> 23:05.660 But to his 1930s audiences, it must have seemed like magic, 23:06.080 --> 23:07.960 like plucking music out of thin air. 23:12.760 --> 23:17.180 Theremin was a physics professor and genius at creating eavesdropping systems. 23:17.180 --> 23:21.540 Initially working from a secret laboratory in the Gulag where he'd been imprisoned, 23:22.120 --> 23:25.780 he used infrared and then microwaves to trigger his eavesdropping devices, 23:26.260 --> 23:28.840 making the thing almost impossible to detect. 23:30.380 --> 23:34.100 It had to be operating at the time that you were trying to detect it. 23:34.500 --> 23:37.440 When it was hit by a certain frequency, it would vibrate. 23:38.060 --> 23:42.280 An American ambassador would later produce the seal and bug at a meeting of the UN 23:42.280 --> 23:45.520 to demonstrate the depths of Soviet espionage. 23:45.960 --> 23:50.340 The Soviets are really, really good at listening in on conversations. 23:50.640 --> 23:54.360 Meanwhile, across town in Moscow, another American technician 23:54.360 --> 23:59.340 discovered a low-strength microwave signal was being beamed at the newly built U.S. embassy. 23:59.340 --> 24:04.860 From across the street, from the roof of an apartment building there. 24:04.860 --> 24:09.980 By the early 60s, the Americans had established the embassy was being bombarded 24:09.980 --> 24:13.000 with low-level microwaves, more or less around the clock. 24:13.340 --> 24:13.800 But why? 24:14.500 --> 24:15.600 Was it more surveillance? 24:16.000 --> 24:17.440 Were the Soviets activating bugs? 24:18.220 --> 24:21.100 One theory was that bouncing microwaves off the windows 24:21.100 --> 24:23.320 could amplify conversations inside. 24:24.180 --> 24:27.480 The signal strength was below American safety standards, 24:27.800 --> 24:30.280 so they didn't think it was being used as a weapon. 24:30.280 --> 24:32.020 But they couldn't be sure. 24:33.040 --> 24:35.860 So in 1965, back in the U.S., 24:35.860 --> 24:39.740 they began to commission secret studies with codenames like 24:39.740 --> 24:43.260 Project Pandora, Bazaar, and Big Boy. 24:44.440 --> 24:47.420 They blasted primates with their own version of the Moscow signal. 24:48.160 --> 24:52.300 The head of that trial was excited by the possible military applications of microwaves. 24:52.840 --> 24:56.240 But his experiments were dogged by measuring errors and bad practice, 24:56.240 --> 25:00.420 poorly designed restraints, injured and even killed some of the animals. 25:01.140 --> 25:04.360 The microwaves seemed to have little effect, and the trials were scrapped. 25:04.820 --> 25:06.400 But the man in charge of them reflected, 25:07.080 --> 25:10.920 My feeling is we probably should have continued longer with the research in that area, 25:11.300 --> 25:13.440 and not necessarily concluded it that early. 25:13.940 --> 25:17.180 There were a lot of unknowns, and I don't think they were ever really put to bed. 25:18.240 --> 25:22.140 If that research had come about in order to find out whether the Moscow signal was harmful, 25:22.640 --> 25:24.560 well, the U.S. still didn't know. 25:24.560 --> 25:26.040 They wanted answers. 25:26.500 --> 25:29.120 It's just that they were still trying to keep it all a secret. 25:29.720 --> 25:34.300 You know, they had been keeping a lid on it for various policy reasons of their own. 25:35.960 --> 25:39.160 They managed to obtain some blood samples in 1965 25:39.160 --> 25:43.780 by telling staff it was research into the viruses that were a feature of Soviet winters. 25:44.380 --> 25:45.880 They learned little from those samples, 25:46.300 --> 25:49.960 but they ignored advice to install conspicuous lining on the windows. 25:49.960 --> 25:52.880 Still, word began to spread, 25:53.440 --> 25:57.900 and by 1970, the situation in Moscow had become an open secret in Washington. 25:58.820 --> 26:01.560 Henry Kissinger confronted his Soviet counterpart about it, 26:02.080 --> 26:04.740 telling him that too many people knew about the microwave signal, 26:05.120 --> 26:09.260 and the U.S. government would catch hell unless they could show they were doing something about it. 26:09.700 --> 26:10.540 The Russian replied, 26:11.040 --> 26:11.640 What signal? 26:11.640 --> 26:15.400 At this point, the State Department took an interesting precaution. 26:16.240 --> 26:19.360 Just like with Havana syndrome, they prepared a briefing note, 26:19.740 --> 26:23.800 ready should any reporter come asking awkward questions about the Moscow signal. 26:24.660 --> 26:27.500 No one did, and the briefing note was quietly filed away. 26:28.460 --> 26:33.860 They were finally found out when Ambassador Walter Stessel Jr. turned up at the end of 1974 26:33.860 --> 26:35.400 and learned of the situation. 26:35.400 --> 26:38.860 The distinguished diplomat, now heading up the embassy in Moscow, 26:39.360 --> 26:41.580 was appalled that this had all been kept a secret. 26:42.080 --> 26:44.620 Ambassador Stessel, you know, he threatened to quit, 26:44.880 --> 26:47.940 and so they allowed him to brief the staff, 26:48.080 --> 26:51.760 and that's when it all blew up, in early 1976. 26:52.840 --> 26:57.920 That year, the Soviets did finally admit that they were indeed responsible for the microwave signal, 26:58.460 --> 27:02.780 but they claimed they were using it as a countermeasure to jam American spy signals, 27:02.780 --> 27:05.200 an explanation the Americans accepted. 27:06.040 --> 27:08.960 With the story public, health concerns began to emerge. 27:09.700 --> 27:13.080 A State Department doctor reported that several members of the embassy staff 27:13.080 --> 27:18.200 displayed symptoms, including severe headaches, inability to concentrate, and fatigue. 27:18.620 --> 27:22.200 But that same doctor put the symptoms down to the psychic stress 27:22.200 --> 27:25.060 connected to the perceived threats of working at the embassy. 27:25.720 --> 27:28.140 It was in the middle of all this, with no questions answered, 27:28.280 --> 27:32.000 that Shoemaker arrived in Moscow, appointed as ambassador's aide. 27:32.000 --> 27:37.300 The thing is, it was during the Cold War, when, I guess, the sides were clearer, 27:37.540 --> 27:40.540 and when, I guess, our moral certainty was clearer. 27:40.840 --> 27:42.700 He knew all about the microwave story. 27:42.820 --> 27:44.000 He'd read about it in the papers. 27:44.560 --> 27:46.340 But he and his colleagues shrugged it off. 27:46.760 --> 27:49.260 You know, it's like you were a soldier in a war zone. 27:50.020 --> 27:53.980 You know, if the enemy hits you with a mortar or a grenade, 27:54.520 --> 27:58.140 you're not going to complain to the enemy about it or file a suit against him. 27:58.180 --> 27:59.480 You're just going to shoot back. 27:59.480 --> 28:05.000 But shortly after leaving Moscow, Shoemaker regretted his cavalier attitude. 28:05.640 --> 28:08.140 Well, I honestly didn't expect to live this long. 28:09.320 --> 28:14.460 But, you know, I'm sort of surrounded now by a platoon of doctors. 28:15.280 --> 28:19.780 During his end of tour physical in 1979, something showed up in his blood tests. 28:19.780 --> 28:24.840 Well, they told me I had a very high white count, just sort of out of the blue. 28:25.240 --> 28:34.540 I didn't know this at the time, but apparently a lot of people at Moscow were coming back from their tour with a very high white count. 28:34.540 --> 28:40.060 The State Department had established this right after Moscow's signal became public. 28:40.640 --> 28:46.360 They took blood tests, which showed that many workers had high white blood cell counts, but established little else. 28:46.720 --> 28:51.000 And their study was abandoned within the year, before Shoemaker even arrived in Moscow. 28:52.000 --> 28:57.980 Shoemaker says that an unusual number of Moscow embassy staff from that time ended up getting rare forms of cancer. 28:57.980 --> 29:01.640 There was a group of us, kind of a Moscow reunion group. 29:01.960 --> 29:03.820 We would meet once a year. 29:04.600 --> 29:07.080 And there you got to see how everyone was doing. 29:08.100 --> 29:15.020 Ambassador Stessel, having stood up for his staff's right to know, also contracted leukemia and died from it in 1986. 29:15.020 --> 29:20.560 No study has ever established a link between these illnesses and what happened in Moscow. 29:21.320 --> 29:25.180 But Shoemaker says it felt like the government could have done more to answer their questions. 29:25.840 --> 29:30.620 Without a long-term study, it was left to him and his colleagues to put it together themselves. 29:32.000 --> 29:34.860 So all you can point to is like anecdotal evidence. 29:35.420 --> 29:43.160 I have to face the reality that I went to Moscow in perfect health and came back with a high white cell count. 29:43.160 --> 29:45.060 The whole thing is just a bottomless pit. 29:45.260 --> 29:48.740 I mean, the deeper you go, you know, it's like a black hole. 29:48.840 --> 29:50.060 You never get to the bottom of it. 29:50.840 --> 29:55.720 You could read the Moscow Signal as a cautionary tale about government mismanagement of a health scare. 29:56.080 --> 30:02.100 But to that lawyer Mark Zaid, the Moscow Signal demonstrated Soviet steps towards a microwave weapon. 30:02.760 --> 30:04.560 For years, a lot of this stayed underground. 30:05.580 --> 30:08.600 In 2014, he received something interesting. 30:08.600 --> 30:15.020 He spent months trying to push the U.S. government for answers on his client who got targeted in, he suspects, Russia. 30:15.640 --> 30:17.000 Finally, he got something back. 30:17.000 --> 30:26.960 So NSA gave me a short memo, unclassified, dated October 16, 2014, that says, 30:26.960 --> 30:47.900 The NSA confirms that there is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr. Beck traveled in the late 90s with a high powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence. 30:48.380 --> 30:52.400 There's a surprising amount of detail about this weapon the NSA had heard tell of. 30:52.400 --> 31:04.520 The 2012 intelligence information indicated that this weapon is designed to bathe the target's living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system. 31:04.700 --> 31:10.960 But it went on to say there was no evidence that such a weapon, if indeed it did exist, was used on Zaid's client. 31:10.960 --> 31:17.140 So it's a very legalistic, written memo that, on the surface, says a lot. 31:18.060 --> 31:20.620 Going down deep says absolutely nothing. 31:21.920 --> 31:25.160 It wasn't the proof Zaid needed for his NSA client. 31:25.640 --> 31:30.640 But when Havana syndrome appeared, he felt sure the Russians were up to their old tricks. 31:30.640 --> 31:37.780 In September 2018, the microwaves theory went public, and the media marveled at the ingenuity of the idea. 31:38.380 --> 31:42.800 Correspondent Patrick Hartman is in Havana with details on this new twist in the investigation. 31:42.800 --> 31:50.560 In a way, you read about these weapons and these weapons programs that did exist, and it's kind of the perfect weapon because it leaves no trace. 31:50.700 --> 31:56.040 Doctors as scientists involved in the explanation are considering microwave attacks to be the main suspect. 31:56.040 --> 32:00.260 In the media, Havana syndrome was beginning to sound like science fiction again. 32:00.800 --> 32:02.940 Even Doug Smith from UPenn weighed in. 32:03.340 --> 32:10.600 Dr. Douglas Smith of the University of Pennsylvania says microwaves are one of several possible explanations for the brain network disorder. 32:10.860 --> 32:17.080 But he and his team are now conducting advanced MRI tests to study these employees' brains and see what's wrong. 32:18.060 --> 32:21.040 UPenn's neuroimaging expert was Ragini Verma. 32:21.440 --> 32:23.040 Dr. Ragini Verma, I guess. 32:23.040 --> 32:29.800 So I have a PhD in math and computer science, so I'm a quintessential Indian kid in that way. 32:30.040 --> 32:31.960 Lots of math and computer science. 32:32.220 --> 32:34.820 UPenn had already performed brain scans on the patients. 32:35.440 --> 32:38.600 Regular MRIs, the type that are used in hospitals everywhere. 32:39.000 --> 32:40.140 Those didn't flag anything. 32:40.840 --> 32:42.600 But Smith wanted to probe further. 32:43.380 --> 32:48.760 And Dr. Smith said, can you do an analysis just to make sure that we aren't missing something? 32:48.760 --> 32:52.900 He brought in Verma to use cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques. 32:53.600 --> 32:55.980 If they ever wanted to publish, they were going out on a limb. 32:56.860 --> 32:57.820 This wasn't just new. 32:58.280 --> 33:01.820 It was usually used to look for patterns among large groups of patients. 33:02.600 --> 33:04.460 Verma was looking at just 20 or so. 33:05.060 --> 33:06.720 But they figured it was worth a shot. 33:07.100 --> 33:10.620 So we put in the groups and controls and we did the analysis. 33:10.620 --> 33:17.160 And I must say that I was blown away, that there was a very significant group difference. 33:17.780 --> 33:28.020 Verma says she found a pattern, not a definite sign of injury as such, but changes, subtle ones, in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls balance and memory. 33:28.680 --> 33:32.120 She took her findings to a colleague who had worked closely with the patients. 33:32.120 --> 33:39.760 So then I reached out to Dr. Swanson and I said, we are seeing differences in this part of the brain. 33:39.920 --> 33:41.180 It's called the cerebellum. 33:42.060 --> 33:44.000 And I said, is this relevant? 33:44.540 --> 33:50.940 And he basically walked across to have a chat saying, oh my God, this is so relevant. 33:51.380 --> 33:53.260 This is where all their problems are. 33:53.860 --> 33:59.040 Verma says she noticed that in that part of the brain, the patients had lost a tiny amount of fluid. 33:59.040 --> 34:04.800 She told me about a minor eureka moment she had one day in the UPenn clinic kitchen. 34:05.600 --> 34:11.100 She was looking at a container of noodles someone had left in the microwave for too long, leaving them completely dried out. 34:11.800 --> 34:16.240 Maybe microwaves could have caused the loss of fluid in the brain scans that Verma had seen. 34:17.040 --> 34:20.000 At a high enough power, microwaves would cause injury. 34:20.820 --> 34:25.960 But as one expert put it, like a microwave oven, they'd fry the outside of your skull on the way in. 34:26.300 --> 34:28.460 So not exactly untraceable. 34:29.040 --> 34:37.100 But could a pulsed beam, short, rapid pulses of high-powered microwaves damage the brain without turning you into popcorn? 34:38.100 --> 34:45.480 It pointed back to that research that Doug Smith at UPenn had come across months earlier about those radar operators in World War II. 34:46.280 --> 34:48.140 Radar uses pulsed microwaves. 34:48.800 --> 34:52.920 And those operators reported clicking and whirring noises inside their heads. 34:53.900 --> 34:57.300 Could this explain those funny noises that people perceived in Havana? 34:57.300 --> 35:04.220 Well, in the 1960s, a biologist studied the noises that pulsed microwaves seemed to trigger. 35:05.080 --> 35:06.440 His name is Alan Frey. 35:06.860 --> 35:09.000 He's now 90 and living in Virginia. 35:09.420 --> 35:10.360 So I knocked on his door. 35:10.360 --> 35:22.280 Nowadays, most people call it the Frey effect. 35:22.760 --> 35:25.240 Frey himself used to call it a sonic delusion. 35:25.240 --> 35:29.000 This is how it works. 35:29.460 --> 35:32.200 Soft tissues in the head absorb the microwave pulses. 35:32.840 --> 35:38.060 That launches a wave of pressure that travels to the inner ear, where it activates the cochlea. 35:38.600 --> 35:40.680 It's the cochlea that absorbs sound waves. 35:40.800 --> 35:41.580 That's how we hear. 35:42.420 --> 35:46.400 But these waves come at it from the other direction, from inside the head. 35:46.400 --> 35:49.000 Like bubbles popping on top of a fizzy drink. 35:49.480 --> 35:50.820 Deaf people can hear them too. 35:51.720 --> 35:56.460 Frey and I talked a little in his front garden about how any of this might relate to Havana syndrome. 35:57.120 --> 35:58.440 I wanted to chew the fat with him. 35:59.320 --> 36:01.260 The effects Frey had documented were harmless. 36:01.760 --> 36:06.220 His experiments had all been conducted at levels way below the safety limit for microwave exposure. 36:06.220 --> 36:09.280 What would happen if you used stronger pulses? 36:09.980 --> 36:12.860 For obvious reasons, a study like that would be problematic. 36:13.760 --> 36:16.700 If anyone's done it, certainly they haven't released the findings. 36:17.460 --> 36:18.460 But what did he think? 36:19.560 --> 36:21.920 At first reluctant, he agreed to an interview. 36:22.640 --> 36:29.000 But when I called him the following morning, Frey told me a contact of his in the US government advised him not to speak on tape. 36:29.580 --> 36:31.680 He said it was all just too sensitive. 36:32.660 --> 36:33.700 Frey did say this, though. 36:33.700 --> 36:44.320 When I asked him, could the Frey effect have been weaponised and used against those people in Havana, Frey said it was a theory looking for a reality to attach itself to. 36:45.600 --> 36:46.780 It was frustrating. 36:47.480 --> 36:51.540 We'd come to the door of the man whose work the whole microwave theory rests on. 36:52.220 --> 36:53.640 And all he could offer was a shrug. 36:54.340 --> 37:00.700 On the hunt for the untraceable weapon, people told us there is a line to connect this Cold War history to Havana syndrome. 37:00.700 --> 37:07.860 But like those 1920s journalists from the Scientific American, we're left groping in the darkness for evidence. 37:08.720 --> 37:12.980 There was something quaint about this history, from the age of reds under the bed. 37:14.100 --> 37:16.380 Arthur Miller said fear doesn't travel well. 37:17.080 --> 37:21.400 What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. 37:21.400 --> 37:28.880 Next time on Havana Helmet Club. 37:30.400 --> 37:40.880 We assumed after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, you know, you had the end of history and so forth, that we never would have to face existential threats. 37:41.340 --> 37:47.900 We went to sleep for a while and we didn't pay attention financially to what we needed to provide our military with. 37:47.900 --> 37:49.540 And now the bill is due. 37:50.140 --> 37:59.920 Had I been met in fact in a halfway timely manner, especially my kids' injuries, but my injuries as well and my wife's, would not have been nearly as bad as they are. 38:00.240 --> 38:01.420 How would that make you feel? 38:01.560 --> 38:02.140 It's outrageous. 38:03.360 --> 38:03.920 Outrageous. 38:04.740 --> 38:07.360 Now it's an attack on the home front. 38:07.720 --> 38:11.080 Now it's, wow, everyone is vulnerable. 38:11.080 --> 38:18.560 If folks are easily targetable, what's to stop whoever this is from doing it to the President of the United States? 38:19.240 --> 38:25.540 I don't think anything accidental happens to American diplomats in hostile countries. 38:25.540 --> 38:32.220 From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club. 38:32.620 --> 38:35.520 Listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds. 38:35.700 --> 38:44.980 If you want to be notified when the latest episode drops, make sure you're subscribed to Havana Helmet Club on BBC Sounds and have push notifications turned on. 38:45.440 --> 38:51.440 While you're waiting for the next episode, you can check out even more gripping investigations with intrigue on BBC Sounds. 38:51.440 --> 38:55.000 One of our all-time favourites, The Rat Line, is on that feed. 38:55.400 --> 39:01.780 It came out a few years ago now, but it's such a great series because of Philippe Sounds' extraordinary personal connection to the story 39:01.780 --> 39:06.000 and because he weaves a plot that's as satisfying as any John le Carré thriller. 39:06.600 --> 39:08.760 There's lots of other great series to discover too. 39:09.380 --> 39:11.380 Just search Intrigue on BBC Sounds. 39:14.600 --> 39:20.220 Havana Helmet Club is written and presented by Sam 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