WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:04.480 BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. 00:05.140 --> 00:07.160 You're about to listen to Havana Helmet Club. 00:08.000 --> 00:11.160 New episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. 00:11.680 --> 00:16.600 But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds. 00:17.520 --> 00:22.500 Just to let you know, this episode contains very strong language and may not be suitable for all audiences. 00:22.500 --> 00:37.380 More than 20,000 people work at the CIA, and as many have collected a paycheck from that tell us, the agency doesn't speak with one voice. 00:38.260 --> 00:42.800 Adam reckons there's always been some who just wanted this whole thing to go away. 00:42.800 --> 00:51.820 It was more than a month after he first raised the alarm in Havana that one CIA physician, Dr. Andrews, took it upon himself to help. 00:51.820 --> 00:55.520 He was the first one that got me out of Cuba, and I say he saved my life. 00:56.080 --> 00:57.480 Then he was sent to Cuba, was hurt. 00:57.700 --> 01:02.120 So then they brought in a younger doctor, and he told me his job was to make this go away. 01:02.800 --> 01:05.740 He looked at me, couldn't do it, then became our advocate. 01:06.200 --> 01:07.820 So then they brought in a guy above him. 01:08.340 --> 01:09.720 His job was to make it go away. 01:09.800 --> 01:11.780 We called him the squeaky fan guy, you know. 01:11.880 --> 01:15.640 Oh, they're hearing squeaky fans, or the fans causing cancer, or whatever. 01:15.740 --> 01:21.140 The theory that American officials were being targeted with a secret weapon required massive action. 01:21.140 --> 01:27.320 But if it turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, then you might be able to get away with doing, well, nothing. 01:27.980 --> 01:34.820 In the beginning, agency cynics waved away the problem in vague terms, saying the Havana agents were being dramatic or paranoid. 01:35.660 --> 01:38.700 But then they gravitated towards a more specific explanation. 01:39.600 --> 01:45.380 The explanation floated back at that controversial conference organized by Cuban scientists in 2020. 01:46.000 --> 01:49.860 But Adam and his fellow victims were like the young girls of Salem. 01:49.860 --> 01:58.160 At one point, one of these doctors was walking around with Salem witch trial papers to convince the seniors at the CIA that we were crazy. 01:59.820 --> 02:06.460 That's how far it was going, to the Salem witch trial papers, to say that this was mass psychogenic illness as their proof. 02:07.160 --> 02:10.560 You know, it just, it got so laughably egregious. 02:10.980 --> 02:16.180 Adam says this talk of hysteria was spread by Cubans as part of a disinformation campaign. 02:16.180 --> 02:25.980 But now his own people had latched on to the idea, apparently beginning to wonder whether the answer to Havana syndrome mightn't require a thorny confrontation with Russia, 02:26.280 --> 02:28.300 or a hunt for a mystery weapon after all. 02:28.680 --> 02:32.000 The fact that that ended up getting pushed in the press, I mean, we knew it was coming. 02:32.140 --> 02:34.120 It just, it took longer than I think we thought it would. 02:34.700 --> 02:35.520 I'm Sam Bunky. 02:36.020 --> 02:37.100 I'm Jennifer Ford. 02:37.100 --> 02:40.860 And this is Havana Helmet Club, Episode 9, Squeaky Fans. 02:56.600 --> 03:02.140 The problem is, you look at these people and they are indifferent as far as how they look. 03:02.280 --> 03:03.540 They look like you and me. 03:03.540 --> 03:09.460 This is Mark Zaid, the Washington, D.C. attorney who'd come to represent many of the victims of Havana syndrome. 03:10.120 --> 03:16.940 And most of them remain high-functioning up to a point. 03:17.460 --> 03:19.700 2021 was a busy year for Zaid. 03:20.200 --> 03:22.700 It's the year that Havana syndrome went truly global. 03:23.320 --> 03:24.800 There were cases in Kyrgyzstan. 03:25.060 --> 03:25.440 Vienna. 03:25.980 --> 03:28.300 India, a suspected case in Australia. 03:28.980 --> 03:30.060 Bogota's on the list. 03:30.060 --> 03:36.180 Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Vietnam was delayed because of a suspected outbreak on the ground in Hanoi. 03:36.680 --> 03:44.060 I mean, I don't think there's any place that I know of as a potential attack that I don't necessarily represent clients from at this stage. 03:44.700 --> 03:47.720 Havana syndrome was affecting more branches of the U.S. government. 03:48.060 --> 03:50.940 The NSC, the DOD, the Chamber of Commerce. 03:50.940 --> 03:55.700 Invariably, a ton of them are all working on issues that relate to Russia. 03:56.120 --> 04:01.820 That year, Politico reported that Havana syndrome had been detected on every continent except Antarctica. 04:02.460 --> 04:09.540 I think the most urgent and important issue facing the workforce today are the terrorizing attacks that are happening globally. 04:09.960 --> 04:12.980 This is Congressman Eric Swalwell at a congressional hearing. 04:12.980 --> 04:19.980 This is going to be a response that is beyond, if it's a foreign country, just closing down a couple of consulates. 04:20.220 --> 04:25.200 That it is going to have to be a very, very severe response. 04:25.580 --> 04:33.880 After the diplomatic confusion of the first Trump administration, with some officials blaming Russia while the president seemed to have a strange affection for Putin, 04:33.880 --> 04:37.980 a Biden government offered new hope for the Havana syndrome victims. 04:38.740 --> 04:41.060 A constellation of agencies was put to work. 04:41.560 --> 04:42.640 Some were looking for the weapon. 04:42.980 --> 04:45.300 Others were trying to figure out a medical diagnosis. 04:46.180 --> 04:52.300 The new director of the CIA, Bill Burns, declared he had assigned the case to one of the agents who hunted down bin Laden. 04:53.060 --> 04:58.180 There was an unconfirmed report that Biden had even raised the issue with Putin at a conference in Geneva. 04:58.180 --> 05:01.360 But some had picked up on a subtle shift. 05:02.020 --> 05:06.240 In official documentation, the government had stopped using the word attack. 05:06.920 --> 05:14.100 Even the Havana Act, a bill brought in to provide medical care for the victims, seemed unclear about who it was actually for. 05:14.860 --> 05:21.300 Some of these folks are being sent to different military medical institutions for treatment, 05:21.300 --> 05:30.440 but they are not being acknowledged as real victims for a variety of political, institutional reasons. 05:30.780 --> 05:36.360 Cover your ass, protect my reputation CIA reasons. 05:36.980 --> 05:38.560 It's a total mess. 05:38.860 --> 05:43.400 Instead of attacks, the official term changed to anomalous health incidents. 05:43.400 --> 05:47.720 The victims began to worry that alongside the tough talk of some officials, 05:48.420 --> 05:53.180 others were trying to reframe this, not as a security issue, but as a health issue. 05:53.800 --> 05:58.300 At a State Department press briefing, an NBC journalist challenged the official line. 05:58.680 --> 06:02.600 With all due respect, with all that you say has been done, 06:03.360 --> 06:10.300 there has been criticism from a number of victims of what they don't call anomalous health incidents, by the way, 06:10.300 --> 06:15.920 because they think that diminishes and disparages what they are suffering. 06:16.480 --> 06:19.320 There was a worrying trend on the rise in the media, too. 06:20.060 --> 06:24.500 New agents and diplomats broke cover to speak publicly about their ongoing problems, 06:25.000 --> 06:27.240 appearing on CNN and MSNBC. 06:27.980 --> 06:29.620 60 Minutes ran another special. 06:30.100 --> 06:32.800 But all this exposure had an unintended consequence. 06:33.880 --> 06:37.520 In certain corners of the internet, these stories came in for ridicule. 06:37.820 --> 06:39.520 Too many mojitos last night? 06:39.520 --> 06:41.160 You may have Havana syndrome. 06:41.840 --> 06:43.120 Yeah, I got Havana syndrome. 06:43.520 --> 06:44.820 Having another cold beer. 06:45.260 --> 06:45.880 That sort of thing. 06:46.580 --> 06:49.120 The left-wing political podcast, Chapo Trap House, 06:49.520 --> 06:53.220 spent a lot of time sarcastically analyzing the coverage of Havana syndrome. 06:53.820 --> 06:57.160 The host sounded particularly suspicious of a story of a military officer 06:57.160 --> 06:59.560 overcome by nausea and headaches in his car, 06:59.960 --> 07:02.220 while his child began to cry in the back seat. 07:02.660 --> 07:04.400 I don't know what more evidence you need. 07:04.500 --> 07:06.760 This is invisible death race, clearly. 07:06.760 --> 07:11.580 I mean, I can't think of any other thing that would account for having a headache 07:11.580 --> 07:15.760 or being nauseous in traffic, or having a two-year-old child cry in a car. 07:16.660 --> 07:19.500 The hosts, who were generally strongly anti the CIA, 07:20.260 --> 07:22.220 wondered if these were the complaints of a generation 07:22.220 --> 07:25.040 who just weren't as tough as their Cold War predecessors. 07:25.040 --> 07:28.520 I like the idea that, like, these are millennial spooks who are just like, 07:28.640 --> 07:33.040 I'm tired and, like, coming up with bogus diseases to get out of doing work. 07:33.440 --> 07:33.880 Yeah. 07:34.140 --> 07:35.460 I have a microwave syndrome. 07:35.620 --> 07:36.480 I can't come in today. 07:36.800 --> 07:38.760 That's the next Ferris Bueller's Day off. 07:38.760 --> 07:43.780 You can't see any physical manifestation. 07:44.260 --> 07:45.420 Here's Mark Zade again. 07:46.240 --> 07:53.200 And that absolutely has contributed to the difficulty in getting people to believe 07:53.200 --> 07:55.800 that these people are real victims. 07:56.260 --> 07:58.800 Some of the victims have made public comments where they're like, 07:58.860 --> 08:02.440 I wish I had been shot so I can show you the bullet wound. 08:02.440 --> 08:06.720 We have witnessed enough of the pain and suffering of victims to tell you 08:06.720 --> 08:08.500 their symptoms are life-changing. 08:09.440 --> 08:14.700 I mean, I saw it recently with a client who was brilliantly articulate, 08:14.900 --> 08:17.600 other than a few gaps in their statements. 08:18.560 --> 08:24.300 And then, all of a sudden, it was as if they were a puppet 08:24.300 --> 08:28.320 and the person holding the strings just dropped them. 08:28.960 --> 08:31.040 I've never seen anything like it. 08:31.040 --> 08:32.840 I never saw that transformation. 08:33.360 --> 08:34.800 Literally, it was like a light switch. 08:35.460 --> 08:37.800 These victims say they had to fight tooth and nail 08:37.800 --> 08:39.500 for the medical attention they received. 08:40.340 --> 08:43.980 Take Mark Polymeropoulos, the veteran operative affected in Moscow. 08:44.820 --> 08:47.440 I remember, you know, sobbing in a hotel room with my wife. 08:48.260 --> 08:50.780 I just, you know, and I couldn't, and then at that point, 08:50.820 --> 08:52.080 I'd lost my ability to drive. 08:52.240 --> 08:53.800 I lost my long-distance vision. 08:54.200 --> 08:57.180 So I was really going down the drain in the toilet, 08:57.180 --> 09:00.120 and again, the medical staff at CIA was not helping me at all. 09:00.120 --> 09:06.340 It was almost three years between Polymeropoulos first reporting his experience in Moscow to the CIA 09:06.340 --> 09:10.260 and finally being granted access to care at Walter Reed Hospital, 09:10.640 --> 09:12.880 who were now handling suspected cases. 09:13.640 --> 09:17.640 And he says those doctors diagnosed him with mild traumatic brain injury 09:17.640 --> 09:20.600 caused by an external exposure event. 09:20.600 --> 09:24.940 But his health had become so bad that back in the summer of 2019, 09:25.600 --> 09:27.680 Polymeropoulos had taken early retirement. 09:27.680 --> 09:33.580 I had a lot of adversaries over the years, whether it's, you know, Al-Qaeda or, you know, Hezbollah or, 09:33.780 --> 09:36.040 you know, Saddam Hussein. 09:36.180 --> 09:39.040 I mean, I was involved in so many different fights and conflicts. 09:39.280 --> 09:41.700 Like you say, perhaps your luck had run out. 09:41.820 --> 09:45.800 I think that's what, I mean, I really, it's, you know, it just is. 09:46.460 --> 09:50.940 As he told us, he's been shot at and rocketed at many times over the years. 09:51.640 --> 09:54.760 Maybe these symptoms were showing from injuries picked up during combat. 09:55.240 --> 09:55.900 That's nonsense. 09:56.140 --> 09:57.520 I mean, there's nothing on my medical records. 09:57.660 --> 10:00.000 I've had physicals out the wazoo. 10:00.100 --> 10:03.140 I mean, you know, I get poked and prodded all the time for every deployment. 10:03.640 --> 10:04.700 So no, there's nothing there. 10:04.900 --> 10:07.860 I wish there was a pre-existing condition because you could treat it. 10:08.360 --> 10:11.540 Or there's, I don't know, there's, you know, there's some environmental thing. 10:11.640 --> 10:11.920 Good. 10:12.380 --> 10:13.260 Then you get treated. 10:13.400 --> 10:14.020 I don't care. 10:14.060 --> 10:14.960 I just want to feel better. 10:15.380 --> 10:16.400 He loved his job. 10:16.400 --> 10:21.480 He finds it hard to reconcile his situation with the claims that he and the other patients 10:21.480 --> 10:23.800 might have somehow brought this on themselves. 10:24.380 --> 10:26.700 So why would it, so what would it be? 10:26.780 --> 10:30.760 A psychogenic, you know, reaction, this idea of kind of mass hysteria. 10:31.080 --> 10:32.960 But I wasn't even thinking that when I went there. 10:33.320 --> 10:38.100 The thing on all this is like it just, the entire debate misses the point that people are really suffering. 10:40.280 --> 10:43.240 For a long time, it was officially known as hysteria. 10:43.240 --> 10:49.620 But by 1980, that term was considered so toxic, it was dropped from psychiatry's diagnostic manual. 10:50.580 --> 10:53.000 Instead, people called it conversion disorder. 10:53.780 --> 10:56.040 There's also psychogenic or psychosomatic. 10:57.040 --> 10:59.600 Many now prefer functional neurological disorders. 11:00.600 --> 11:03.980 But all the name changes have failed to outrun old assumptions. 11:04.880 --> 11:09.780 That functional illness is a delusion that affects only the weak, poorly educated, 11:09.780 --> 11:13.220 or, like those in Salem, teenage girls. 11:13.800 --> 11:18.560 It's nothing to do with education or being intelligent or unintelligent. 11:18.960 --> 11:20.680 This is Dr. Susanna Sullivan. 11:21.340 --> 11:24.360 She's a neurologist based at University College London Hospital, 11:24.740 --> 11:27.840 who works with what people now call functional illness. 11:28.500 --> 11:33.940 I do think it made a difference in the Havana subjects because they were educated, 11:33.940 --> 11:38.820 well-traveled people, and not all young women. 11:39.240 --> 11:42.660 And I think that made people think that they were less likely to be affected. 11:43.100 --> 11:46.200 Whereas really, there's absolutely nothing protects you. 11:46.540 --> 11:49.120 It can happen to absolutely anybody. 11:50.060 --> 11:53.740 O'Sullivan talked to us about the struggle to agree on terms for these illnesses. 11:53.740 --> 12:00.220 The changing of names in order to destigmatize these conditions has been done for a very long time 12:00.220 --> 12:01.960 and has been done many, many times. 12:02.620 --> 12:04.500 And in my opinion, it doesn't work. 12:05.080 --> 12:09.420 So I stick with words like psychogenic and hysteria 12:09.420 --> 12:14.040 because history suggests that sanitizing a name only works 12:14.040 --> 12:17.460 for as long as people don't know what that new name means. 12:17.460 --> 12:25.920 I think to destigmatize these conditions, we need to normalize the mind-body interaction. 12:26.380 --> 12:29.160 If I'm nervous, my heart beats faster. 12:29.600 --> 12:32.800 Now, you would not say to me that my heart was beating faster on purpose. 12:32.980 --> 12:34.680 I have no control over that. 12:35.180 --> 12:37.040 You wouldn't say I was imagining it. 12:37.400 --> 12:39.880 And you wouldn't say to me you could stop that if you wanted to. 12:40.780 --> 12:44.240 O'Sullivan stressed she hasn't met or examined the patients from Havana 12:44.240 --> 12:46.760 or any of the other places caught up in this story. 12:46.760 --> 12:50.340 It's just that what she read of the symptoms that people were experiencing 12:50.340 --> 12:52.580 didn't seem all that foreign to her. 12:53.140 --> 12:55.260 Problems with balance and concentration. 12:55.980 --> 13:01.180 You know, our concentration is very, very easily disrupted by small things. 13:01.820 --> 13:05.620 Our balance is very easily disrupted by small things. 13:05.900 --> 13:10.940 Walking along a cliff edge or walking in some place where you feel like there's danger. 13:10.940 --> 13:16.920 So paying attention to your body is detrimental to the automatic quality of movement 13:16.920 --> 13:21.820 and detrimental to those filtered out sensations that are supposed to be filtered out. 13:22.400 --> 13:23.800 I mean, I understand all that. 13:23.900 --> 13:29.200 It's just how do you get from that to, you know, talking about these patients from Havana, 13:29.740 --> 13:34.980 that they have to sit in dark rooms, they can't think properly anymore. 13:34.980 --> 13:37.780 It is astounding, but it is also incredibly common. 13:38.200 --> 13:41.500 Often there's a kind of a looping effect where symptoms are additive. 13:42.160 --> 13:46.960 So you start out with one small symptom, which is, you know, that you feel dizzy. 13:47.700 --> 13:51.440 And then you think, well, you know, am I okay walking? 13:51.740 --> 13:55.040 And then you start noticing you're walking and your walking becomes unstable. 13:55.040 --> 14:01.140 And you see a doctor and your doctor says, well, do you have any bladder difficulties? 14:01.140 --> 14:03.520 Or I'm randomly picking symptoms now. 14:03.600 --> 14:10.040 But doctors then put emphasis on particular things and say, now, now pay attention to this thing. 14:10.600 --> 14:16.300 Next things are being suggested to you by doctors and by family members and by your own research 14:16.300 --> 14:17.520 and by your own anxiety. 14:17.520 --> 14:24.540 So all of these sort of internal and external looping factors often cause a progression of disability. 14:25.060 --> 14:27.820 And it is usual for there to be lots of symptoms. 14:28.280 --> 14:30.420 It's not usual for there just to be one. 14:31.340 --> 14:34.060 O'Sullivan has her own story from when she broke her foot. 14:34.700 --> 14:38.520 Even once the cast was off, she convinced herself it hadn't healed properly. 14:39.280 --> 14:40.400 My foot was so wasted. 14:40.580 --> 14:43.960 I just thought it looked more than it should be. 14:43.960 --> 14:47.800 And I went through sort of a period where I thought, that can't be right, that can't be right. 14:47.880 --> 14:52.600 And I limped down to my doctor and said, I want, you know, you need to x-ray that again 14:52.600 --> 14:53.820 because there's something wrong with it. 14:54.300 --> 14:56.560 And the x-ray was totally fine. 14:56.580 --> 14:57.720 And I walked home normally. 14:58.180 --> 15:02.660 So it doesn't matter if you're a doctor and you understand how bodies work. 15:02.840 --> 15:09.660 If you have a sufficiently vivid picture in your mind of something happening inside your body 15:09.660 --> 15:12.060 that doesn't seem right, then you're vulnerable. 15:12.060 --> 15:13.400 In fact, we're all vulnerable. 15:13.400 --> 15:16.040 We just need to meet the right circumstance. 15:17.880 --> 15:22.460 Professor Simon Wesley is a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King's College London. 15:23.120 --> 15:28.180 He's studied how symptoms like O'Sullivan is talking about can spread in a group and become an epidemic, 15:28.780 --> 15:31.920 often known as mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. 15:32.900 --> 15:36.860 Like O'Sullivan, he's careful to point out that he doesn't know what happened in Havana. 15:37.460 --> 15:41.340 But he says the elements of the saga seem to follow a pattern he's familiar with. 15:41.340 --> 15:44.760 He can list the makings of an outbreak like a good recipe. 15:45.420 --> 15:46.640 A good name is important. 15:46.980 --> 15:48.840 That does seem to make a difference, I'm afraid. 15:49.420 --> 15:50.400 Add a plausible explanation. 15:51.400 --> 15:52.320 Absolutely essential. 15:52.920 --> 15:58.500 And the more technological it is, it seems to have more traction than if it doesn't. 15:58.920 --> 16:02.680 Throw in a tense environment and, crucially, he says, a good villain. 16:02.680 --> 16:13.100 Like Putin, or indeed the situation in Cuba where, you know, there's a long history of tension, you know, between the Cuban regime and America. 16:13.500 --> 16:15.340 So you need that setting. 16:15.820 --> 16:21.960 If you don't have that setting, most of these things will probably just sort themselves out of their own accord. 16:21.960 --> 16:31.660 But with a plausible villain, things can get much more intense quite quickly. 16:32.240 --> 16:38.860 Wesley says looking at the context and background is often key to picking out cases of mass psychogenic illness. 16:39.580 --> 16:46.580 He told us a story from the rural town of Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944, as World War II raged. 16:46.580 --> 16:54.500 Many, many years ago, more than I care to remember, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this story called the Phantom Gasser of Mattoon, 16:54.980 --> 17:04.580 in which in a relatively closed, isolated rural communities, rumours started to spread that there was a gasser or a phantom anesthetist, 17:05.180 --> 17:07.020 who was called in the local press, on the loose. 17:07.460 --> 17:12.380 Somebody reported that they'd been sprayed by a poison gas of some shape or form. 17:12.380 --> 17:17.420 A local newspaper report told of the first victim noticing a strange smell in her bedroom. 17:18.100 --> 17:23.740 What she initially thought was the scent of flowers drifting in through the window became steadily overpowering. 17:24.300 --> 17:28.800 She tried to move, but found herself temporarily paralysed and screamed for help. 17:29.680 --> 17:34.840 One theory was that chloroform had been sprayed in through the window in a fine mist. 17:35.240 --> 17:41.280 This then caught on for all sorts of reasons, and more and more people started to report the same thing. 17:41.280 --> 17:47.160 And then it became a big story, and vigilante groups went out looking for this Phantom Gasser. 17:47.640 --> 17:51.520 Headlines in the local press, Mad Gasser yet to be found, etc., etc. 17:52.200 --> 17:56.260 There were sightings of a possible assailant, a tall, thin man. 17:56.880 --> 18:03.140 And there was speculation he might be the fugitive Nazi who'd recently escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Illinois. 18:03.140 --> 18:17.960 But the people affected, you know, really believed they'd been attacked, and the symptoms they had were fits and faints, were noticed by doctors, so, you know, verified by doctors, who didn't necessarily agree with the cause. 18:18.280 --> 18:21.900 But that they were sick and in real trouble could not be denied. 18:21.900 --> 18:28.840 Wesley says, with the backdrop of the Second World War, the general public was primed for poison gas attacks. 18:29.420 --> 18:34.620 You had to walk around with a gas mask in Britain, and also people forget in America as well. 18:35.440 --> 18:41.240 So the thought that this was an early Nazi attack was there. 18:41.680 --> 18:47.120 And people were very, very frightened of what poison gas could do with genuine reasons. 18:47.120 --> 18:50.000 So this rumour had some cachet. 18:50.580 --> 18:52.680 Wesley can reel off a list of these stories. 18:53.240 --> 18:58.700 Illness spreads as word goes round a tight-knit community or a profession that you too may be at risk. 18:59.120 --> 19:07.800 Sick building syndrome starting in Scandinavia, you don't hear much about that now, but was quite a big issue 30 years ago. 19:08.560 --> 19:12.760 Concern over computer screens, so new technology, again. 19:12.760 --> 19:18.240 Like mobile phones or wind turbine syndrome had a kind of flourishing for a while. 19:18.740 --> 19:20.440 So, yes, we get these things. 19:21.000 --> 19:25.680 Wesley says that what connects these events is that they're often reported in the press as mystery illnesses. 19:26.560 --> 19:32.600 Because of the stigma, it's as if people have to relearn over and over that mass psychogenic illness could be an explanation, 19:33.340 --> 19:35.600 even when no one can agree on another cause. 19:35.600 --> 19:43.980 There's often a sort of a very strong sort of association with there must be something, there must be something. 19:44.120 --> 19:49.460 And no matter how hard people are looking for the something, the something can never be found. 19:50.340 --> 19:55.960 Suzanne O'Sullivan thinks it's important to put the possibility of functional illness on the table from the start. 19:55.960 --> 20:00.720 I think an old-fashioned way was that it was a thing called a diagnosis of exclusion, 20:01.260 --> 20:06.640 which means that basically you look for every other possibility and two years down the line when you've done 10 scans 20:06.640 --> 20:11.320 and you found all of the tests were negative and therefore you're running out of options 20:11.320 --> 20:13.740 and therefore you think, oh, it must be psychosomatic. 20:14.380 --> 20:21.280 We now know that's a wrong approach because the sooner you treat psychosomatic symptoms, 20:21.440 --> 20:23.460 the better chance they have of getting better. 20:23.460 --> 20:28.980 In her clinic, O'Sullivan has come across people who've lived with the wrong diagnosis for many years, 20:29.600 --> 20:32.920 starting out on a unit diagnosing difficult-to-treat seizures. 20:33.340 --> 20:38.860 I expected to be working entirely with epilepsy and there were four beds in that unit 20:38.860 --> 20:44.620 and, you know, at least 50% of the people I admitted to hospital on any given week 20:44.620 --> 20:47.780 who came into hospital because they believed they had epilepsy, 20:48.060 --> 20:52.140 they tried lots of epilepsy treatments and the epilepsy treatments weren't working. 20:52.140 --> 20:55.760 Possibly for decades, did not have epilepsy. 20:56.420 --> 21:01.780 O'Sullivan says seizures caused by psychological distress can so closely mimic those caused by epilepsy 21:01.780 --> 21:05.060 that they get mistaken all the time, even by paramedics. 21:05.640 --> 21:08.320 She also pointed out that they can be no less debilitating. 21:09.020 --> 21:10.640 I'll give you an example. 21:10.780 --> 21:15.080 So I met a young woman and she was actually having about 100 seizures a day, 21:15.200 --> 21:16.220 which is unbelievable. 21:16.220 --> 21:18.380 You couldn't possibly live your life that way. 21:18.560 --> 21:19.680 Did you see her having seizures? 21:19.940 --> 21:21.660 Yes, I saw her having seizures in the office. 21:21.780 --> 21:24.220 She had multiple seizures during our conversation. 21:25.020 --> 21:29.540 She did not really believe that the problem was psychosomatic, 21:29.860 --> 21:31.520 but she didn't have to believe. 21:31.960 --> 21:36.080 Something in the conversation I'd had with her that asked her to change her expectations 21:36.080 --> 21:39.100 worked at the same unconscious level as the disorder. 21:39.100 --> 21:43.000 And I met her a week later and the seizures had gone down to 10 a day. 21:43.400 --> 21:45.800 And all I had done was have a single conversation. 21:47.440 --> 21:51.480 There's a whole other dimension, which is that actually the commonest trigger for a functional disorder 21:51.480 --> 21:54.060 is an identifiable physical illness. 21:54.400 --> 21:58.220 This is Professor John Stone, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh. 21:58.500 --> 22:03.140 Our brains have an amazing capacity just to get stuck at a certain moment in time. 22:03.140 --> 22:05.500 And then they just can't get unstuck. 22:06.000 --> 22:10.280 Stone says he was still a trainee neurologist when he first started coming across patients 22:10.280 --> 22:14.640 with functional illnesses and found that most were being totally ignored. 22:15.060 --> 22:20.180 So these are people in neurology who have problems like paralysis of their leg 22:20.180 --> 22:21.740 or they have tremor or seizures. 22:23.240 --> 22:27.880 And my experience was that they would be accused of being bogus 22:27.880 --> 22:32.300 or he said it was all in their mind or it wasn't a problem for neurology. 22:32.300 --> 22:34.220 The tests are normal, goodbye. 22:34.780 --> 22:39.480 The patient might get referred to a psychiatrist who wouldn't deal with the physical symptoms 22:39.480 --> 22:42.080 and they'd often end up falling between the cracks. 22:42.700 --> 22:47.320 And I just couldn't understand why people weren't more interested in them 22:47.320 --> 22:51.020 because they clearly had the problems that they were experiencing. 22:51.540 --> 22:56.080 When Stone began to write papers describing these disorders and how to diagnose them, 22:56.580 --> 22:58.220 he got pushback within his field. 22:58.680 --> 23:01.520 Senior neurologists were coming up to me rather concerned 23:01.520 --> 23:03.220 that I was putting these things in print, 23:03.840 --> 23:08.280 which tells you something about neurologists' attitude to these patients as well. 23:08.380 --> 23:12.260 There has always been a sort of ambivalence about whether they really had the things 23:12.260 --> 23:14.120 that they were complaining of. 23:14.500 --> 23:15.700 It was confusing to him. 23:16.200 --> 23:19.940 He was finding it hard to square the large numbers of people with functional disorders 23:19.940 --> 23:21.240 that neurologists see. 23:21.440 --> 23:22.600 There's loads of these patients. 23:22.700 --> 23:25.820 It's one of the commonest things, commonest conditions that we're referred. 23:25.820 --> 23:28.940 With the widespread ambivalence in his field, 23:29.420 --> 23:32.340 there hadn't even been anything about these patients in his training. 23:32.980 --> 23:34.720 But he made a fascinating discovery. 23:35.480 --> 23:37.040 It wasn't always this way. 23:37.540 --> 23:39.960 If you opened a neurology textbook from 1890, 23:39.960 --> 23:46.820 there was a huge section on hysteria with lots of information about how to make a positive diagnosis, 23:46.820 --> 23:49.380 what caused it, and actually what to do about it. 23:49.860 --> 23:54.340 The symptoms they had of their leg dragging or their hand clenched in a fist 23:54.340 --> 23:57.360 or having a seizure are the same. 23:57.740 --> 24:01.500 And when I read these books by a neurologist in the 19th century, 24:01.560 --> 24:05.760 they're describing exactly the same problems that I see in my clinics. 24:05.760 --> 24:08.860 And all of that knowledge just sort of disappeared. 24:09.640 --> 24:10.440 So what happened? 24:11.000 --> 24:13.460 How did this illness fall out of the neurology textbooks? 24:14.080 --> 24:18.000 Well, you can make a good case that the turning point came in World War I. 24:18.640 --> 24:22.580 You had doctors in 1914, from September, October onwards, 24:22.660 --> 24:25.820 who were puzzled by troops coming back from the battlefields. 24:26.220 --> 24:27.320 This is Edgar Jones, 24:27.480 --> 24:31.180 a professor in the history of medicine and psychiatry at King's College, London. 24:31.780 --> 24:33.620 Because they were coming back with fatigue, 24:33.620 --> 24:35.400 that they weren't able to function. 24:35.400 --> 24:37.860 They'd have aches and pains, difficulty concentrating, 24:38.640 --> 24:42.060 poor memory, being confused, dizziness, 24:42.620 --> 24:44.600 not being able to make decisions quickly. 24:44.760 --> 24:47.000 So all the things that a soldier has to do on the battlefield, 24:47.580 --> 24:50.840 becoming very vulnerable and not being a trustworthy soldier. 24:51.720 --> 24:55.880 And yet they didn't seem to be suffering from an established known pathology, 24:55.960 --> 24:57.640 an illness that they could put their finger on. 24:57.920 --> 25:00.640 Some thought the men might have been exposed to a toxic gas. 25:00.920 --> 25:03.980 Others thought it was caused by blast waves from shells. 25:03.980 --> 25:07.360 That people were getting some post-concussive injury, 25:07.360 --> 25:11.900 that this was a consequence of this new industrial war, 25:12.220 --> 25:15.260 the intensity of the artillery bombardments. 25:15.260 --> 25:18.720 People talked about it being like a concussion without a concussion, 25:18.720 --> 25:21.340 and worried that with numbers on the rise, 25:21.340 --> 25:24.960 whatever was going on was taking effective troops off the front line. 25:24.960 --> 25:28.340 The fear was that it was something that hadn't been seen before. 25:28.340 --> 25:31.580 So if they didn't understand what the processes were, 25:31.720 --> 25:36.920 you would find that your army was being slowly eroded by casualties, 25:37.540 --> 25:42.040 where mysterious symptoms, no obvious treatment, 25:42.720 --> 25:45.400 and no way of thinking of how on earth would we prevent it 25:45.400 --> 25:47.180 happening to troops that we're sending out. 25:47.180 --> 25:50.920 The question of what to do with these soldiers became a national conversation, 25:51.140 --> 25:53.560 attracting interest from doctors of all backgrounds. 25:54.060 --> 25:58.980 You get physicians, you get surgeons, public health doctors, 25:59.540 --> 26:04.340 all very interested in what is then beginning to be spoken about as shell shock. 26:04.780 --> 26:09.280 British psychologist Charles Myers was the first person to document cases of shell shock. 26:09.680 --> 26:14.560 He's clearly able to show that there's something going on in their minds 26:14.560 --> 26:18.500 that's causing these symptoms, that they're not a direct effect of wounds, 26:19.140 --> 26:23.660 that this is to do with the stressor that they've been through 26:23.660 --> 26:26.680 and the impact that's had on their physical function. 26:27.420 --> 26:30.400 The British opened special units for these men in London hospitals 26:30.400 --> 26:32.360 with a brand new approach to treatment. 26:33.100 --> 26:38.320 A hospital which treated psychological illnesses as a branch of medicine, 26:38.440 --> 26:39.340 as a physical illness. 26:39.700 --> 26:42.740 This work was challenging people's understanding of hysteria. 26:42.740 --> 26:46.700 It was no longer an affliction just for women or troubled individuals. 26:47.420 --> 26:49.020 Now there was a new possibility. 26:49.640 --> 26:54.520 The possibility that even the most robust, highly trained individual, 26:55.380 --> 26:58.160 the best soldier, you know, you could possibly have, 26:58.240 --> 27:00.680 if you put them through extreme repeated trauma, 27:01.140 --> 27:03.380 they will ultimately suffer from shell shock. 27:03.760 --> 27:05.940 But this presented a threat to the war effort. 27:06.660 --> 27:10.340 The army couldn't have large numbers of men taking long spells in hospital, 27:10.340 --> 27:14.300 and they worried that it would become an escape route from the front line. 27:14.860 --> 27:19.120 It was at this moment that the British army committed what should perhaps go down 27:19.120 --> 27:21.560 as the original sin of functional illness, 27:22.120 --> 27:26.380 when they latched onto a new way of thinking in the hopes of shaming men back to the front line. 27:26.380 --> 27:38.180 There's no sort of space in between for psychology, for psychological wounds. 27:38.300 --> 27:42.700 So you're either a brave wounded soldier, or you're a coward. 27:42.960 --> 27:45.480 So the army turns against shell shock as a term, 27:45.840 --> 27:51.280 and they say, from now on, summer 1917, you can't use that term. 27:51.280 --> 27:57.800 And so, instead of this being a breakthrough moment in understanding the connection between mind and body, 27:58.420 --> 28:00.940 John Stone says everyone just stopped talking about it. 28:01.160 --> 28:06.640 The whole episode was kind of a bit of an embarrassment, I think. 28:07.280 --> 28:12.000 They were a bit embarrassed about the fact this had happened to all of these British soldiers. 28:13.060 --> 28:20.600 And after that, you could see interest from certainly within neurology really evaporated very rapidly. 28:21.280 --> 28:26.100 Freud picked it up, declaring he could fix all these problems with a good chat on the couch. 28:26.360 --> 28:31.320 Freud had said on his theory that this is entirely about, you know, how you were brought up, 28:31.780 --> 28:33.760 or your sexuality, or whatever. 28:34.340 --> 28:37.500 So it was a classic disorder of the mind. 28:38.020 --> 28:39.080 Simon Wesley again. 28:39.440 --> 28:45.500 And so, and a lot of other things were swept up into, it is all in the mind. 28:46.260 --> 28:50.300 And of course, that's not, it is rather more complicated than that. 28:50.600 --> 28:56.140 If you concentrate purely on the psychological, or you concentrate purely on the biological, 28:56.360 --> 29:04.140 you miss out the fascinating and extraordinary workings of the two. 29:04.840 --> 29:09.340 None of these experts could be certain that functional illness explained Havana syndrome. 29:09.340 --> 29:16.180 But they were concerned that misunderstanding and stigma had led others to dismiss the possibility out of hand. 29:17.260 --> 29:21.220 When Susanne O'Sullivan read about the Havana patients in the first UPenn paper, 29:21.660 --> 29:23.700 she found some of the language unhelpful. 29:24.340 --> 29:29.620 For example, the paper said that the patients were different from many sufferers of group functional disorders, 29:29.980 --> 29:33.580 because they were not faking their symptoms and they were eager to return to work. 29:33.580 --> 29:37.860 So it really implied that people with psychosomatic symptoms don't want to work. 29:38.540 --> 29:41.660 Most of my patients are incredibly hardworking and conscientious. 29:42.020 --> 29:46.540 So it's, you know, it's pretty offensive to suggest that they're just lazy people. 29:47.080 --> 29:53.400 This is a story in which experts, in weapons, security, politics, brain injury, functional disorder, 29:53.400 --> 29:56.720 have to be careful to keep their professional bias in check. 29:57.120 --> 29:59.120 To a hammer, every problem is a nail. 29:59.120 --> 30:04.600 Well, I will say on, I want to say on your recording as well, that I've, I've not met any of these patients. 30:04.740 --> 30:07.320 I don't know what's wrong. 30:07.440 --> 30:11.300 I wouldn't, it'd be unprofessional of me to say that what's wrong with them. 30:11.900 --> 30:17.280 Johnstone sees a way that functional illness can explain the lasting symptoms the patients are suffering from. 30:17.640 --> 30:18.780 They're common in his clinic. 30:19.460 --> 30:23.060 He even says that functional illnesses can show up on brain scans. 30:23.800 --> 30:26.160 And so he thought it should just be in the conversation. 30:26.160 --> 30:28.940 And he wrote to the paper's publishers to say as much. 30:29.580 --> 30:31.040 I just wanted to highlight it, really. 30:31.320 --> 30:35.020 The idea that they could have a functional disorder should be on the table. 30:35.880 --> 30:38.500 What if there was no one outside Adam's apartment? 30:39.140 --> 30:41.020 Or Mark Lenzi's Guangzhou high-rise? 30:41.560 --> 30:44.880 Or moving in the service chase of Dr. Andrew's hotel bathroom? 30:45.820 --> 30:48.740 It was a seductive idea, neat in its own way. 30:48.740 --> 30:54.580 And this is precisely why Adam thinks those voices in the CIA were gravitating towards the theory. 30:55.240 --> 30:59.600 Just as the specter of a weapon had been useful for anti-Cuba hardliners, 31:00.180 --> 31:05.280 hysteria might be irresistible to those who now saw an issue spiraling out of control. 31:06.080 --> 31:11.580 But if they were looking for a way out of a hole, as far as Adam was concerned, this wasn't it. 31:11.580 --> 31:18.320 You're telling me that all these specialists across the United States can't tell the difference 31:18.320 --> 31:24.780 between a psychosomatic episode and actual fucking brain damage? 31:26.920 --> 31:30.460 It doesn't even pass the sniff test. 31:31.160 --> 31:34.420 He does suspect in some cases there was other stuff going on. 31:34.840 --> 31:39.040 So are there people that are in the field that have had a freakout? 31:39.040 --> 31:43.120 As Havana Syndrome went global, all sorts of things were lumped in. 31:43.540 --> 31:44.560 Probably, yeah. 31:44.820 --> 31:45.700 Are there sight cases? 31:45.940 --> 31:46.980 Yeah, 100%. 31:46.980 --> 31:47.640 I know some. 31:48.180 --> 31:51.360 Are there pre-existing condition cases? 31:52.080 --> 31:52.560 Yes. 31:53.180 --> 31:57.880 Pitti says there are core cases who had experiences that you can't explain away. 31:58.240 --> 32:02.080 I'd get up on a chair and I'd look over the wall behind my house, 32:02.140 --> 32:04.460 which was an empty U.S. Embassy home. 32:04.460 --> 32:09.880 And the way I describe it, if you go to the ocean and you sit behind a seawall, 32:10.060 --> 32:14.980 you know, there's no wind or very minimal, but if you pop your head up, it just blasts you, you know. 32:15.280 --> 32:20.940 And that was the feeling when I was doing the recordings, is, you know, 32:21.020 --> 32:24.040 down here, I'm all right, and up here, it's like, holy shit, something, you know, 32:24.100 --> 32:26.640 this is very intense, whatever is hitting me. 32:27.080 --> 32:30.920 As it turns out, this didn't make sense to John Stone either. 32:30.920 --> 32:35.200 There seemed to be some very unusual experiences that people had, 32:36.320 --> 32:40.420 which are way out of the domain of a functional disorder. 32:40.520 --> 32:43.740 Someone saying, you know, I went behind a pillar and I didn't feel something, 32:43.880 --> 32:47.140 and I came back from the pillar and then I could, there was a buzzing. 32:47.400 --> 32:52.020 He began corresponding with Dr. Kenneth Foster, a microwaves expert in Pennsylvania. 32:53.040 --> 32:57.540 At one time, Foster was a vocal skeptic of the pulsed microwave weapon theory. 32:57.540 --> 33:03.760 Back in 2019, he told a reporter that for all the evidence of a brain-frying microwave weapon, 33:04.200 --> 33:07.820 you might as well say little green men from Mars were shooting beams of energy. 33:08.540 --> 33:11.640 But now he and Stone were having a more nuanced conversation 33:11.640 --> 33:14.720 that allowed Stone to put forward another theory. 33:15.440 --> 33:17.100 I said, you don't need to have a brain injury. 33:17.200 --> 33:21.800 Is it possible to just make people, give people an unpleasant symptom? 33:22.120 --> 33:24.240 And he said, oh yeah, you could give someone an unpleasant symptom. 33:24.240 --> 33:28.820 I said, well, that's all you need to do to be a trigger. 33:29.300 --> 33:34.700 So I think it's quite possible that somebody could have been pointing something at somebody. 33:35.360 --> 33:37.580 Oh, I didn't expect you to say that. 33:37.860 --> 33:40.880 All it had to do is cause a slightly alarming symptom 33:40.880 --> 33:46.180 for it to have triggered in some people a persistent illness state. 33:46.180 --> 33:51.780 So for all I know, people have been pointing something at somebody. 33:52.420 --> 33:57.080 Classic cases of mass psychogenic illness revolve around an imagined boogeyman, 33:57.560 --> 34:00.780 the devil in Salem, the mad gasser in Mattoon. 34:01.400 --> 34:04.240 But in Stone's vision of Havana at the end of 2016, 34:05.060 --> 34:08.440 hysteria struck, and so perhaps did the thing. 34:08.440 --> 34:11.300 Next time on Havana Helmet Club. 34:11.820 --> 34:15.720 I am convinced that the evidence that exists in the classified arena 34:15.720 --> 34:19.880 directly contradicts the public conclusions expressed by federal agencies 34:19.880 --> 34:23.060 as to the origin, cause, and scope of AHIs. 34:23.200 --> 34:25.460 You know, there are things that I can't say because it'd be illegal, 34:25.680 --> 34:28.220 but there's so much more out there. 34:28.600 --> 34:29.920 It's like the iceberg, right? 34:29.920 --> 34:31.520 You only see a third of the iceberg. 34:32.040 --> 34:33.260 Two-thirds of it is below. 34:33.840 --> 34:36.680 If you have video, if you have recordings, if you have evidence, 34:36.800 --> 34:40.520 if you've got travel data, if you've got the medical data that backs up 34:40.520 --> 34:43.180 what the recording data is, like, I don't understand. 34:43.460 --> 34:44.780 What do we need? 34:45.000 --> 34:49.420 What is the threshold that we need for someone to say this is real? 34:54.620 --> 34:57.900 From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club. 34:58.340 --> 35:01.260 Listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds. 35:01.260 --> 35:04.560 If you want to be notified when the latest episode drops, 35:05.000 --> 35:08.460 make sure you're subscribed to Havana Helmet Club on BBC Sounds 35:08.460 --> 35:10.660 and have push notifications turned on. 35:11.160 --> 35:14.780 Havana Helmet Club is written and presented by Sam Bunke and Jennifer Ford 35:14.780 --> 35:16.500 and edited by Guy Crossman. 35:16.720 --> 35:19.960 Our story editor is Mike Olive and our producer is Larry Ryan. 35:20.440 --> 35:22.480 Jesse Baker is our editorial advisor. 35:23.280 --> 35:25.360 Additional editing by Simon Pearce. 35:25.860 --> 35:27.780 Original music by Tom Pintons. 35:27.780 --> 35:29.800 Sound design by Meryn Royards. 35:30.200 --> 35:31.760 And mix by Joe McDonnell. 35:32.080 --> 35:34.700 Commissioning editor for the BBC is Dylan Haskins. 35:35.160 --> 35:38.440 Assistant commissioners are Sarah Green and Natasha Johansson. 35:38.920 --> 35:43.580 Havana Helmet Club is a yarn production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. 35:43.580 --> 35:52.640 In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, 35:52.860 --> 35:55.540 the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers. 35:56.040 --> 35:59.700 Men and women accused of passing information to the police and the British Army. 35:59.920 --> 36:03.980 But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA 36:03.980 --> 36:05.780 was himself an informer. 36:06.040 --> 36:09.420 A secret British Army agent with the codename Steak Knife. 36:09.420 --> 36:12.500 These were police agents, but that defined other agents. 36:12.760 --> 36:15.980 Just how was one man allowed to lead a double life for so long? 36:16.100 --> 36:17.160 It's not like James Bond. 36:17.360 --> 36:19.180 It's not a black and white situation. 36:19.340 --> 36:22.480 When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? 36:22.820 --> 36:24.820 I wouldn't even know where to start and I'm with the IRA. 36:25.120 --> 36:25.720 Steak Knife. 36:26.020 --> 36:27.840 Listen now on BBC Sounds.