Rubio seeks additional care for CIA and State employees suffering the ‘Havana syndrome’
Following the publication of a report by the National Academies of Sciences concluding that directed microwave energy may have harmed U.S. officials in Cuba and China, Republican senators Marco Rubio and Susan Collins filed a bill Tuesday that would ensure the victims receive proper health coverage.
The legislation would authorize additional compensation for CIA and State Department officials, and their dependents, who suffer brain injuries resulting from those mysterious incidents. Though widely reported, this is the first official acknowledgment that CIA agents were also harmed after traveling to Cuba and China.
“As we investigate the source of previous microwave attacks and seek to prevent them from occurring in the future, this legislation would provide additional financial assistance to Americans who were injured and continue to experience debilitating symptoms,” said Collins, who serves on the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence.
According to a statement announcing the bill, more than 40 diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Havana and at least a dozen diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China, were affected with ailments including dizziness, tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo and cognitive difficulties.
But the State Department has only publicly confirmed 26 cases in Cuba and one case in China. Some of the victims hired D.C. attorney Mark Zaid to fight for compensation and have complained that they had to pay for expenses linked to their treatments.
Zaid welcomed the proposed legislation, but said the changes would not cover personnel from other agencies who might have been the victims of similar attacks in other countries.
“This legislation will fill in some gaping holes and is a positive first step, but it appears the bill fails to take into account the breadth of prior injuries sustained by other federal employees such as at the Departments of Defense and Commerce who worked alongside CIA and State Department officers,” he told the Miami Herald.
He also asked for more transparency because four years after the first reported incident in Havana the public still doesn’t know the results of FBI and other agencies’ investigations.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
“Congress needs to push for greater transparency from the Executive Branch as to what it knows about these incidents,” Zaid said. “Sometimes even more valuable than compensation is knowledge, and hopefully Congress will hold public hearings soon.”
A 19-person committee that investigated the clinical data of the victims for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the State Department concluded that the set of symptoms, which came to be known as the Havana syndrome, is “unlike any disorder in the neurological or general medical literature” and is “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radiofrequency (R.F.) energy,” most likely microwaves.
“The absence of reporting of a heating sensation or internal thermal damage may exclude certain types of high-level R.F. energy,” the report says.
In late 2016, U.S. Embassy employees in Havana started reporting loud noises or pressure coming from a specific direction, followed by dizziness, vertigo, headaches, visual problems and cognitive impairment, among other symptoms. The incidents repeated well into 2017. The embassy personnel has been drastically reduced since.
In 2018, the State Department also evacuated staff reporting similar symptoms at the consulate in Guangzhou.
“As of June 2020, many of these personnel continue to suffer from these and/or other health problems,” the National Academies’ report says.
No foreign power has been identified as the culprit, but American intelligence officials suspect Russia was behind the attacks, several media outlets have reported. The Cuban government has vehemently denied any involvement.
Although the State Department switched wording and now labels the events as “incidents,” Rubio and other committee members co-sponsoring the bill refer to the incidents as attacks by foreign adversaries. They also blamed Cuba and China for not protecting U.S. diplomats.
“Both the regimes in Havana and Beijing have failed, under international treaties, to protect the safety of foreign diplomats on their soil,” said Rubio, who is the acting chairman of the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence.
The illness has mystified the doctors who treated the victims at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Miami. UPenn doctors found evidence of mild brain injury consistent with a concussion but without the victims having suffered blunt head trauma.
In a later study, UPenn doctors abandoned the concussion theory but found brain changes in 40 people affected while stationed in Havana.
U.M. doctors, who saw patients at the onset of acute symptoms, believed the balance and cognitive dysfunctions presented by these patients were primarily linked to damages to the inner ear’s vestibular system.
Both teams and the NAS dismissed collective hysteria as the primary cause of the symptoms, a hypothesis promoted by the Cuban government and other scientists with no direct knowledge of the cases. The NAS report also excluded pesticides as the cause of the outbreak, a theory proposed by investigators from Dalhousie University in Canada. They looked into the medical records of Canadian diplomats in Havana who also reported similar symptoms to those of U.S. diplomats.
Follow Nora Gámez Torres on Twitter: @ngameztorres
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 7:23 PM.