Congress to look at intelligence agencies’ handling of Havana Syndrome investigation
Following complaints by some of the U.S. officials affected by what came to be known as Havana Syndrome, the House Intelligence Committee will open a formal investigation into how U.S. intelligence agencies handled the inquiry into the mysterious incidents and why they concluded the ailments were likely caused by stress and other factors and not by an attack by a foreign adversary.
Sara Robertson, a spokeswoman for Arkansas Republican Rep. Rick Crawford, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the panel has looked into the incidents, first reported in late 2016 in Havana, for quite some time and is “transitioning this to a formal investigation, and they are expecting Intelligence Community components to be responsive in their requests.”
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Crawford sent a letter to the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, informing her of the investigation. According to the report, the inquiry would look into “improper suppression” of information about the incidents between intelligence agencies and between the executive branch and Congress.
Robertson said most of the content of the letter is classified.
A former U.S. official affected said he and other victims had provided testimonies to the Committee in the last two months.
Last week, two members of the intelligence committee, Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup and Virginia Democrat Abigail D. Spanberger, introduced a bill requiring that the Secretary of Defense brief the Armed Services committees in the Senate and the House about the Defense Department personnel affected by the “anomalous health incidents,” the government term for the Havana Syndrome-related events.
In March 2023, seven unnamed U.S. spy agencies published an assessment concluding that “there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing” Havana Syndrome. The CIA compensated some of its officials affected in Havana and elsewhere even though the assessment disputed the doctors’ findings that the victims suffered injuries similar to a concussion.
The U.S. and Canadian officials affected by the incidents, first in Havana, then in Russia, Europe, China and even Washington, D.C., said they heard noises or felt pressure coming from a specific direction. They also developed debilitating symptoms like migraine, memory loss, ear pain and cognitive problems.
Victims of the incidents have been urging Congress for years to investigate further, expressing dismay at the slow response by some U.S. agencies to provide medical treatment and at an assessment they view as wrongfully dismissing their ailments.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA deputy chief for operations in Europe and Eurasia who said he got sick in Moscow during one of those incidents, called the congressional investigation “long overdue.”
“It is high time that Congress take its oversight role seriously on the issue of attribution” of the incidents, Polymeropoulos said. “I’m glad to see whistleblowers and intelligence community officers come forward to Congress, as the intelligence community investigation was terribly flawed and suffered from bias. The unit involved, in fact, mocked the victims and showed a lack of compassion. To me, that was a betrayal from colleagues.”
He added: “How can it be that the U.S. government compensated us for an injury that they also claim did not ever happen?”
After the intelligence agencies made public their conclusions, former CIA officials who had been affected, Canadian diplomats who got sick in Havana and scientists in contact with the patients pointed to several discrepancies and omissions in the studies commissioned by different government agencies to understand the nature of the incidents and the ailments they caused.
A Miami Herald review found that the studies followed different methodologies and used limited data, which would make it difficult to draw conclusions by academic standards. Much of the information is classified and out of reach even for some of the scientists involved in figuring out what happened. The assessment also prioritized findings from one study over the others with little explanation. The agencies writing the evaluation also disagreed with each other regarding how sure they were about some of the conclusions they made.
In conversations with reporters, senior intelligence officials have said they could not intercept conversations by Russia or other adversaries that would implicate them in the incidents. The New York Times suggested that weighs heavily against suspicions about Russia as a possible culprit because American spy agencies “had penetrated Russian military and intelligence services so thoroughly that they knew many details of the Russian invasion plan for Ukraine.”
However, intelligence experts said such a conclusion would imply that the United States can know everything that Russian intelligence services are doing. Yet Russia is known in the spy world as a “hard target” — a hostile place where gathering intelligence is challenging.
In the intelligence assessment published last year, two of the seven unnamed agencies said they had “low confidence” in concluding that an adversary was unlikely responsible for the incidents, citing “collection gaps” and their review of the evidence.
Adding to the confusion, a report declassified after the assessment was made public and written by experts convened by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA concluded that commercially available devices known as directional loudspeakers or acoustic lasers could be behind the unexplained health incidents causing Havana Syndrome.
This story was originally published February 16, 2024 at 3:57 PM.