C (9:51)

Right?

A (9:51)

So he's late 90s, and then we start really hearing about havana syndrome almost 20 years later. But actually, cases were happening in the middle. Just there was a lot of issues. First off is the cases were isolated, so it wasn't like a bunch of people being hit in the same location repeatedly. Also, there was poor documentation. And really none of this was even shared publicly. There was a lot of situations where it was handled internally in one agency and not shared across agencies, even if they all had officers serving in the same location. And then they never linked all the cases together. So in those cases, we had intelligence officers and diplomats that reported sudden head pressure, disorientation, cognitive changes, and balance issues. They weren't in some sort of explosions. They didn't really have visible injuries. Of course, there was no easy attribution to what they were experiencing. There was no name at the time for what they were going through. Nobody clustered all these cases together. And. And then, because there was no, like, adversary, anybody was thinking about the cases just went into a medical file or even maybe went into a classified drawer, and we really didn't hear anything about them. And this is how you get these early warning signs and you miss them. Right? I mean, that's a failure, and we should be looking at how we mess it up then. So then we move to what everybody now knows. This was in 2016, and everything changed. This, of course, was happening in Havana. And this is the time now. Multiple people being intelligence officers and diplomats were being hit by what seemed like some sort of energy weapon. They began reporting repeatable incident. They weren't vague symptoms. They were similar in description to each other. They weren't stress induced. And this is the time when people said I was perfectly fine. And then a second later, I felt something and I no longer was better. Now when we talk about what happened in Havana, I just kind of want to walk through at least how a situation would occur so you understand it. So I'm an intelligence officer, and I'm sitting in the home that's rented for me, you know, while I'm serving in Havana, I hear a strange noise. It's a little metallic and it's like directional towards me. And then I feel intense pressure in my head. And then I'm hit almost immediately with the feeling of vertigo. Now then I'm like, okay, I got to get out of this room. So I leave the room, it stops. But then I go back into the room and it happens another time or my colleague who lives down the street, the same thing happened to them. And this just keeps occurring over and over to officers serving there. After this, pattern recognition was shared and understood as it was occurring. And in Havana, as you can imagine, other people started waking up and being like, wait, wait, wait, I'm experiencing those same side effects or symptoms. Or I had this onset of this pressure, you know, where my residence was. And that's kind of when everything flooded in. And that's when we got all the cases and realized, even though we're calling this Havana Syndrome, and it's occurring in a number of locations. So another location occurred in was China. And their diplomats reported dizziness, headache, cognitive issues. And in that case, some of their families were even affected. Then we had Vienna. Dozens of reports came out of Vienna. A lot of them focused on intelligence officers. They had severe neurological symptoms. And then, of course, career ending. I mean, there were times CIA couldn't even fill important roles in Vienna because people didn't want to take the risk of going there. Now then we had it happen here on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C. and that's why this is so important to explain to people. This doesn't just occur over oceans. This has happened here in D.C. it was reported at multiple people's residences. They had the same symptoms, this sudden on state of this pressure. And now remember, we're in different countries. These people are working different missions, but they're having the same neurological symptoms. That's not how stress behaves, but it is how a weapon does. Let's talk through some of these patterns. I want to be clear about what's repeatable across a lot of these cases. Because there's dozens of these cases. So. So here's what we're seeing. A lot of the victims are American, but there's some from allied powers. But everybody's usually in a senior role or an intelligence capability, or they're working as kind of some sort of security official. Like a lot of these people have access to the most sensitive information. And a number of them, of course, have security clearances. Then we have the fact that these symptoms happened suddenly there wasn't other medical issues going on. And it compounded. It was just I was feeling perfect and then I wasn't. And then as we kind of clustered some of these locations for you, the same symptoms were occurring in the same locations. Right. Repeatable pattern. And the symptoms then stopped or lessened when that exact moment wasn't happening. But in most, if not all of the cases, the injuries persisted long after they left these locations they were serving in. Let's go back to D.C. for a second. I told you, these incidents happened at the residences. So they weren't happening at embassies or like the CIA building. This was happening in people's homes. I mean, this is a very scary thing when you think about it. But also when you're home, you're not at the same level of stress when you're working. So even some of that argument around, oh, these people just can't manage your stress is foolish. And we have to explain how this weapon works so you really understand it. I'm going to take a moment and just walk through it as simply as possible. When people hear directed energy, they think of lasers and science fiction. But that's not what we're talking about here. How the symptoms are playing out with Havana Syndrome, it's believed to be a radio frequency or a microwave based weapon. But what it's doing is it's pulsing now. It's not continuous, it's not random. It's this pulse that's really important to explain and understand. So how our brain operates, it's using electrical impulses, and then every thought, every moment, every memory relies kind of on these pulses traveling between our neurons.

B (18:02)

I think the easiest way for a layperson to understand what particularly rapidly pulsed microwaves could do is to think about something like WI fi connections in a cellular phone. So if you were to take your phone and put it in the microwave oven for a second or two seconds, you would take the phone out and structurally it would look fine. It would seem that it would be working just fine for you on some levels. But the actual sophistication of that phone would have been changed as a consequence of the microwave damage. And not only will it change then, but that change is durable and characteristically progressive.

C (18:39)

That's what a directed energy weapon attack does.

B (18:42)

Yes, ma'.

A (18:43)

Am.

C (18:43)

It fundamentally disrupts the brain network.

B (18:45)

Yes, ma'.

A (18:46)

Am. Now imagine this for a second. You're sitting on your couch and you're thinking, you're trying to concentrate, and there's like this tap on the wall. It's not a continuous tap, but there's a tap and then another tap, and then maybe five seconds later, another tap. And each tap, when it happens, like, throws your concentration completely off. Well, now imagine that the same thing is happening, but it's happening in your nervous system. Like, that's what we're talking about. That's what Havana syndrome is. So this energy or this pulse isn't something that leaves like burns on your skin. You don't get, like radiation poisoning. It doesn't even show up in an X ray. But what it does, it disrupts your neural signaling, it damages the blood brain barrier, it causes vestibular dysfunction, and it triggers long term neurodegeneration. So, I mean, these are massive effects if you just think of that list of four things. Now that's why, though, when we talk about those parts of the brain, you get victims saying, oh, I had sudden head pressure, I felt vertigo, I became very confused, I had memory loss, my balance was just out of control. All of that makes sense for what's being hit. And if you look at an mri, it looks completely normal. And I want people to understand that this is a functional injury. It's not like blunt trauma to a person. That's a very difficult thing for people to understand when we're talking about this type of injury because it's not easily understood. Now here's a critical point. Russia has openly researched this technology since the Soviet era. Now, it wasn't secret, it wasn't some hypothetical thing. I'm talking about open source Soviet and Russian papers and literature that they actually put out. Here's some of the things they put out. Information on psychological effects of RF energy. Remember, these are unclassified behavioral disruption, non lethal incapacitation. They're literally telling you this is what they've been working on for years. And then when we go back to Michael Beck's NSA letter, you know, it really confirms that the US was well aware of this occurring and being available since the 90s. So that's not theory, that's an acknowledgment they gave to him. So this is, of course, then when we talk about failure, failure is of course, going to enter the story, because if our intelligence community was aware of this since the 1990s, and we still have people being impacted by this and 2025, this is a huge problem.

C (22:05)

It's been deeply concerning throughout this period, from the first time this was discovered so long ago to where we are today, that the intelligence community still has failed to identify the source and the cause for Havana Syndrome, as it's commonly known, even as many people who are in service are suffering the consequences of it. I look forward, if confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, to addressing this, of course, making sure that those who have been impacted are getting the care that they need and deserve, but getting to the truth behind how and why this has occurred. Do you. Do you. Are you saying that we're not any closer to understanding where these came from? Based on my understanding, there has not been any definitive reporting from the intelligence community on the source and the cause for these anomalous health incidents.

A (22:59)

And I want to walk through how this problem has unfolded. First off, our government didn't do some sort of unified strategy against this problem, which already starts off bad. So investigations were fragmented, right? Some organizations did them, some didn't, some had funding, some didn't, some got funding pulled. There's no constant funding to deal with this. The other thing is agencies worked in silos. They weren't sharing the findings or even the cases that were happening. Can you imagine that? You work in an embassy and there's people from two different organizations and they're feeling the exact same effects, and those two organizations aren't even sharing the information with each other. How are you going to solve this? Another thing is a lot of public statements came out from the government that really, really downplayed in a horrible way. In a lot of cases, it really came out like, oh, people are imagining these side effects and these symptoms, which is foolish, when we're saying that this goes back to the 1950s. There's real cases that we're aware of that caused harm since the 1990s. Now, why would the government not share the truth? I mean, I honestly almost laugh when I say that because we all know the government doesn't share the truth. One of the things is, if it does, it actually has to really acknowledge that US Personnel were targeted and then that they did nothing to protect them. I mean, think about that for a minute. They sent you to a location knowing this weapon has been directed at other people, and they did nothing or put no safeguards in place to protect you. I mean, this is a huge liability. Another thing is if they make a real determination of who's causing this, it forces a de escalation. It becomes a problem between two nations. Another thing is it emits a massive security failure. We can't stop this. We don't know where it's coming from. We haven't given you some tool to measure it yourself or protect yourself from it. Then of course, the last piece that our government is horrible at is it really requires accountability. It requires people saying, yeah, this is really, really bad. We have to decide what is causing this, who is responsible, and we have to prevent it from happening. And then we have to protect all of our people who have already been harmed by this. Many of them now on disability and, and will never work again. There's so many avenues to this problem because the government really hasn't dealt with it. Now what happens is when you ask the government about Havana Syndrome, or AHI as they like to call it, they just go, we don't know, we don't know what it is, we don't know who's causing it, et cetera. And that's just a very, very frustrating thing if you think about it. And that isn't denial, right? They're not saying it's not happening. They're just doing enough ambiguity so it leaves the issue hanging and there's no real action. Now I want to walk through then, when you're a victim, like, how does this end up looking. Well, you're first fighting for care because you have a government kind of stuff saying, oh, this is in your head, and not even really being honest that this causes real neurological damage. You then have to fight for some sort of recognition of your symptoms. So obviously insurance or somebody will cover these effects that have occurred to you. And then in a lot of cases, you're fighting for disability support from an employer who isn't even being clear that that disability came from, from serving the government. So it's this constant fight for these victims while people are literally dying.

C (27:21)

Merriam Webster defines gaslighting as psychological manipulation that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts. Did the CIA gaslight you?

A (27:34)

It was designed to make us think ourselves are crazy and to question our own injuries. When you hear the term cover up in the government, a lot of people think like secret meetings in dark rooms, but this is actually what it looks like. This is basically something that's like bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility, right? This isn't my problem. We don't know what this is, we don't know who's responsible. This is medical. We can't touch people's medical records. It's very interesting. I want to walk through the pattern of how we've seen this play out. We'll get these medical teams that say, well, I looked at these patients and this isn't a classic injury. Then you'll get the intelligence agencies that focus and instead on the culprit. And they're like, oh, we can't attribute accountability, or we're not conclusive about who did this. And then you get leadership saying, well, we're going to need more data to make any decisions or do anything. And then out to the public, they say, well, there's no definitive cause. Every one of those points is defensible. But when you put them all together, it makes it almost impossible to move forward on this because nobody's taking in a stance and saying, let's deal with this. Let's make it a whole of government problem to deal with. Now, there are things that have been done internally, though, and I think we need to be honest about that, because these organizations don't always tell you what they're working on. So classified investigations were launched. There were panels to talk about. Is it plausible that directed energy causes these problems? There's been a number of times Russia has been named as the likely actor. And then victims literally were evacuated that were serving overseas to come to America to deal with the harm caused by these weapons. And then recently we got new chatter. Oh, the government. The government might have one of these weapons and be testing it or reverse engineering. It's like, what? So lots of things are happening behind the scenes, but for these victims, a number of their careers ended, of course, because they couldn't work in their normal capacity. They lost their security clearances. I told you. Just getting their medical benefits has become a constant fight. And then just the families who are also impacted by this are left without answers. We had Michael Beck fighting until his death. Others haven't lived that long to even be a part of this fight. So this isn't history. I told you, I know people with this. I know people who've passed away from this. This is an ongoing problem that we have to be honest about and we have to address, especially. Especially since it's occurred on U.S. soil. Yes. Today they might be targeting intelligence officers. Tomorrow they could be targeting an entire different industry because they're like, hey, they're a benefit to the US Government. They're advancing innovation. They're helping the US Government build tech or defense systems. A lot of people could get impacted by this, even academic research institutions. So Havana Syndrome isn't some mystery illness. It starts from Cold War in Moscow, it goes into the 90s and then it goes to Havana. And we still have cases occurring today. Obviously I've already said the name. The same adversary gets thrown around. I know we've heard of their names, but it's Russia. There's a documented history of Russia doing research on how to use microwave against foreign personnel. We have the Moscow signal precedent that I started the show with. There's Soviet era research and how this impacts humans. There's modern Russia interest, of course, in non kinetic warfare. And then there's a pattern of overlap. When we talk about these officers that were hit, obviously in the same locations are Russian intelligence officers. Even my friend that was hit last summer, I think it was impacting a person with him. And that person with him is, and his family's been a longtime target of the Russians. This isn't some sort of speculation. We can really start taking these facts, pull them together and make some real assessments about this. Now, even in the intelligence community, even if quietly, they all point to Russia as well. Are we being attacked?

B (32:55)

My personal opinion, yes.

A (32:56)

By whom?

B (32:58)

Russia.

A (32:58)

We have a number of people affected with Havana Syndrome. We need to see accountability. Now. We have these fighters that have unfortunately died. They're not here anymore. But we can ask the question that they've been asking and the government seems to refuse to answer. And it's this. Did adversaries possess and use technology capable of silently damaging the human nervous system? The answer is yes. Yes, they did. Covering that up isn't going to make it go away. It's just going to allow them to continue to harm our people. Thanks for being here today. This has been the watch floor.