Battlefield Brain: The Havana Syndrome and Direct Energy Attacks on Us Personnel.

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Let me take you back to poor, sunny Havana, in late 2016. It's been a little over a year since diplomatic ties were restored between the US and Cuba. That's when the enigma commences. What the State Department initially called 'health attacks'. What the press would describe as 'an astonishing international mystery' unfolding in Cuba.

'The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again.'

Another case: a woman diplomat was in her home, after work in the Embassy, washing dishes. Outside her window, a wooden booth where Cuban police kept watch. She 'felt a sudden burst of pressure in her head, then a stabbing pain worse than any she had ever experienced'. She panicked.

She remembered a security officer at the Embassy: 'Get off the X' - move away from the site where you experienced the pain. She went to the other room and took a few minutes to steady herself.

The number of American diplomats that were victims to these unexplained events in Cuba quickly rose to 21. Some have had concussions, and others permanent hearing loss. But symptoms also included 'brain swelling, dizziness, nausea, severe headaches, balance problems and tinnitus (…)'. Secondary symptoms also included speech issues.

The attacks seemed to come at night, and in some of the incidents they were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms.

That's the stuff nightmares are made of: attacks coming from a mystery source - attacks of a mysterious nature. It resembled the UFO situation in the 1950's, some sci-fi dystopia where fact and fiction collide.

'Some felt vibrations, and heard sounds – loud ringing or a high-pitch chirping similar to crickets. Others heard a grinding noise. Some victims awoke with ringing in their ears and fumbled for their alarm clocks, only to discover the ringing stopped when they moved away from their beds.'

The situation escalated to such a degree, after the first attacks were recorded, that the US was moved to warn Americans not to visit Cuba, slashed the number of people at its Havana mission and went on to expel 15 Cuban diplomats.

What Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called “deliberate attacks” were very real. But attacks by whom? With what objective? And, to begin with: what kind of attacks?

When it comes to National Security concerns, not knowing is not an option.

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Besides the macrocosmic repercussions on the world stage, the episode also represented a personal tragedy for dozens of diplomats and their families.

In late September, 2017, the press reported on a US diplomat ranting on social media 'on Washington's response to the situation and the difficulty in getting proper treatment'.

'We have injured people who still have no real information as to what to do medically, and a web of half-truths and outright lies', the diplomat wrote.

The same report brings an interesting take on the story by John Caulfield, former diplomat stationed in Havana. While not privy to the details of the ongoing investigations on the subject, Caulfield said that 'when he first heard about the incidents he assumed they were eavesdropping attempts using a new technology that had gone wrong'. This is something to keep in mind.

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The efforts to ascertain what was the nature of the 'Havana Syndrome', as far as the general public could see, were going nowhere, and suggested a measure of confusion between different agencies that is downright frustrating.

While State Dept. stated that the US 'would be 'putting people intentionally in harm’s way if it sent diplomats back to Cuba', an FBI investigation seemed to rule out the initial theory that Americans in Havana have been hit by 'sonic attacks'.

It sounds weird that the investigation's results were not about what the attacks were, but simply about what they were not.

The report stated that the FBI 'tested the hypothesis that air pressure waves via audible sound, infrasound or ultrasound could be used to clandestinely hurt Americans in Cuba, and found no evidence'.

Reports also shed light on how the FBI couldn't investigate properly because State and the CIA basically didn't allow them to.

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Some people went on the record suggesting that it was nothing but a psychogenic illness, something 'originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic cause.' In a word: mass hysteria.

'[The] dispute over the cause of the episode has spread into the medical world, where some doctors and scientists are furious with a situation they believe is being spun for political gain.'

The report featured an 'expert' weighing in that 'The number one suspect here is mass psychogenic illness'.

'It's all in your head' it's the worst explanation when you ultimately were soon to have hundreds of American personnel showing signs of brain trauma.

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In fact, that was exactly what the University of Pennsylvania researchers found when they examined affected diplomats that served in Cuba. Advanced MRI scans revealed all the 40 diplomats in Havana who had reported injury had indeed experienced brain trauma.

The findings state that 'a constellation of acute and persistent signs and symptoms were identified, in the absence of an associated history of blunt head trauma'. Other symptoms included 'cognitive, vestibular, and oculomotor dysfunction, along with auditory symptoms, sleep abnormalities, and headache'.

'The unique circumstances of these patients and the consistency of the clinical manifestations', the study states, 'raised concern for a novel mechanism of a possible acquired brain injury from a directional exposure of undetermined etiology'.

So: some mechanism that remains unidentified is directionally exposing the brains of the diplomats with some form of equally unidentified effect and it's causing real, verifiable injury to these people's brains.

It's not much, but at least it puts the 'psychogenic illness' mob to rest.

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So, they called in the CDC to weigh in. After the last two years, we learned not to expect anything good from this agency - and in this instance, it certainly was the case.

The CDC report ultimately found that the diplomats’ medical histories alone could not explain their illnesses.

'The evaluations conducted thus far have not identified a mechanism of injury, process of exposure, effective treatment, or mitigating factor for the unexplained cluster of symptoms experienced by those stationed in Havana'.

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Guangzhou, a south China mega port city at the Pearl river. Called the City of flowers, it was the stage for subsequent attacks 'leading to symptoms similar to those following concussion or minor traumatic brain injury'.

A Foreign Service officer started hearing noises that sounded like 'marbles bouncing and hitting a floor, then rolling on an incline with a static sound', followed by headaches that could last several days.

To no-one's surprise, the State Department said that 'the nature of the injury, and whether a common cause exists, hasn't been established yet'.

The symptoms were "very similar" and "entirely consistent" to those experienced by American diplomats posted in Havana.

As an immediate reaction, US officials issued a health alert for Guangzhou following the incident.

The State department sent a team to Guangzhou in late May to examine US staff and their families, and by July more US citizens were evacuated from China. The latest evacuation suggested that the 'isolated case' had turned into a wider diplomatic crisis.

The new US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, appointed a task force to investigate the unexplained health incidents.

The U.S. State Department moved to expand its health alert for all of China. Global Times, China’s state-run tabloid, called the situation “very strange”.

'Practically all Chinese people do not believe that this country’s official organizations would carry out such sonic attacks against U.S. diplomats.'

Global Times also mentioned that it is hard to believe that another foreign country could carry out such an attack in China, escape China’s monitoring, and leave no trace.

This is something to keep in mind.

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In Vietnam, in India, in Austria and Germany, in Serbia, Taiwan, Australia, Colombia - even in the heart of London. By now, there is no doubt that Intelligence, Military and Diplomatic officials are being targeted all over the world. We are talking about more than 200 possible cases by mid-September 2021.

While the incidents around the world seem distressing enough, the bar was raised even more when word got out about two possible incidents on US soil, including one near the White House.

In a 2019 episode, a White House official reported an attack while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb outside Washington.

The most recent attack occurred near the Ellipse, on the south side of the White House, and it sickened one National Security Council official.

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For a long time all reports and even investigations focused on the Havana Syndrome as 'sonic attacks'. Time after time we are informed that they couldn't substantiate evidence for this 'sonic events'. Every other explanation seemed to have been put aside.

But 'a growing trail of evidence has focused on microwaves as the most likely culprit'.  We are talking high-power microwaves that would be delivered as pulses.

The likelihood of this hypothesis comes from the fact that this technology has been known to be in use for decades: 'For nearly a quarter of a century, the 10-storey US embassy in Moscow was bathed by a wide, invisible beam of low-level microwaves. It became known as 'the Moscow signal'.'

We have to look back into the dark pit of the old Cold War, mixing science, medicine, espionage and geopolitics. 

The microwave bursts would be an eavesdropping system that presented health hazards to people in its vicinity, and the sounds that the victims heard were caused by microwaves interacting with the nervous system.

'The  energy was absorbed by the soft brain tissue and converted to a pressure wave moving inside the head, which was interpreted by the brain as sound.'

Besides the attacks maybe being a by-product of an information gathering activity, there is also the possibility that it was done on purpose. The microwaves 'could be used to impair brain function or induce sounds for psychological effect. (…) It would be a system for disorienting or disrupting the behaviour patterns of military or diplomatic personnel'.

It all seems to revolve around surveillance technology. In the old soviet case, they 'bounced microwaves off windows to pick up conversations, [or] they were activating their own listening devices hidden inside the building, or capturing information through microwaves hitting US electronic devices'.

The current hypothesis is that this new wave of attacks that started in Havana involve a targeted method of surveillance with higher-power, directed microwaves.

This would explain the actual unwillingness from US investigative efforts to identify the exact source of these phenomena. Most likely, the US has also developed and perhaps even deployed these kinds of microwaves itself and wants to keep it secret. 

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Cuba, with its position just 90 miles off the Florida coast, is the perfect place to collect SGNIT (signals intelligence). This is done by intercepting communications. 

The Russians had just reopened a former major Soviet listening station there. The Chinese had also opened two listening sites right before the attacks began.

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In late 2019, finally the nature of the attacks started to be disclosed to the general public. CNN wrote that '[t]he mysterious head injuries suffered by US diplomatic staff in China and Cuba that had been described as "sonic attacks" are consistent with the use of directed microwave energy, according to a report published Saturday by the National Academy of Sciences'.

Note that the injuries in the study occurred in China and Cuba. The major press move to pin this solely on Russian intelligence hadn't started yet.

'Overall, directed pulsed RF (radio frequency) energy (…) appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases', is the conclusion from the Academy.

The report also 'considered chemical exposures, infectious diseases and psychological issues as potential causes or aggravating factors of the injuries, but the overall analysis appeared to show they were not the likely cause'.

Late last year, U.S. officials began sharing their suspicions that Russian Military Intelligence unit GRU may be behind the attacks. The officials, speaking off the record, admit that they do not have a smoking gun.

'It looks, smells and feels like the GRU. When you are looking at the landscape, there are very few people who are willing, capable and have the technology. It’s pretty simple forensics.'

That clearly is happening in the wider context of Joe Biden's administration from hell turning Russia into the bogeyman they hope to rally the nation around against.

Immediately, the sources have to admit that Israel and China also have the same technology, but 'neither country operates in all of the locations where the incidents were reported, or has shown the desire to attack Americans in this way'.

That is really unconvincing.

China had capabilities in Havana, many of the attacks occurred in China, they also reportedly have the technology in question - we are left hanging on the unnamed CIA officer's opinion, who guarantees that the Chinese have not shown the desire to attack Americans in this way. Really? After the whole pandemic biological attack, can we buy this?

Global Times, a Chinese-controlled paper, said it best: 'it is hard to believe that another foreign country could carry out such an attack in China, escape China’s monitoring, and leave no trace'. So, either China was behind at least some of the attacks, or it was complicit.

The brain is the new battlefield.

The attacks are ongoing, and there doesn't seem to be a safe place on earth to escape their reach.