Havana syndrome

Havana syndrome is a cluster of idiopathic symptoms experienced mostly abroad by U.S. government officials and military personnel. The symptoms range in severity from pain and ringing in the ears to cognitive dysfunction and were first reported in 2016 by U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba. Beginning in 2017, more people, including U.S. intelligence and military personnel and their families, reported having these symptoms in other places, such as China, India, Europe, and Washington, D.C. The U.S. Department of State, Department of Defense, and other federal entities have called the events "Anomalous Health Incidents" (AHI). Of over a thousand purported cases, the majority of US investigative bodies found only a few dozen cases to be suspicious.

Once the story became public, various U.S. government representatives attributed the incidents to attacks by unidentified foreign actors, and various U.S. officials blamed the reported symptoms on a variety of unidentified and unknown technologies, including ultrasound and microwave weapons. Other possibilities such as pesticides and other toxins were also raised, but all suggested causes were speculative as no undisputed evidence was discovered. As the story developed, and the U.S. intelligence services could not determine the cause of the symptoms, U.S. intelligence and government officials expressed suspicions to the press that Russian military intelligence was responsible. Due to the lack of evidence, pattern of reports, and spread to numerous locations, some scientists promoted the alternate hypothesis of mass psychogenic illness as the true cause of the cases.

In January 2022, the Central Intelligence Agency issued an interim assessment concluding that the syndrome is not the result of "a sustained global campaign by a hostile power". Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed. In February 2022, a panel of experts assembled by the Biden administration released an executive summary stating that stress or psychosomatic reactions could not explain some of the incidents of Havana syndrome it had reviewed, and that radio waves could have caused some of the injuries of the CIA officers and diplomats. At roughly the same time, the State Department commissioned the JASON Advisory Group to investigate the cause. In February 2022, the State Department released the JASON report, which stated that it was unlikely that a directed energy attack had caused the health incidents.

In March 2023, seven U.S. intelligence agencies completed a review of the proposed cases of Havana syndrome and released an unclassified report with the consensus that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unlikely". Despite this report, Pentagon-funded experiments which attempted to recreate Havana syndrome in animals by exposing them to RF waves for extended periods continued.