SICKENING NOISES IN CUBA

In December 2016, a CIA officer checked in to the American Embassy’s health office in Havana suffering from nausea, headache and dizziness. Days later, two more CIA officers reported similar ailments. By late 2018, the number grew to 26 Americans and 14 Canadian diplomats with roughly the same weird symptoms, ranging from hearing loss to nosebleeds. All the victims said that the symptoms were related to a strange noise they’d heard at their homes or hotel rooms. One noted that the noise was high-pitched. Another described “a beam of sound, pointed into their rooms.” Some said that the noise resembled marbles rolling inside a large funnel.

While the cause of these reported brain injuries was still a mystery, the fallout was clear. In October 2017, the Americans removed 60% of their diplomats from Cuba and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington, D.C. The illnesses confounded medical experts. Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania who examined some of the victims diagnosed concussion-like symptoms but didn’t find signs of concussions. You might be thinking: The Cuban government was up to something, right? The Cubans vehemently denied they were responsible. Many American investigators believed them.

Recordings of the sounds only added to the confusion. Two scientists believed the recordings were of lovelorn male crickets. One of the experts, Alex­ander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, said the insects are incredibly loud. “You can hear them from inside a diesel truck going 40 miles an hour on the highway.” Still, scientists had no idea how these sounds could lead to human illness, and they couldn’t explain why other people who lived near the diplomats weren’t affected.

Maybe it was just nerves. “Cuba is a high-threat, high-stress post,” a former embassy official told propublica.org. Diplomats are warned that “there will be surveillance. There will be listening devices in your house, probably in your car. For some people, that puts them in a high-stress mentality, in a threat-anticipation mode.”

True—but then how to explain what happened in China? In May 2018, an American posted in the consulate in Guangzhou was diagnosed with the very same mystery illness. Ultimately, 15 Americans were evacuated.

In 2020, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that the most probable cause was “radiofrequency energy, a type of radiation that includes microwaves.” Meanwhile, a 2023 intelligence community assessment found that the injuries were likely “tied to previous injuries, stress, environmental concerns and factors such as group psychology, in which illness symptoms reported by one individual in a community can spread serially among its members.”

And in 2024, two studies by the National Institutes of Health compared more than 80 affected people with a healthy comparison group. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed “no clinical signs or brain image indications to explain those widely varied symptoms.” Yet attorney Mark Zaid, who represents current and past federal officials and their family members seeking continued medical treatment for Havana syndrome, believes that “the government is knowingly weaponizing the lack of science that exists in this area and intentionally hiding behind the classification wall where much of the evidence that contradicts the results exists.”

The mysterious sounds may well be the opening shots in a new kind of cold war...