Fighting An Invisible Enemy: The Voices Of Havana Syndrome

in recognition of your resilience and an appreciation of your dedication and continuing contributions to the service despite injuries incurred in the line of duty in havana cuba i've read this so many times because it's on the award that hangs on my wall i don't think any of them realized what a big deal it was until we started talking to people and telling them our stories the night of my event march 17 2017 i was standing at the kitchen window i was washing dishes and in the midst of washing the dish all of a sudden i felt like i was being struck with something and it was an overwhelming sense of anxiety uh pressure completely inexplicable and then pain that have never felt before in my life all of a sudden i heard what one of the security officers had said to someone else just a couple of days before look we don't know what's happening but if you think something's happening get off the x and i heard that in my head get off the x and it was almost like i had been unplugged and a spell was lifted and and i moved and that was it i i kind of just walked down the hall in a daze by that point we had all heard the stories in the embassy of things that were happening i have never covered a story as bizarre or mysterious as havana syndrome so here's the first report that came out from the doctors at the university of pennsylvania they wrote in their conclusions here these individuals appear to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma what we can't understand is why these people's brains look like that when they have no history of anything hitting them in the head possible symptoms of the mysterious illness called the first havana syndrome some mysterious neurological symptoms can cause dizziness nausea even brain damage a covert sonic weapon know a lot of people still see this as kind of a science fiction novel plot but it's very very real [Music] let's see cuba cuba this is a good one i was in the state department for a little over 20 years let's see this is me and ambassador delaurentis i think it's towards the end of my tour in havana i got there before the embassy became the embassy shortly after i got there we did the big signing and the whole pla you know we had the big party on a day when symbols mattered the stars and stripes raised over the u.s embassy in havana we were so thrilled to be sent to cuba at such a time just a few hours ago this communist nation welcomed president obama who became the first american president to visit here in 88 years we felt like we were part of history in the making it was impossible not to feel that way starting in 2016 u.s diplomats and spies who were serving in cuba started experiencing these strange sounds and physical sensations mostly in their homes in the cuban capital and then started coming down with these bizarre unexplained symptoms we heard the strange cicada sound at our house i would say two three four nights a week for 30 to 60 minutes over the course of several months i think when we went out on the porch and made that recording that night you got hurt it was persistent very very loud i was always sitting in our bedroom in front of those french doors with just glass between me and the sound you know i didn't have a sense that it was dangerous i started with the vertigo and the tinnitus and that brain fog i could actually feel my brain shutting down like it just everything kind of went black i'm standing and it's feeling as if i'm being pushed like you're being smashed from the top of the head into the ground that particular symptom it was many months after i had come back to the states before i started feeling that one neurologist said to me he says kate what you've got here is it's as if you age 20 something years and you have those changes all at once something had happened to me and the more i ignored it the worse i got it had gotten to a point where i i quite literally wasn't functioning as a person i couldn't remember anything my head was in so much pain my ears were ringing we all had different sensations we all heard different sounds or in my case didn't hear anything at all why why are they so different one theory that we bounce around sometimes is maybe they're experimenting with dosing right so they hit some of our people with a really strong blast in our case it felt like whatever they were doing it was farther away like a lower intensity thing are we guinea pigs are we test mice a little bit felt like it [Music] early on the government explored every possible theory for what this could be maybe it was some type of a surveillance operation maybe it was some type of attempt to harm them maybe it was something in the environment a toxin or a pesticide that they had breathed in i think at the very beginning it was very hush-hush something is going on that the department doesn't know what it is and we just need to be careful people started to raise the possibility that this was psychosomatic that it was mass psychogenic illness several of us went to the security office we listened to the sound that they had recording and i'm like wow that's the sound i heard they were pretty much no you you know you're you're wrong you're not you you didn't hear that so that was the start of trying to figure out how to get people to believe me i don't think anybody wants to be a victim but there's nothing in the world that's worse than being a victim that everybody doubts as a journalist who've been covering cuba for decades it's always complicated when i went to havana and interviewed the intelligence officers and the medical doctors down there they denied everything did you do it the cubans said they had tested everything they had sent all kinds of experts to the neighborhood where a lot of these people had been hit and had found nothing awry tonight the state department ordering most of the american staff at the u.s embassy in cuba home the rare move in response to mysterious attacks against 21 u.s diplomats the secretary assessed this was the only way to significantly reduce the risk to our diplomats and their families the fallout from this has been profound diplomatically for cuba for the united states because it basically shut down diplomatic relations between the two countries it was heartbreaking to leave it was heartbreaking to have the relationship with cuba that we were building collapse it almost felt like we were giving up in a way like letting the bad guys win the people who who did this if someone did this deliberately i actually got a call from someone at the state department and said this is dr hoffer and i said yes and he said dr hoffman this is the state department we have a problem dr hoffer was able to do a lot of testing especially on the delicate inner ear organs that govern balance if you take the whole group that they uniformly had dramatic damage to the otolithic organs which are the gravity organs so not just a little bit abnormal all of them were abnormal press the middle button when finished as more and more cases emerged the government realized they were going to need one facility that was able to really evaluate any new case that came forward and that's where the university of pennsylvania came in the doctors were able to determine that the havana syndrome individuals had brain injuries that were very similar to a concussion they found that the havana syndrome brains had less white matter and less connectivity in them and that led to what doctors started to refer to as a brain network disorder i still didn't completely believe it and i would ask dr swanson constantly are you absolutely sure this can't be psychosomatic and he would say over and over yes we're sure there are certainly some components that could be argued away but there are others that can't be and it's those that make us know that this is real and not psychosomatic doctor writes it is my opinion that my current symptoms are a direct result of the environmental exposure exposure she suffered during her work assignment in havana cuba in 2017. i think i was at my peak when i first got to cuba and then it went downhill from there i see myself and there isn't any physical problem that i can see and i'm still seeing me but um it's not me and so it's depressing and it's overwhelming and and i'm still trying to deal with it [Music] i spent about nine months trying to do my old job little pieces of it a few hours a day and um i felt sick all the time i had horrible headaches all the time i had to grieve it because it's a loss i am not the woman i was before when i went to cuba i'm not that person anymore i had to go back to the department and say i think i'm broken permanently when dr galloway told me that i couldn't make my eyes work together it was the first time that someone had said you know that this is sort of the smoking gun this is your your proof that you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury without actually being hit in the head i finally realized that it was over there is no more career it's just try to keep working try to keep contributing in some way i work two hours a day if i'm lucky i don't manage i don't lead everything that's happening for me is happening below the surface it's four and a half years of of excruciating headaches it's four and a half years of stumbling losing my balance it's four and a half years of of vision degradation people don't understand what this kind of brain damage can do to you symptoms are not what we have we have injuries so it is all in our heads in the sense it's a brain injury it's inside my skull but it's not imagined i do not believe the department took me seriously it was always we'll get back to you if we ask for more information we'll get back to you i have to ask myself are they trying to disprove us or are they trying to prove what happened we cannot definitively sit here today and say this is the machine or this is the thing they used to cause these injuries we are not aware of a technology that does this we've never seen a technology anywhere in the world that does this to people the longer this went on the more government agencies that were pulled into trying to figure out what was happening and how to stop it the military was looking at it the intelligence agencies were looking at it and the state department commissioned a report from the national academies of science to assess these injuries as well in the room where we sat listening to these people you could have heard a pin drop all of this to us was simply unlike anything that we had ever heard and clearly something that had to be real the committee felt that these acute symptoms were more consistent with a directed radio frequency energy attack and explored possible related mechanisms we looked at four possible mechanisms but came up with one that we thought was most plausible and that was pulsed microwave energy the national academy of sciences report was really helpful in saying yes it's our belief that these are directed energy attacks um that they are real and that they were perpetrated by somebody a state that has this kind of technology we know that russia is one of the nation states that has the technology there are some others and it's very concerning to think that our adversaries might be using this kind of attack against our employees to undermine our diplomats to undermine our intelligence personnel to undermine our military personnel the russians are the only country i know of who have previously targeted american diplomats with microwaves although for a different purpose that puts them at the top of a very short suspects list the problem here is that this is all conjecture at this point the american embassy in moscow for years the russians bombarded it with microwave radiation many employees there developed blood problems american officials protested but also insisted there was no connection between the radiation and the problems by the time i arrived there people were still very upset about the fact that the reality of this microwave signal had been kept from them for years and years if you're talking about the state department and the bureaucracy we had a similar problem that the havana syndrome people had which was that people were saying oh it's embassy moscow these people are imagining things this is mass hysteria there was a tendency on the part of the bureaucracy to ignore this problem i have more than a dozen clients who are from multiple agencies state department and the cia and they have been victimized by whatever this is and i'm there to try and find out what happened to them and make sure their health is taken care of i mean i started in this case in 2013 three years before havana took place and michael beck my first client who then was an nsa national security agency employee had been impacted by what we believed to have been microwaves in 1996. they're probably in here where this alleged incident happened is classified the circumstances to why he was there is classified nsa wouldn't tell me what any of that information was so how am i supposed to help file this workman's compensation claim when all the information is classified in october of 2014 nsa finally gives me a document the national security agency confirms that there is intelligence information from 2012 four years before havana associating the hostile country to which mr beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken intimidate or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence the 2012 intelligence information indicated that this weapon is designed to bathe a target's living quarters in microwaves causing numerous physical effects including a damaged nervous system and this is the document that the u.s government the nsa the cia and others need to respond to and say what did you mean by this and what are you doing about it when i first saw this statement i said holy cow the government is saying they have intelligence about a foreign country with a microwave weapon that could potentially kill people and leave not a trace but you know there are all kinds of intelligence some of it's solid some of it's questionable and without knowing more about this it really raises more questions than answers the impact of this beyond my clients is actually potentially really scary because one can construe if these are attacks on u.s government personnel as an act of war as many as 200 americans working vienna abroad in berlin u.s officials say potential victims on every continent but antarctica we are investigating and reviewing reports of incidents from all around the world there has been more openness in the biden administration to acknowledge what's going on but it's still not transparent enough president biden signed a new law granting financial support to government officials who have been victims of the mysterious havana syndrome we will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of what and who is behind these incidents i don't think anyone should doubt the sense of urgency that we have or our determination in november cia director bill burns went to russia and met with their spy chief and warned them that if it's them then they're going to face consequences this is a huge deal so the cia is seized with this and has been since bill burns took over at the beginning of the biden administration unfortunately according to bipartisan critics the state department did not respond as aggressively as the cia has and is now just catching up because i continue to be disappointed by the state department's response even though i've heard that you are committed to ensuring that people who have been affected get the medical care they need but what i'm still hearing from victims is that that is not happening always and so there's clearly a disconnect between what's happening at the top levels of the state department and how people are being treated in some cases hi alright great thank you i got this update from a couple of people on whatsapp and their experiences it's depressing and it's it's aggravating and part of it is it's like the department's had so much time and they're still treating people the same way it's been a long journey of trying to find health care okay so referral request follow-up the department's still not meeting needs for health care i'm pretty sure i have tried all of most of these i tried them i tried them i cannot get treated in this state because although i have workers compensation i was not injured in this state so no one will treat me i feel invisible i feel um i am trying all this stuff and i'm ignored [Music] they expected their agency and the u.s government to take care of them to take them seriously and they haven't they are fed up with how this has impacted negatively their career their health and their life and worse that they have been perceived to be disregarded by their agency and not taken seriously if you would have told me in august 2017 that five years later we would still be covering this with no answers about who did this why they did this or how they did this i wouldn't have believed you i would have said the best intelligence agencies in the world are gonna figure out if someone is attacking our diplomats or not and yet here we are we still have no known source or cause that's what we have when i read the news and i hear 20 some in vienna i'm struck with it some of them are going to be like myself and some of my other colleagues who are no longer able to contribute what we once would have been able to contribute and that is a loss to the service if the american public could see the injury see the blood they would be demanding something happen this is something i'm afraid of i would like to know long term what's going to happen to me what's going to happen to the others it seemed right to tell the whole story with my name with my face so that people understand it maybe for the first time i really truly understand what happened to all of us and and that it's very real we all need to come to terms with that so that we can start moving forward and try to stop it before it hurts anyone else [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thanks for watching our youtube channel follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the nbc news app

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Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 22 2021