CNN's revelations about discovery of an actual device for Havana syndrome is far more than a passing news blip
But another bombshell academic book proves that such weapons are real and should make us take the "threat to national security" quite seriously
Pursuant to CNN’s bombshell report earlier this week that investigators had purchased and been testing for a year now a mysterious device allegedly responsible for “Havana Syndrome”, the spook world – not to mention the entire pop Jason Bourneosphere – is all atwitter.
You ask, what exactly Is Havana syndrome?
The locution refers to a cluster of unexplained medical symptoms first reported by U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Havana, Cuba, starting in late 2016. Impacted personnel described the sudden onset of excruciating headaches, dizziness, nausea, ear pain, mental impairment, and balance difficulties.
These symptoms were frequently paired with perceived loud sounds and sensations of intense pressure in the head.
The phrase “Havana syndrome” has increasingly in recent years been replaced by the more professionally sounding, but teasingly ambiguous and generic phrase “anomalous health incidents” (AHI).
Estimates vary as to the specific count of purported victims, but it probably has a high ceiling of about 1,500 cases.
In late March 2024 CBS News’ “60 Minutes” aired a report, fronted by anchor Scott Pelley and developed in collaboration with Germany’s Der Spiegel and the Latvian investigative outlet The Insider, suggesting a “Russian nexus” behind anomalous health incidents.
“60 Minutes” brought forth evidence that Russian GRU Unit 29155 had possessed and toyed with non‑lethal acoustic, or directed‑energy, weapons.
The segment concluded: “Russia may be responsible for Havana Syndrome, ‘60 Minutes’ finds.”
The CBS report contradicted what America’s intelligence agencies had been contending all along. A 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) insisted that it was “very unlikely” that Havana Syndrome resulted from the use of sonic or directed energy weapons, hypothesizing that the symptoms were due mainly to somatic or environmental factors, an assertion numerous medical experts have since then debunked.
The House Intelligence Committee, which has been dogging the agencies in recent years for a satisfactory explanation of what Havana Syndrome might be, pushed back aggressively in December 2024 against the ICA.
In their own published findings entitled “Investigating the Intelligence Community’s Conclusions on Anomalous Health Incidents: Is the Intelligence Community Hiding the Real Reason for This Phenomenon?” the House Intelligence Committee wrote:
…the Subcommittee has uncovered evidence that the ICA lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation. It appears increasingly likely and the Chairman is convinced that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs.2 The Intelligence (IC) has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn. Despite this, the Subcommittee has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release. The Subcommittee recommends that the IC expeditiously release a new ICA on AHIs in which all information collected by the IC is appropriately considered.
Of course, the IC to this date has not released an updated report.
In light of CNN’s news story this week, the House Intelligence Committee sent a letter yesterday to Department of Homeland Security director Kristy Noem asking for more details about the “device” in question as well as the circumstances of its covert purchase by national security personnel during the Biden administration.
The mainstream media has dithered for a decade concerning not only the reality, but also the origins, of Havana syndrome. Nonetheless, the confusion is not due to any lack of data, or dearth of plausible hypotheses.
In fact, responsible and savvy professionals have known such a threat of what are technically known as “directed energy weapons” (DEWs) tracing back to the late twentieth century. In the aftermath of release of the ICA “consensus” in 2024 I myself wrote the following:
One of the major hurdles in uncovering the truth about what lies behind the Havana syndrome is that the public has been conditioned over the …to react almost instinctively to the suggestion that directed energy weapons might be deployed by shadowy personnel against their adversaries as a “conspiracy theory.” The word “conspiracy theory” is increasingly dredged up by enemies of the truth in such a manner that it functions semantically as what experts in psychological warfare refer to as a “thought-stopping cliché”, the mere utterance of which stifles all serious discussion.
Fortunately, we now have a ground-shaking, impeccably argued, and exhaustively researched lengthy book by a well-known, internationally regarded security expert with scientific credentials that put to rest once and for all the “conspiracy theory” nonsense.
Blandly entitled Havana Syndrome: A Threat to National Security, the book was published last fall in the United Kingdom by the prestigious publishing house Bloomsbury Academic. The author is Armin Krishnan, a professor at East Carolina University (ECU).
Krishnan’s bio reads as follows:
Armin Krishnan is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. He was Director of Security Studies from 2016 to 2025. He has previously taught intelligence courses as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the National Security Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and held research associate positions at the University of Southampton and Salford University. He has academic degrees in political science, intelligence studies, and security studies from the University of Munich and Salford University, UK. His research has focused on novel aspects of contemporary warfare, including the privatization and outsourcing of military services, the ethics of military robotics, targeted killing and drone warfare, military neuroscience, and psychological warfare.
In the introduction to his book Krishnan observes:
Governments have been developing DEWs since at least the 1960s, which amounts to over sixty years in research and development. All major military powers are developing DEWs, including the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, Iran, and many others. Various types of DEWs are known to exist, including acoustic weapons, millimeter wave weapons, lasers, particle beams, and high-powered microwave weapons. They are currently presented to the public mainly as anti-material weapons, which obscures other potential applications.
Krishnan adds that “the amount of public information on DEWs, especially their capabilities and any bioeffects that they may have, is very limited as governments prefer to keep the existence of certain weapons and capabilities secret, hence the mystery”.
Krishnan in both writing and conversation is the master of dry understatement. But what his book proves searingly and definitively is that there has been a systemic and - clearly in some instances - deliberate whitewash by those in the know throughout the intelligence world.
Because the IC has not been able to sustain, especially in the follow-on to the “60 Minutes” disclosures, the tiresome canard that Havana Syndrome is nothing more than urban legend, overheated imaginations, or exotic iterations of well-known natural or social phenomena, it has clung to the fallback excuse of “we still don’t know”.
They do know.
Either they do in fact know, or they somehow sink to the level of gross incompetence that thoroughly undermines their pretension to expertise that scholars like Krishnan are not shy about displaying.
On the other hand, the persistent meme conjured up by social media and the conspiracy industry that the government refuses to be transparent about such weapons, chiefly because they are shamelessly deploying it against the citizenry itself, happens to be egregious disinformation designed to obscure the truth as well.
It really comes down to an emperor-has-no-clothes sort or reality-hiding-in-plain sight sort of impasse among the vast majority of our patriotic servants and protectors of national security.
All the “adults” know.
Yet they are terrified of speaking out on account of a clutching their own reasonable doubts that have been brutally enforced through clueless or corrupt corporate media as well as the political agenda-driven administrative state (think Wuhan and the Covid pandemic).
Or if do see what appears to be the case from a professional angle of vision, you’ve been so gaslighted for so long you come to question your own judgment.
Krishnan’s analysis by the way is comparable to the child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale that finally and innocently speaks the truth that emperor is naked. No matter what thinks of the political leanings of CNN, its dispatch on the IC’s purchase of the secret weapon was a true godsend.
Which brings us to the question of what the current flap over Havana Syndrome and DEWs, which probably will have a quite short theater run amidst the virulent churning of the obsessively sensation-sated daily news cycle (unless of course there are more “bombshells”), genuinely signifies over the long haul.
The hard question our “savants” in their sundry security and ambassadorial bailiwicks need digest is the one Krishnan himself calmly and methodically poses: are we really dealing with a serious national security risk?
If Krishnan’s argument and evidentiary account is as solid as its depth and breadth indicates (and no reasonable reader could retort “no”, let alone “maybe”), well, what can you say?
Uh. Duh.
It is one thing for a mainstream media narrative to concentrate, as it has for years, on the physiological and psychological damage that Havana Syndrome in all its cryptic eccentricity has inflicted on those serving in the diplomatic core. We react with sympathy, but at the same time with a certain jaded wave of the hand.
Well, soldiers die in foreign wars. Secret agents are expected to be zapped or taken out from time to time by the baddies lurking in the crepuscular cubbyholes of overseas metropoles.
Diplomats can safely thrive for a stint in distant Shangri-las while getting paid to devote their careers to the hardscrabble life of attending elegant balls and receptions. So what’s the difference between suffering Havana syndrome and getting mugged on your walk back at night from the Parthenon in Athens?
But the “threat”, as it turns out, is not just to them but to us.
One disconcerting factoid that emerged in a phone exchange I had with Krishnan this past autumn is that there is a rising wave of cases of Havana Syndrome among U.S. citizens who are not, or who have never been, in the government per se.
Some of them are highly reputable professionals who are singled out simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or crossed paths with domestic terrorists, or organized crime contractors to foreign terrorists, who may have access to such weaponry.
In his book Krishnan describes this phenomenon as a critical exam[le of hybrid or asymmetric “cognitive warfare” wielded by certain US adversaries. At the same time, the disinformation machinery seems concurrently to be amping up in real time to convince us none of this is actually happening.
In my last communique within this space I outlined from information that has long been fully public about the influence operations and likely terrorist-adjacent infrastructure that has been cobbled together in recent years while we pretend not to notice.
The chickens may be coming home to roost, as the rather hackneyed saying goes.
Yet what is clear is that the fox is not only in the henhouse, he has the wherewithal to cause havoc if we refuse to do something about it.