Questions loom over ‘Havana Syndrome’
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is scrambling to develop plans for providing compensation and improved medical care to diplomats, intelligence officers and other personnel affected by mysterious health incidents, part of an attempt to strengthen the response to a phenomenon known as “Havana Syndrome.”
But the evolving effort to deal with the episodes, which have spanned the globe and generated fears of stealth foreign attacks, is complicated by officials’ inability to establish a clear diagnosis for a spate of symptoms that while sometimes debilitating are also common and to identify who or what is causing them.
Officials have detected no patterns among apparent victims in their effort to better understand and attribute the incidents despite an extensive, ongoing investigation by the government, which includes the CIA and other agencies, according to officials. And, deepening the mystery, most of those who do report symptoms — labeled anomalous health incidents by the government — turn out to have some other identifiable condition.
“In a significant majority of cases where individuals have come forward with symptoms, they can be attributed to some particular illness or condition, or they’re reporting out of an abundance of caution and the symptoms do not meet AHI criteria,” said a person familiar with the matter, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
Under the Havana Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in October, the administration has six months to establish a framework for making payments to individuals who have suffered from Havana Syndrome. Creating an effective payment system, like the medical response, faces bureaucratic challenges, including uncertainty about who will be eligible and how much they will receive.
“We’re trying to figure this out on the fly,” a senior administration official said.
The bipartisan push to increase support — in this case, payments to cover lost income and missed career opportunities — signals the urgency of congressional concern. Since the first incidents were reported at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, hundreds of potential cases, involving reports of dizziness, headaches and cognitive problems, have emerged on every continent except Antarctica.
While investigators have uncovered no hard evidence, some senior officials and lawmakers say Russia may be targeting U.S. personnel and their families with a powerful form of directed energy, either with the intent to surveil or inflict harm. Canadian diplomats have also reported being affected.
Advocates for affected personnel say the early response was chaotic and slow, colored by institutional skepticism about whether the illnesses were real. In 2018, an internal State Department study found the department had failed to communicate adequately or establish responsibility for the matter.
Attorney Mark Zaid represents more than a dozen people who have reported anomalous health incidents. “Disorganized, inconsistent, arbitrary and full of unknowns is probably the best way to describe it,” he said of the government reaction from the start.
Both CIA Director William J. Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken say the issue is a personal priority.
“We will do absolutely everything we can — leaving no stone unturned — to stop these occurrences,” Blinken said in November as he named new officials to oversee the State Department’s management of the issue.
At his confirmation hearing in February, Burns promised to “make it an extraordinarily high priority to get to the bottom of who’s responsible for the attacks.”
A CIA spokesperson described the agency’s work on figuring out what lies behind the illnesses as “very rigorous.” The agency placed a senior officer in charge of the effort who is best known for his leading role in the search for Osama bin Laden.
Blinken has joined several of the bimonthly calls that one of his deputies holds with affected State Department employees. During a recent visit to Bogotá, Colombia, he spoke privately with employees injured in apparent incidents there.
“This level of seventh-floor support simply did not exist before,” a State Department official said, referring to the executive floor at the department.
“Clearly, it’s far better now,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who worked for the CIA for 26 years before retiring early in 2019 because of symptoms including painful headaches, tinnitus and vertigo.
After years of fighting to get specialized care, Polymeropoulos was admitted to an intensive program at Walter Reed, the military hospital, where personnel have extensive experience treating brain injuries. Polymeropoulos said he was diagnosed with one and credits the program for helping him manage his symptoms.
“Ultimately, the treatment is designed to make you feel better and alleviate the pain of your symptoms,” he said. “You can’t reverse this.”
At the State Department, new cases are now fielded by a team of four clinicians, located in Washington, Europe and Asia, who can offer evaluations 24 hours a day, officials said.
Officials from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and other agencies have jointly developed a new, two-hour medical exam to screen potential new cases that can be administered by doctors or other practitioners to U.S. personnel assigned to overseas missions.
The triage process includes visual, vestibular and blood testing but not brain imaging, a fact that reflects constantly changing and sometimes disputed science on the injuries. Even though some doctors previously identified “perceptible changes” in the brain as a result of apparent attacks, State Department physicians say they now believe the scans have no scientific validity.
Officials are also seeking to better educate medical staffers at missions worldwide, instructing them to be receptive to potential victims’ experiences — and they stress that skepticism is no longer the norm.
“I think it really just psychologically helps them to have somebody just sit down for an hour or more and just say, ‘I believe you,’ ” a senior State Department official said.
But officials acknowledge the care, like everything else surrounding the incidents, is complicated by the lack of a medical diagnosis for what is occurring. They say they are not sure whether the apparent ailments constitute traumatic brain injuries; an NIH study due next year may answer that question.
In the absence of a firm diagnosis, agencies are focused on treating patients for whatever is ailing them, the same way anyone else with their symptoms would be: breathing exercises, yoga or art therapy; medication for headaches, vertigo or depression.