‘Havana syndrome’ attacks blamed on Putin’s agents

Mysterious ailments including nausea, hearing loss and memory lapses that have afflicted hundreds of American diplomats and intelligence officials are likely to have been caused by Kremlin agents armed with sonic energy weapons, an investigation has concluded.

The symptoms that make up Havana syndrome, as it became known, were first reported in the Cuban capital in 2016. Since then, cases have been reported across the globe from Asia to Europe and North America. Other symptoms include tinnitus, insomnia and in rare instances blindness.

A high-level US defence official was said to have been struck by a suspected attack during President Joe Biden's visit to the Nato summit in Lithuania last year and White House staff described symptoms while staying at a hotel in London in 2019.

Members of a notorious Russian military intelligence (GRU) unit known as 29155 were near to suspected attacks, according to a joint investigation by the Russian opposition website The Insider, the German newspaper Der Spiegel and the CBS News programme 60 Minutes.

The investigation used intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, data on telephone calls and eyewitness testimony to track the movements of the Kremlin agents. It also said that members of the GRU unit had received bonuses and promotions linked to their work with “non-lethal acoustic weapons”.

“It was like a high-pitched, metallic drilling noise,” an FBI agent identified only as Carrie said of one such incident. “It was like a dentist drilling on steroids.”

She said that she had passed out during the suspected attack and that the battery in her phone had swelled until it burst out of its case. Another US intelligence officer said he had been left blind in one eye after a similar experience.

Western intelligence agencies say that the unit specialises in sabotage and assassination. Britain has accused two of its agents of carrying out the Salisbury novichok poisonings in 2018. They are also thought to have blown up an arms depot in the Czech Republic in 2014.

The suspected attacks have also affected the spouses and children of diplomats and intelligence officers, as well as a senior official in the Trump administration's National Security Council and a deputy chief of staff for William Burns, the CIA director. Greg Edgreen, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel who ran a Pentagon investigation last year, told 60 Minutes that he had no doubt that Moscow was to blame.

Edgreen said the officials and intelligence agency employees who are thought to have been injured by the high frequency beam had all “worked against Russia, focused on Russia and done extremely well.” He added: “There are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and ... if we don’t face this head-on the problem is going to get worse.”

Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, dismissed the allegations of Kremlin involvement in the incidents. “Nobody has ever published any convincing evidence so all this is nothing more than a groundless and unfounded accusation,” he said.