Havana Syndrome Unsolved After a Decade: U.S. Intelligence Community's Handling Failures and Suspicions of Internal Cover-up

According to The Guardian, the U.S. intelligence community's handling of "Havana Syndrome" — what official documents term "anomalous health incidents" — over the past decade is being described by multiple senior insiders as systematic dysfunction accompanied by suspicions of internal cover-up. The latest developments point in two directions: a portable device allegedly capable of emitting non-thermal pulsed microwaves, purchased via the dark web in late 2024 and brought back to the United States for testing, and the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's revocation this summer of the 2023 intelligence community assessment that deemed foreign adversaries' involvement "highly unlikely."

Multiple CIA and U.S. government employees have reported severe headaches, vertigo, brain fog, and long-term neurological damage since 2014 in Frankfurt, Havana, Beijing, Vienna, London, Warsaw, Belgrade, and other locations. The symptoms share common features: sudden onset, location-specific, accompanied by a sense of pressure and incapacitation. Some patients subsequently received compensation under the Havana Act. Marc Polymeropoulos is among the most representative cases. According to The Guardian, in early December 2017, this senior official, then serving as the CIA's Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Europe and Eurasia, suffered a sudden bout of intense vertigo and headache in his hotel room after liaison meetings in Moscow with Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service and FSB federal security service. He was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury and received Havana Act compensation in 2023.

The debate over causation quickly devolved into factional infighting within the intelligence agencies. Skeptics argued the so-called incidents were mass psychogenic illness, or caused by environmental factors, toxins, or even cricket chirping; some inside the CIA even accused patients of fabricating symptoms to collect medical compensation. Counter-arguments pointed out that many victims were highly effective and senior intelligence officers whose symptoms bore unfakeable clinical signatures.

According to The Guardian, a U.S. government scientific panel chaired by Stanford University professor David Relman concluded in 2022, after reviewing patient files and over a thousand classified documents, that the symptoms of the anomalous health incidents were "real and compelling" and "possibly caused by external stimuli." Relman himself told The Guardian that a subset of cases was "most likely caused by exposure to pulsed microwave energy," and that "any rational person, after examining all the evidence I have been able to see, inevitably arrives at the conclusion that a cover-up is likely."

But the 2023 public intelligence community assessment pointed in the opposite direction: foreign adversaries' involvement was "highly unlikely." According to disclosures by The Guardian, near the end of the Biden administration, five of the participating agencies still maintained the "highly unlikely" judgment, while the sixth shifted to there being "a roughly equal possibility," holding that foreign actors may have carried out some of the attacks using "novel weapons or prototype devices."

The intelligence community's internal judgment on Russian involvement split to a point difficult to bridge. Citing two sources, The Guardian reported: one side emphasized the lack of "smoking-gun evidence," arguing that if Russia were running a large-scale program, U.S. intelligence collection capabilities against Russia should have captured something; the other side countered: "If you're waiting for some intercepted phone call — 'Hi, this is Igor, I'm going to push the button on the secret laser' — then you'll probably never get that day. But for any rational person with access to intelligence and who knows how to read it, the Russian fingerprints are clear."

The above disagreement was broken in the summer of 2026 by Gabbard in the form of a memorandum. According to The Guardian, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence claimed the 2023 assessment contained "selective exclusion of evidence" and "mischaracterization of sources," but the statement released no new evidence and provided no revised assessment.

The Guardian's report simultaneously disclosed two new pieces of evidence. First, independent journalist Sasha Ingber revealed this year and had two sources confirm to the paper: the U.S. government purchased through an undercover operation from a dark web seller in late 2024 and brought back a device that could be "carried by a single person" and emits non-thermal pulsed microwaves; animal testing showed it could produce symptoms resembling anomalous health incidents. The device is not believed to have been used in actual attacks. Second, investigative journalist Christo Grozev claimed that leaked travel data showed the locations of suspected anomalous health incidents overlapped with the travel patterns of officers from Russian military intelligence GRU Unit 29155 on at least four occasions; he said he had traced a "member of a technical department suspected to be adjacent to 29155" who visited during the initial Cuba attacks.

An earlier clue was exposed in The Guardian via content from the new book by CBS journalists Michael Rey and Oriana Zill: in a 2019 internal investigation into a senior CIA officer who experienced anomalous health incidents in London and Warsaw, a phone linked to Russian intelligence personnel was reportedly located within roughly 10 meters of his hotel room at the time of the incident; then-CIA Director Gina Haspel reportedly opposed reporting this lead to President Trump, who was highly sensitive on Russia-related issues, and the investigation petered out. Rey told The Guardian that the so-called cover-up did not stem from a single smoke-filled-room decision, but rather from years of accumulated "bureaucratic dysfunction, factional infighting, and dereliction" — for example, the FBI initially sent criminal investigators rather than counterintelligence investigators with classified clearances to Havana.

In responses cited by The Guardian, former CIA Director Burns denied any "cover-up," calling the related investigations "a rigorous effort by the entire intelligence community." But Mark Zaid, a lawyer representing more than 30 patients, said Gabbard's memorandum was the "first step" in overturning a CIA cover-up, and hinted that the motive for cover-up was to protect the agency's reputation: "The truth has reached a point the institution cannot bear, because once exposed it would severely damage their image."

Polymeropoulos told The Guardian: "Russians are our enemies, and I put them in the same category as al-Qaeda or the Taliban — all the organizations I have fought against. Of course, I want to see them held accountable. But what I am actually more angry about, more betrayed by, is my own government."

Georgetown University Medical Center emeritus professor James Giordano told The Guardian: "We know this technology has reached the level where it can be weaponized. I consider this a clear and real threat." For those intelligence officers who have been long-term disabled by unfakeable brain injuries, what truly outrages them is not only the attacks by foreign adversaries, but also their own country's agencies' persistent failure to provide an honest accounting for the decade-long chain of handling.