Former President George W. Bush may have been attacked with a sonic weapon causing the mysterious Havana Syndrome condition in 2007 as president, a new report revealed this week.
A Washington Examiner report on Tuesday citing “exceptional witness testimony” revealed that Bush and the delegation that traveled with him to the 2007 G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany may have suffered from Havana Syndrome, which was not named or identified at the time.
Additionally, former First Lady Laura Bush’s 2010 book “Spoken from the Heart” described the first couple’s travel to the summit, noting “by the afternoon of [June 7] I could barely stand up. My head inexplicably throbbed; I was horribly dizzy and nauseated. I went to bed, pulled up the covers, and for several hours felt so awful that I might die right there in the hotel room.”
Laura Bush’s book went on to add that “nearly a dozen members of our delegation were stricken” along with the president. “For most of us, the primary symptoms were nausea or dizziness, but one of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear.”
The incident prompted Secret Service to go on “full alert,” Laura Bush wrote.
Now that Havana Syndrome has been identified and is a focus of U.S. intelligence, the 2007 incident warrants a review, five current and former U.S. government officials told Washington Examiner.
One U.S. government official who was a victim of Havana Syndrome and diagnosed with a subsequent brain injury because of it, told Washington Examiner that Laura Bush’s descriptions are “eerily similar” to what the official and their colleagues experienced when they were injured. The official said an investigation should be launched into the incident.
Victims of sonic attacks producing Havana Syndrome have widely reported hearing a grating sound and feeling pressure or heat, followed by the onset of nausea, dizziness, and head or neck pain. The symptoms of these sonic attacks – which were first identified in Cuba – have since come to be known as “Havana Syndrome” over the past few years since the frequency of the attacks ramped up in 2016 and beyond.
Preliminary investigative efforts have assessed the symptoms are consistent with a directed radiofrequency energy system. A 2020 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report concluded that “intense pressure or vibration in the head, and pain in the ear or more diffusely in the head” as well as “sudden onset of tinnitus, hearing loss, dizziness, unsteady gait and visual disturbances” was symptoms consistent with “the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”
American diplomats in Cuba, China and Russia, U.S. troops in Syria, White House staffers and secret service agents in and around Washington D.C., and federal personnel in Florida have all been victims of the sonic attacks in the last five years. A report in May revealed that at least 130 Americans were victims of the attack since 2016, with a two-year-old child identified as the youngest victim.
Although an official consensus has not been reached or released, U.S. intelligence officials have widely said that Russia’s military intelligence – known as GRU – is a primary suspect in the mysterious sonic attacks inducing Havana Syndrome.
The GRU, which in Russian stands for the Main Intelligence Division, is the intelligence arm of the Russian military. The GRU reportedly has a known footprint in each of the countries where sonic attacks have been suspected, including in the U.S.
“It looks, smells and feels like the GRU,” one former national security official involved in the investigation told Politico in May. “When you are looking at the landscape, there are very few people who are willing, capable and have the technology. It’s pretty simple forensics.”
Moscow has also repeatedly denied it is behind the various suspected attacks.
In May, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said U.S. national security and other federal agencies were working to investigate the unexplained sonic attacks. In September, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered all military, civilians, or contractors in the Defense Department to immediately report unexplained health incidents indicative of Havana Syndrome.
