“Patient Zero,” an American official stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, was in his Havana apartment one night in December 2016 when he heard a strange sound and felt what he described as a “head-crushing pressure” and a “massive ear pain.”
The sound stopped after he moved to another residence, but the symptoms remained, he told the Miami Herald: “I would wake up with nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop.”
A doctor the CIA sent to investigate had a similar incident himself in his Capri Hotel room just hours after arriving on the island’s capital in April 2017. “I woke up with severe pain in my right ear. I had a deafening, resounding headache and nausea. I sat on the bed and realized I was awake. I had this extreme feeling of pressure. I thought, ‘This can’t be happening; it’s crazy,’” he told the Herald.
That morning, the physician was so disoriented he said he didn’t know whether to pull or push to open a door and couldn’t concentrate enough to count money to exchange currency.
Around the same time, in early 2017, two Canadian diplomats posted in Cuba had similar symptoms, suddenly feeling extremely nauseous and disoriented, with headaches and ear pain, the two told the Herald.
The children of some Canadian diplomats also had nosebleeds, nausea, loss of memory, and concentration and vision problems for no apparent reason.
In December 2017, a high-ranking CIA official, Marc Polymeropoulos, at the time deputy chief for operations in Europe and Eurasia, woke up in a hotel room in Moscow “with a terrible case of migraine and vertigo,” he told the Herald.
All of these people have been diagnosed with brain injuries or inner-ear problems that doctors who treated them believe are part of a new disorder known for the place it all started: Havana Syndrome. They went through years of tests and rehabilitation therapies and are still suffering from debilitating effects.
But after so many years, they still struggle to be believed.
The Miami Herald spoke to three former CIA officials and two Canadian diplomats affected by the strange incidents who said they are convinced they were targeted while serving their countries abroad. And all said that a recent U.S. intelligence report blaming their ailments on pre-existing medical conditions or environmental factors is an attempt to whitewash the Havana Syndrome affair, likely due to political considerations.
Most of those who spoke to the Herald requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, concerns for their security or because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the cases.
“A betrayal,” Polymeropoulos said of the U.S. intelligence assessment published in March.
“An attempt at public influence and disinformation,” said another of the victims.
“Hugely disappointing that they would take that stand and cast doubt all over again,” one of the Canadian diplomats said. “It really hurts our credibility.”
The Havana Syndrome affair marked a breaking point in U.S. relations with Cuba. Most embassy staff was evacuated in 2017 and all visa processing halted in Havana for several years.
Now the victims claim the U.S. government wants to move on and “put a bow on it and close the book in hopes that no one would question it,” Patient Zero said. “This is a massive analytic intelligence failure or a cover-up; only time will tell,” he said.
Patient Zero got his nickname for being the first U.S. official to bring up the incidents. He said he retired from the CIA after seven years of service because the injuries he suffered in Havana left him blind in one eye and incapacitated for work.
He suspects he might have been targeted with a directed energy weapon or device, a possibility that the March intelligence assessment rules out.
“The report has been harmful to those of us injured,” he said. “It’s just another knife in the back. People don’t realize that by doing this, they greenlit all of our adversaries abroad to keep doing this to us.
The Canadian cases were not included in the March assessment, the Canadian diplomats said, even though they were a crucial part of what happened in Havana.
“We were there,” one of the Canadian diplomats said. “We know that something happened.”
The people the Herald interviewed also point to the failure of the U.S. and Canadian governments to immediately respond to the incidents and provide timely medical treatment to all affected.
The three former CIA officials said the U.S. government has taken one position in public while discreetly paying compensation to the victims under the Havana Act, a 2021 law that authorizes “payments to agency personnel who incur brain injuries from hostilities while on assignment.”
The compensation rules require that a doctor certify the person has a “qualifying injury to the brain” and that they do not “have evidence or otherwise believe that the symptoms can be attributed to a pre-existing condition.”
The “CIA wants to have it both ways,” Polymeropoulos said. ”They paid out settlement money to us, acknowledging that we suffered a brain injury in the line of duty that was not a preexisting condition. But then they also say at the same time, nothing happened to us.”
Asked for comment, the CIA pointed to a statement by agency Director William Burns after the release of the March intelligence assessment stressing that “these findings do not call into question the experiences and real health issues that U.S. Government personnel and their family members — including CIA’s own officers — have reported while serving our country.”
Burns said he and other leaders at the CIA, one of the agencies involved in the production of the March assessment, “stand firmly behind the work conducted and the findings.”
“We applied the Agency’s very best operational, analytic and technical tradecraft to what is one of the largest and most intensive investigations in the Agency’s history,” he said.
‘The worst type of science’
The Intelligence Community Assessment published in March, written by analysts from seven unnamed U.S. intelligence agencies, concludes “there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing” Havana Syndrome.
U.S. government officials said the assessment is the most comprehensive analysis of the mysterious incidents in Cuba and other countries including Russia, China and Austria.
Because the intelligence agencies could find no evidence of a foreign power targeting American officials, the “symptoms reported by U.S. personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors,” National Intelligence Director Avril D. Haines said in a statement.
The CIA doctor who became ill in Havana said the statement is an example of “circular reasoning.”
“Because they could not find a weapon or adversary, and they don’t think any directed energy or microwave weapon would work (without providing a basis for that assessment), they dismissed the legitimacy of the medical problems,” he said. He called the report “a gross summary designed to influence public opinion. It is not a scientific report.”
A declassified summary of the assessment shows that the agencies that contributed to it sometimes disagreed with each other, with some stating they had “low confidence” in particular findings because of gaps in the evidence, and one even abstaining from backing up some of the report’s conclusions.
But a lack of evidence does not mean something didn’t happen, Polymeropoulos said.
In countries like Cuba, Russia and China ”we don’t have this all kind of encompassing knowledge,” he said. “We don’t have great coverage in terms of human intelligence and signals intelligence… How can you explain anything that happens inside Cuba when we don’t know anything that happens inside Cuba?”
Patient Zero agrees, noting the Cuban government “controls every square inch of the environment down there, which makes it very difficult to collect the appropriate intelligence.”
When Polymeropoulos asked the CIA if it had solved his case, the answer was no, he said, adding that he can’t understand the “sense of finality” in the March assessment.
“It really is a betrayal,” he said. “And it’s a betrayal from colleagues. It’s upsetting because I don’t understand why they can’t just say we don’t know” what happened.
Critics of the assessment say it has a major flaw: It looked at 1,500 cases, a figure dramatically higher than the original reports because the Biden administration asked government employees to report any suspicious symptoms. By casting such a wide net, critics say, and without a clear explanation of the criteria and methodology, the report minimized the findings related to a core cluster of cases, mainly from Havana, that do follow similar patterns — and that the CIA acknowledged were difficult to explain in an interim finding in early 2022.
“This is a very dangerous report that represents the worst type of science possible,” a scientist familiar with the Havana Syndrome cases told the Herald. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the the subject. “They were very indiscriminate in who they included as a possible victim. When you include individuals who may or may not have been affected, you don’t get an accurate view of those who were truly affected.”
The scientist pointed out that the data was sometimes collected years after the person was affected.
“The report sounds authoritative, which is unwise because the science is very suspect, if not totally wrong,” the scientist said. “And in some ways, it disenfranchises or discounts the truly affected individuals who are truly suffering. I think it was done entirely with political motivation.”
The March intelligence assessment relies heavily on a 2021 report written by JASON, a group of elite scientists that advises the U.S. government, to cast doubt on the original clinical findings by two independent teams of medical experts at the University of Miami and the University of Pennsylvania. Those teams were asked by the CIA and the U.S. State Department to test and treat American diplomats, CIA officials and family members stationed in Havana.
The Miami team found that some victims had a unique pattern of balance and cognitive dysfunctions linked to abnormalities in the inner ear. The Pennsylvania team concluded that about two dozen Americans suffered from mild traumatic brain injury, similar to a concussion, even though none had suffered a blow to the head. In a later study in 2019, the UPenn doctors found the group had specific changes in their brains. Both teams strongly opposed theories that the injuries were psychosomatic, as an earlier FBI report and the Cuban government had suggested.
Two other teams of experts — one from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that published its findings in 2020, as well as a panel convened by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA in 2021 to investigate potential causes — also agreed with the early medical findings that the symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome pointed towards a new medical disorder.
But the authors of the March intelligence assessment paraphrased language from the JASON report to claim that while the initial studies concluded that the health incidents represented “a novel medical syndrome or consistent pattern of injuries similar to traumatic brain injury, a combination of medical and academic critiques pointed to methodological limitations in that work.”
Yet examples of those critiques are scant in the Jason report, which was commissioned by the State Department. The intelligence assessment also says JASON’s review of medical data “does not convey a consistent set of physical injuries, including neurological injuries such as ‘traumatic brain injury’.”
The JASON report, however, included several caveats, among them that the group did not have access to the patients’ MRI studies and other medical records, and that an alternative explanation for not having found “strong evidence” of traumatic brain injury in the medical data of 65 people the group reviewed was that the pool of individuals might have been too broad.
However, 20 to 30 cases “defy a straightforward explanation at present,” the JASON report concluded.
It is unclear why the intelligence agencies gave more weight to one study than others. The assessment’s full version is classified. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not comment for this article.
‘A failure in leadership’
After an initial diagnosis of brain injury by a UM team led by Dr. Michel Hoffer, a professor of Otolaryngology and Neurological Surgery and concussion expert, in February 2017, “Patient Zero” spent several months trying to convince his superiors he needed further evaluation and medical care.
He did not return to Havana and his health deteriorated. At some point, he said he even wrestled with suicidal thoughts. It was not until he told his superiors he would not go back to work that he was allowed to see doctors at UPenn in September 2017. He received a similar brain-injury diagnosis there. But at that point, the doctors informed his superiors “that the delay in treatment and the fact that I was forced to stay in work, and was fighting and stressing, all that stuff actually led to the severity and permanence of my injuries,” he said.
“Patient Zero” said that while he was away from his post in Havana, the U.S. government sent replacements without warning them about what had happened.
“And then they would come out injured as well but not knowing why,” he said.
The CIA closed its station in Havana in September 2017, according to a declassified internal review obtained by the National Security Archive. The document mentions that several “temporary duty officers” were injured in Havana, including two who “experienced medical injury from an incident at a Havana hotel” in August 2017.
Several years later, “Patient Zero” says he is still adjusting to living with a brain injury which is now his reality.
“It’s a challenge; it’s day by day,” he said. “You exist with Post-It notes and things on your phone to remember things, which is difficult for someone like me. I used to have a photographic memory. Now, it’s a challenge to remember things.”
Despite his position higher up in the CIA, Polymeropoulos said he also encountered similar reluctance when he asked for medical care.
After his return from a 10-day trip to Moscow to meet Russian intelligence officials, he “went to visit the doctors immediately at CIA headquarters. And I said, ‘Something happened to me in Moscow.’”
He asked them to send him to UM or UPenn for evaluation, but he said they refused. It was not until after he retired in 2019 and spoke to the media about his case that he was referred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a Washington, D.C., government facility where he was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, according to a document he shared with the Herald.
“I was in really bad shape and begging for health care. They were saying no,” he said. “What a horrible leadership failure. What a kind of moral injury for me. I was a very successful operations officer, one of the most decorated in terms of intelligence medals and awards from my generation.”
The Canadians who spoke with the Herald reported a similarly harrowing experience.
The diplomats said they believed they were targeted in Cuba but that Canadian Embassy officials in Havana asked them to keep quiet and not alert others about what was happening.
The Canadian government did not evacuate family members and non-essential personnel until April 2018, after UPenn doctors told two Canadian families that they had the same brain injury pattern as the Americans. That was months after the U.S. State Department had pulled out non-essential personnel in Havana in September 2017.
A study of 16 adult Canadians who reported health incidents in Havana found changes in areas of their brains that were similar to those found in the Americans affected. The study was requested by Global Affairs Canada, the agency that oversees diplomatic relations.
The diplomats said the Canadian government did not coordinate medical treatment, particularly for the affected children, and that getting reimbursed for medical treatment took months, if not years. Recently, they said they had been cut off from workers’ compensation too.
“We were railroaded, thrown under the bus,” one of the Canadian diplomats said.
Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Marilyne Guèvremont said the agency “takes the health, safety and security of Canadians — both at home and abroad — very seriously. Canadian diplomatic staff and their families have Global Affairs Canada’s unwavering support.”
She said Global Affairs Canada provided support to employees posted to Cuba and their dependents, including aiding medical assessment and treatment and reimbursing them for medical expenses.
One of the Canadians affected said that even when their government stopped officially acknowledging new cases, Canadian officials going to Cuba continued to get sick. Global Affairs said that 15 Canadians had been diagnosed with “acquired brain injury,” although Canadian media have reported at least 23 cases of people affected in Havana.
In 2019, a group of Canadian diplomats and their families sued the government for $21 million, claiming it withheld information and failed to protect them. The government is fighting the complaints but has agreed to mediation, one of the diplomats said.
Most sources interviewed for this story said they couldn’t say why the U.S. and Canadian governments were slow in responding to the threat. Still, they mentioned geopolitical interests and staffing concerns as possible reasons.
The incidents have been a major roadblock in U.S. relations with Cuba and contributed to thousands of Cubans using irregular means to get to the U.S. after the embassy stopped issuing immigration visas. The Biden administration started staffing the embassy again in late 2021.
Canada, on the other hand, which has a friendlier relationship with the Cuban government, has carefully avoided publicly calling the incidents “attacks.”
The CIA doctor who was affected in the Havana Capri Hotel incident said he believes that some of the participating intelligence agencies behind the March assessment “had an interest in diluting the results, as they were involved in the premature decisions to ignore the medical complaints.
“The impact of the relentless impugning of the Havana group’s integrity and motivation has had serious impacts on their well-being,” he added, noting the group had passed extensive medical and psychological tests.
“If anything,” he said, “it is the report’s cherry-picking of facts and cases to formulate their opinions that really falls apart.”
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