Max Johnston:
Hi, I’m Max Johnston, the lead producer and co-creator of The Sound Mystery of Havana Syndrome. I’m here with the bonus episode of the show. This past February, we held a panel on Havana Syndrome at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. The conversation was moderated by the museum’s historian and curator Andrew Hammond. It also included our host Nicky Woolf, former CIA Officer Marc Polymeropoulos, and National Security Attorney Mark Zaid. You’re gonna hear their conversation where they discuss their personal experiences with this story, their take on the various government agencies and their responses to the anomalous health incidents, and what can be done for victims moving forward. Let’s get right into it.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
So, it is a pleasure to be with you here tonight to explore this issue, and I feel like, uh, Scottsman and Englishman and two New Yorkers, I feel like there’s a joke in there somewhere. So I’ll leave it to you to workshop in the reception afterwards. So we’re going to discuss this issue in a second, but I just wanted to put a little bit of historical context around this, uh, given that’s what the Spy museum pay me for. So, just to put it in context. So for some people, this seems really far fetched, right? Microwave beams. Let me just give you a few things that have been verified. So, the period, 1945 to 1962, ‘the thing’ which is the Great Seal of the United States was given to Averell Harriman, the American Ambassador in Moscow. And there was a passive cavity resonator in there, which basically means that it would only be activated when electromagnetic beams were directed towards it.
This was there for seven years until 1952. It got discovered during the tenure of George Kennan, who actually on this particular day wrote the Long Telegram – so someone who was foundational for American Cold War Foreign policy. And actually one of the ambassadors during this time was also a former director of Central Intelligence, uh, Walter Bedell Smith, 1953 to 1977, a thing called the Moscow Signal. So let me just, I’ll illustrate this by speaking about some Senate hearings that were held in 1979. So just listen to the title of this: Microwave irradiation of the US Embassy in Moscow. So this is the name of a Congressional report. Let me quote from the opening passage: “People reading this report may know that the US Embassy in Moscow was subjected over a period of approximately 25 years to microwave radiation.” Close quotes, Henry Kissinger, and a call with Anatoly Dobrynin, the long term, Soviet ambassador in Washington DC. This is not too long ago, declassified file, Kissinger to Anatoly Dobrynin: “That beam that you’re beaming into our embassy in Moscow. Maybe you could turn it off. We really are sitting on it here, but too many people know about it. We will catch hell unless we can say something is happening.” Close quotes. This brings us up to the person I want to start with, uh, Marc. So Marc Polymeropoulos, I’m going to let him tell his own story, but he’s in Moscow in 2017 when he experiences what he went through. Marc, if you don’t mind, uh, just telling the audience your story, how this all happened for you.
Marc Polymeropoulos:
Sure, thank you. So, I think, you know, to, to start, this is probably the last place I really want to be talking about myself and my health struggle as I have gone kind of public with what happened to me almost as a plea for help, because it eventually did get me to Walter Reed’s traumatic brain injury center. But this is not something that’s normal for someone like myself who spent 26 years at CIA in the clandestine services. Um, you know, we live in the shadows. That’s where we’re supposed to operate. But the story is, and I’ve said this many times, I’m happy to of course say it again for the audience. In December of 2017, I was the Deputy Chief of operations for the Europe in Eurasia Mission Center. So I was the deputy in charge of clandestine operations across 50 countries across the European continent, and all the way to the farthest time zones of Russia.
Now, I had been a long time Near East Division case officer, also worked in the counter-terrorism center, and I was brought in this job specifically after the 2016 elections and Russian interference. Um, not making a political statement, but, but ultimately they wanted to bring a whole bunch of us from the Near East and the counterterrorism world to kind of take it back towards the Russians and so what I had to do was go to Moscow for what we call area familiarization, which in essence is visiting the embassy, seeing the ambassador there, it was John Huntsman, who was a senior statesman, a super ambassador. But I had to go get eyes on the ground there for a lot of reasons, I had to see what I was, you know, what I was in charge of but also for, you know, credibility as well.
I had to, I had to go kind of take a trip there. So it was a 10 day trip, I believe it was on December 5th. I woke up in the middle of the night. I didn’t hear a sound. And you know, everyone’s story is different. I did not hear a sound per se, but I woke up with an incredible case of vertigo. The room was spinning. I was, I felt physically sick. I had tinnitus, which is ringing in my ears, and it was pretty terrifying. And, and I say this after someone who’d spent almost three years in the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, and been shot at more times than I had, care to talk about. I ran a paramilitary base along the Pakistan Afghanistan border, we’re in combat every day. This was the most terrifying experience of my life, because I had lost total control — something had happened.
And it was the vertigo, the extreme vertigo, which is nothing like I’d ever experienced before. The next morning, I woke up, I had contacted the embassy, we went to a local pharmacy to get some anti-nausea medication. We then went to St. Petersburg along with our, you know, all of our trailing surveillance, which is totally normal. There’s some Moscow veterans here, so they’ll know all about that. Nothing unusual. I felt a little bit better. And then I returned to Moscow the night after, and it hit me again as I was sitting having dinner in the Pushkin Cafe, a famous restaurant in Moscow when extreme vertigo hit me again. And, and then I kind of, you know, kind of tried to survive the rest of the trip, crawled my way back onto the airplane and came home. And it started a pretty awful medical journey and, and really fights with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, where when I came home, I asked to be seen and treated.
And, and the answer from them was, nothing’s wrong with you. It, this caused me to eventually retire after, you know, a medical journey, which again, took me, my own private doctor spent thousands of dollars of my own money. And the Office of Medical Services, despite my repeated pleas, refused to, to give me treatment. I of course at that time had thought about what had happened to my colleagues in Cuba. I had begged to go to the University of Pennsylvania, which a lot of people know is where, where some of our officers from Cuba were being treated. And they said no. I finally retired in July of 2019. And at that time, some of my other colleagues were affected, and they were going to Walter Reed’s Traumatic Brain Injury Center, it’s called NICO. And even then, through my contacts at the agency, I was begging for medical care.
It was gotten so bad, I couldn’t drive. I lost my long distance vision. I had terrible brain fog. And when I finally made the decision to go public, it was via, journalist Julie Ioffe. But I credit so much to her because she wrote an article about me in, in GQ Magazine. The day it was published, three former CIA directors called me who I knew from my time — I retired from the Senior Intelligence Service, so I was relatively senior, and they said: “What the hell is going on? Why haven’t they treated you? This is a tremendous leadership fail on the part of the agency”, which is correct, because ultimately, as you know, with my 26 years at the agency, and as a Near East officer, I think I was involved in every covert action program in the Middle East, um, always with the notion that whatever, you know, what the US government was asking me to do.
And there were some unusual things, but I always thought they would have my back and they didn’t. And even when I was, again, when I was retired, I was begging to get medical care, and there the answer repeatedly was no. And so I finally went public and three agency directors, former directors called me. They immediately called the seventh floor and miraculously the next day I was admitted, or given authorization to go to the Walter Reed program. And, you know, I could go on and on about this, but I will say that the 18 specialists there, the doctors and nurses saved me. Pretty, pretty tough time. I was not in good shape when I got there. And I, I came out of there with some hope and some tools, um, and I’m still on the kind of long road to recovery, and I’m feeling much better. Um, that was five years ago, if you can imagine that now, sorry, I get emotional even talking about it. But what those doctors did for me, um, I will be able to repay them.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Your career was taken away from you, your physical health, your mental health. I mean, really debilitating, right?
Marc Polymeropoulos:
I was, you know, again, the position I had. And when I left, I remember that the deputy director of operations at the time asked me, are you okay enough? We wanna bring you upstairs to be one of the associate deputy, the ADDOs. This is the pinnacle of someone’s career at the CIA. I couldn’t even go to work for three hours. I had such bad headaches, um, and brain fog, and it just, I was, I was a mess. And so I went from someone who is a, you know, a high performer, but also someone who, and even in my journey now, as I’ve talked about this publicly, I deeply believe in the mission of the CIA. And so, you know, it’s an indispensable institution for the United States. And I’m very proud of the things we did and like, and, you know, work with my colleagues who I think are heroes.
But there’s a moral injury to this. There’s a betrayal I felt when the CIA didn’t give me the medical attention that I needed. You know, if you’re not feeling well and an employee comes to you, send ’em to the doctor. And they weren’t able to to do that. And to me, that’s just a leadership fail for the ages. And something that to, you know, to current CIA director Bill Burn’s credit, when he, you know, came into into office, he called me. And I, I’ve spent many hours with them. And he fundamentally didn’t understand some of the decisions that were made you know, with the previous administration. This is not a political thing. This is just kind of basic leadership.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Mm-hmm. Going on to Nicky before we get to the other, Mark. And Nicky has worked at The Guardian, The New Statesman
Nicky Woolf:
<laugh>. So I, I guess if I, should I go back to the beginning end of kind of a brief overview of what… So at the end of 2016, the first of what would be 24 of the first cohort, and it started out as CIA officers and later diplomats in the US Embassy in Havana started reporting these weird medical symptoms and those included quite a lot of what Marc’s just talked about experiencing. So we’re talking vertigo, insomnia, nausea, brain fog, also ocular damage. Later it came out, brain damage was found on some scans. Now, exactly the definition of damages is complicated. But quickly, this was run up the chain within the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon. It was clear something was happening. Patients flown out into at first Miami and then University of Pennsylvania, they were given scans. And when it went public, there were a whole bunch of hypotheses that the people ran through really quickly.
Now, the first one was the idea that it might be some kind of sonic weapon, a sound device. That was what then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson first said, when the questions were asked. Actually of the hypotheses, that one was relatively easy to rule out, partly because the level of of sound — ironically, because a lot of the people had reported hearing a strange sound that accompanied the onset of symptoms — a sonic energy weapon that could cause these symptoms would actually be either past the top end or below the bottom end of what you could hear. So ironically, we ruled out sound as the weapon because eople could hear something. But then the other two major theories with it, a) there was some kind of psychogenic transfer going on, a sort of mass delusion. The power of suggestion is very powerful. It can cause a certain amount of types of symptoms.
And then the other theory that that quickly emerged was a directed energy device, some kind of likely microwave energy. And those became the two major theories that we were kind of litigating. Um, and the problem with the psychogenic hypothesis is that one, a lot of the early cases didn’t follow a kind of a network pattern. There were, among the first ones, there was not a huge amount of ability to transfer the idea from one to the other and also, there were some of the symptoms that are simply not within the realms of what psychogenic illness can cause. So like, you know, it can cause nausea, but it can’t cause detached retinas. It can’t cause lesions to come up on, on brain scans, that sort of thing. And then the next question we had was, if it is some kind of directed energy device, what’s the status of that kind of technology out there?
And it became, as we researched it, it became cleared to us that actually the, the technological capabilities weren’t just — it wasn’t just plausible, but these were devices that were being, that existed in the real world and that American defense companies were even manufacturing. There’s patents out there and things like that. So we hit that plausibility argument, and then it became a question of motive. So again, the Cubans were accused, first off, cause this were happening in Cuba, and this was in the early days of the Trump administration. There were a lot of people like John Bolton whose agenda it really suited to blame Cuba. They’d wanted to roll back on Obama’s opening up for a really long time. They put Cuba back on the state sponsors of terror list. But really no one serious that we’ve spoken to believes that the Cubans were really doing this. And obviously given the kind of geopolitical situation, there’s one major suspect that, that quickly emerged, which is Russia, um, which is how we came to Marc. And we were talking about what other, you know, examples of this were coming up. Also, the more research we did, the more we found examples, as you say, going back to the fifties of different types of deployment by Russia of directed energy, partially for intelligence gathering. And then as it kind of progressed, it became less and less plausible that they didn’t know this was also causing health effects.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And just very briefly for our audience, one of the things that I found fascinating was the, the narrative arc and the podcast, you start off more skeptical, but then there’s a transition as you encounter more victims, as you see more evidence. So can you just talk about that, that transition that takes place that you encountered?
Nicky Woolf:
So I was brought in — just to sort of lay cards on the table — I was, my previous show was on Q Anon. I was brought in almost explicitly as a conspiracy theory reporter, right? Like I think when this was commissioned, the idea was as a debunking exercise. And first of all, from talking to the victims that we spoke to, first of all, it was very clear that something pretty dramatic had happened to these people. Like, in a way that, as I was saying before, the psychogenic effect is extremely powerful. But the more of these stories we heard, the less and less it felt like this could be sort of… the more twists we were having to do in order to explain it that way. And then the other thing was finding out about the force capabilities that already exist, which I had no idea about. I had no idea these things were, you know, existed. But yeah, we really had that, it was less of a single turn. It sort of seems like that in, in the show, but it was sort of a growing creeping element of doubt that came up. The more people we spoke to and the more we heard.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And over to Mark Zaid, who’s worked in national security law for a very long time and I think is one of the most fascinating perspectives in all of this, because of the people that you represent and the amount of time that you’ve been doing this. So tell us how you first came across this Mark. Because it’s before the Havana Syndrome, isn’t it?
Mark Zaid:
Right. So I give Nicky a bunch of crap, and, everyone else, when we always hear in the media, say it started in Havana. No it didn’t. Havana, something happened in Havana that brought this to light at a number of people. Two things, the vast number of people impacted and who was being impacted — predominantly State Department. Now I remember first seeing the stories and immediately as I saw a story, I was like, ah, this is, these aren’t State Department people. These are CIA people who are being impacted. Uh, and this is some sort of intel thing. And, you know, spy versus spy. And at first all the media reports were acoustic weapons. I was already working on a microwave perceived case that dates back to 1995 for an NSA client, Michael Beck — and this is all public, Washington Post did a great profile piece, The Guardian’s done a good piece — and I’ve already been on it for several years.
Uh, I’ve already been dealing with the NSA who had given me information that they had knowledge of microwave weapons being used by a foreign adversary that could be used to maim or kill a victim without leaving any evidence. Now is all intelligence reports. It was this memo that they gave me, you could find it online from 2014 October, is very carefully crafted by my colleagues inside the legal office in NSA because they were giving it to me for use in potential proceedings to try and get medical attention for Michael. And then as Havana hit, and we started to hear more and more of what was going on, and now I have two dozen clients or so, from across the spectrum of, you name the three letter agency and other agencies who had personnel serving overseas, uh, some whom you wouldn’t have suspected to be impacted, you know, doing trade work.
Uh, it wouldn’t normally be the type of person though, when you would dig down into some of the cases, you’d realize that they were in the same housing that had housed former CIA people that had been based there. And I will tell you, we don’t know what’s going on. I mean, let’s, let’s be very clear about this. We know the color of the victims, the stories they can tell in their experiences and what they’ve gone through. But this case, these cases, when you look at ’em historically, and the Moscow signal I’ll say is the ancestor of it, and you have to look at it that it’s not necessarily a straight line. It’s an evolution of technology, an evolution of adversarial capabilities from a spy versus spy, it is something that has developed where we don’t necessarily know the intent. Was it designed for surveillance to capture technology?
Was it designed to impact the person? Or was the person’s impact collateral damage that the adversary just didn’t care about? Clearly that has changed in the last few years because it has become so public, versus where it was in the shadows, that now anyone, whomever — and it could be more than one perpetrator — they’re doing it, is clearly having an adverse health impact on people. So regardless of what the intent is, there’s a duality and the notion of, right, this, this microphone I’m using is clearly for the purpose of beaming out my voice. So you can, you can hear me, but if I bop Marc on the head with it, it’s pretty heavy. And it could be a weapon too. Uh, and so that’s where we’re kind of looking at the technology. Now, the problem with this case, cases, is it is, at its root, intelligence.
I liken it to, cuz I do a lot of work on the Titanic, the iceberg. Only one third of it is visual. The two thirds of it is beneath the surface. What sank The Titanic was beneath the surface, not the part that they saw from the crow’s nest. In my work, I have had access to classified information about this. Can’t share it obviously, but I will tell you the vast majority of this information as to the capability, the actor, actors, whatever, all of that is in the classified realm. And what I have seen that has really bothered me the most is not that, oh, they know who’s doing it. Maybe they do, I don’t know, or they know what’s doing it. Maybe they do, I don’t know. It’s what they have been told over a passage of years of victims from within the community, the intelligence community at various locations, at various times that they have ignored, absolutely ignored, ignored in such a way that it’s, as far as I’m concerned, purposeful.
If we look at the Moscow signal as an example, that hearing it had basically three objectives from the government standpoint, the legislative standpoint. How long has the executive branch known this was happening? To what extent were they telling anyone it was happening? A-la what Kissinger was referencing? And what were the long-term health effects of it happening? And the responses that came out, the answers were, oh, it’s been going on for 15, 20 years. We knew it in the executive branch. Uh, we weren’t telling our people that it was happening who were based there in Moscow. And we have no idea of the long-term health impact because not enough time has gone by in 1977 or nine, whenever the hearing was, becuase it had only been a few years that some of these people had been impacted. Well, 1979 is now a long time ago.
It wouldn’t be that difficult for the State Department or the CIA to go back. And I’m not, maybe they’ve done it, I’m not aware of it. To go back and identify who was based, even if you looked at the leadership in our embassy and see the extent to which any of those individuals are one still alive, and if so, what’s their health or are they deceased and what did they die of? Because those of us who have been working on this know historically, and sadly currently a number, particularly within the agency, the CIA, a number of their personnel have been stricken with cancers, rare forms of cancers, Parkinson’s, leukemia — all of that could be coincident. All of that could be natural for them. But it appears to be statistically, anecdotally, at a level that is greater than the normal percentage in the population. And why is it that that’s not being studied?
Why is it that there’s no report on that? The final thing I’ll end in this sort of monologue, is when Marc talks about going into Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting on the front lines, they know the risk they’re taking when they do that. And it’s just them and they’re willing to accept it. When you look at some of the locations where this has happened, some of which are still classified, others of which have leaked out into the media, of reports in North America, south America, Europe, elsewhere, some of the most beautiful postings for where a case officer would love to go, cuz it’s just a gorgeous city, overseas where they bring their family and they bring their children. And what hasn’t been told there are, including some of my clients, a lot of children, minor children who have been impacted by whatever this is.
And to go to the psychosomatic aspect, you know, how is it that a new, you know, a less than one year old would be psychosomatically impacted? Or even quite frankly a six year old, who has no idea what’s going on in their parents’ lives whatsoever, and yet reports the same symptoms, but also upon examination is reflecting the same physical, similar physical deficiencies that can’t be explained by, you know, anything just occurring in the mind? And that’s the untold story. And that’s really the sad part because trying to get them medical care, get them compensation. It’s one thing when it’s a federal government employee, you know, try and do that for spouses and minor children who aren’t necessarily covered in the system that they’re normally accustomed to be.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And just to wrap that up, you know, just thinking about this in terms of say, trying to get to the bottom of something we don’t know the intentionality, we don’t, we don’t know what the MO was as a directed attack against US intelligence personnel or is that a byproduct of doing something else at the embassy? We don’t know what’s going on there. It’s things that are above and beyond what we can hear and what we can see. And then it involves intelligence agencies, which that’s another part of it. And then the final part, which is, you know, I think significant is this is ultimately about managing nuclear great power rivalry at some level as well, right? There’s, you know, there’s very significant geopolitics behind all of this. So just to move back to Marc, I was wondering, could you tell our audience how does this… give them some context for the rough and tumble game of espionage. Because this is pretty common, right? Harassment and, you know, your suitcases go missing and you know, people have broken into your apartment and so forth. It can, especially in Moscow during the Cold War, it could be pretty rough and tumble, but give them some context for what’s happened to you and some of the things that have happened to other people in the past.
Marc Polymeropoulos:
So Andrew, you know, traditionally in the, you know, espionage business, you know, there is a gentleman’s agreement, not always abided by, and certainly the Russians have played very, very dirty, particularly if you serve in Moscow. But overall, you know, even with our, some of our, our biggest adversaries, you know, when you serve overseas and you have, you know, a CI case officer and you know that there’s Russian intelligence officers, Iranian intelligence officers, Chinese intelligence officers, you’re developing them, you’re trying to recruit them, or you see how they are having an impact, what they’re doing on the streets, but ultimately there is an agreement that you don’t hurt each other. Uh, now that’s, again, that’s very kind of broad and it doesn’t go to some of the tough places like in Moscow or other times where our officers have been targeted.
But again, it’s the general notion of, of that is not violated. And so in this case, what is happening does seem to go to the extreme, particularly in the numbers that we’re talking to. And this is not numbers what we’re, you know, and even if we’re saying you can’t even quantify the number of attacks that that have occurred, but this is out of the norm. And so then, you know, one of the things that I guess we then look to, you know, when I’m in places where there’s a threat of counterterrorism or, or we’re going after terrorist groups, sure they’re gonna try to hurt CIA officers, but as a Russian SVR officer, as a Chinese MSS officer, or Iranian Y’s officer necessarily going to do something like this? You know, perhaps not now. So, so then you go to the notion of why, what’s changed?
And to me, the way I think about this is, and I I’ve been very open in when I say that I think Russia is a leading suspect, and I’m fine debating that all day, but if you take a look at how Russia and Russian intelligence is behaving over the last several years in an international stage, well, they are doing things a little bit out of the norm, like trying to, as you know, trying to kill their old officers in the UK, assassination operations in Germany. They’re getting caught doing so, they’re being very brazen in this. It’s almost you know, a reflection of what I think is they’re, you know, they’re practicing of hybrid warfare, which is everything kind of underneath the surface, non, you know, non-kinetic shooting war, but they’re doing things that are a bit out of the norm.
And that does give us some pause, especially as Mark said, when CIO officers go overseas, not in in conflict zones, but in traditional assignments, they take their families. And, and I know, and Mark alluded to it, I have friends and colleagues who have been affected by this, as has their six month old infant who has a permanent traumatic brain injury. And that to me is far beyond the norm of what, what is part of the intelligence game. I will say if I have had, you know, just individual anecdotes of friends who, you know, hey, do you want to go serve an X, Y, Z location? Well, I’m not sure I want to take my family there. It is a barrier to oversee service, which is something that we were very proud of for many years. And people always ask me, why has the agency not really pushed this and investigated it to the best of the ability of a world-class intelligence service? And, you know, people have different views of this. Well, what if we come to the conclusion that it’s not safe to serve overseas? That’s something that our operations directorate can’t have happen. So I think there’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want to kind of push this to some conclusions, which might be pretty disturbing for future service if we can’t find out and stop what’s happening. And that’s a hard thing to say, that’s damaging to our ability to kind of project, you know, what we need to overseas.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And I remember you describing this to me once and you said that would be one, I think one hell of a National Security Council meeting if, you know, they had conclusive proof and everything was on the table about what would the response be. And I just wondered, Nicky, you know, you’ve, you’ve been through this personal journey where you encountered highs and lows and, and got to the end. And I was just wondering what highs and lows did you experience? What was the, you know, you, I see you almost like Ulysses out there getting blown from island to island and, you know, eating lotes and so forth.
Nicky Woolf:
Yeah I mean, so one of the, one of the most staggering things that I found in this was — you know, setting aside the question of what exactly happened for a moment — was quite how chaotic just coming from not the US and just sort of, you know, you see US kind of intelligence operations as sort of, you know, as the friend who turns up in James Bond or something, and learning that half these agencies barely even speak to each other was gobsmacking. I mean the history of the FBI and the CIA kinda… is loathing the right word? Wouldn’t that mean just like, but like not all playing great together in the sandbox. Like this idea that all these agencies kind of have their own agendas and their own, not necessarily in a, in a malignant way in general, but just not speaking to each other, which just delayed any hope of getting a reasonable investigation on this done.
Each agency did their own investigation that came to a wildly different conclusions. And so there, there was a point at which all hope of a definitive answer was kind of lost because too much time had passed. The data was getting too noisy. And we spoke to, there was a National Academy of Science investigation commissioned by the State Department, one of more than a dozen investigations or so, yeah, they were like, yeah, it took them two years to pick up the phone and call us, by which time it was already too late. And that was, that was the moment I just, of, we both sat back and like, damn, there was a real kind of screw up happened here. And then there was the second US government screw up, which is the support for the victims just wasn’t there from any of the branches of government, really. They, they’re just the fight that people going through what you went through had to do in order to get the bare minimum of medical care was really stark to me, I thought.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And, uh, one, one question that I wanted to ask all of you, like what do you see as going on here? Like, is this just good old-fashioned bureaucratic incompetence? Like why have we not got to the bottom of this? Is this people like Kissinger sitting on top of information or is this just incompetence? Is it lack of communication? Is it something else? Yeah. Why would they not try to get to the bottom of it? Like, what’s going on? Like, why, why did it shake out like this? Why did it not shake out in a better outcome?
Marc Polymeropoulos:
Well, I mean, one of the things that I learned kind of over the, over the years working in national security is when there’s a story and there’s some kind of scandal, incompetence usually is <laugh> is the, is the culprit. And in this case, there certainly was some incompetence, but then it starts moving towards willful neglect or almost dismissive of some of our claims. But it’s a question three, former CIA directors when they called me, said, why are they not sending you to the doctor? And I said, I can’t answer that. And even when I fought to get to Walter Reed for those months and months, some senior staff at, at the agency and certainly in the Office of Medical Services, who by the way, CIA director Burns ended up removing, um, for cause. But they would say things to me like, well, Marc wants worker’s compensation, you know, Marc wants money out of this. They started making up things like I had a, a previous traumatic brain injury, a pre-existing condition. So it started going past the incompetence piece to something a little more, frankly, to me that was, it was disturbing. It was wrong and it violated that oath that we had as CIA officers to take care of each other. And so it’s people actively working against healthcare, and that to me is something that, you know, I will never get over.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Well, why do you think they were doing that? Was it to protect their own careers or was it to try to protect the agency in some misguided way? Like why would, why would people who were your colleagues like actively work against you?
Marc Polymeropoulos:
I can’t answer. I know Mark wants to answer.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Okay. Okay. <laugh> succinctly,
Marc Polymeropoulos:
This is my lawyer. He’s very good.
Mark Zaid:
<laugh>. I always go back to the saying about, you know, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And having been in DC now for 30 years, working on national security cases, never having been in the federal government, at least that I can tell you, I haven’t,
Nicky Woolf:
That’s what you would say
Mark Zaid:
Right? That I, I have determined that 15 to 20 years is the line where everybody starts forgetting what had happened beforehand. And so I worked on Gulf War syndrome cases back in the 1990s, in suing the government for access to data about it, working with some of the congressional task forces on it. I worked on the anthrax vaccine conspiracy matters for a number of years and shut the program down for being experimental. And we saw the same type of machinations within the agencies of challenging the existence of injuries that were difficult to identify. And that’s part of the problem because you’ll have naysayers with inside the agencies who think immediately that people are faking it on purpose because they want to get out of assignments, they want to get free healthcare, they want to get free compensation, whatever it might be. And, and that grows, and there is a concern.
And some of it is legitimate concern because some of the symptoms are so generic and can exist for alternative reasons or just are difficult to identify that I’ve heard from folks within the agencies that, you know, they don’t want to just be providing, lush assignments or compensation to everybody who just applies because they get a doctor somewhere in the United States to say, oh, you have a traumatic brain injury, which frankly, you know, some doctors will do if for whatever reason. So there are problems with identifying exactly what this is and quantifying in a way so that the government will take care. But it’s all of the above of what everybody’s saying — I always say incompetence first, CYA second, malicious conspiracy third. And there could be an overlap between the three of them. We’re at a point now though, where — and the agencies are coming to it begrudgingly —
I used to feel sorry for the State Department in the early years post Havana because they were the poster child in taking the brunt of it because they had the majority of the people publicly, and they were in the dark from the CIA. The CIA was not sharing information with them. I even had that with NSA where we had to, we had to bring CIA people up to NSA for them to meet and learn. Same thing with on the Hill as well. And then as time has gone by, cases have happened where the CIA has had to publicly identify litigation that we have under the Freedom of Information Act, where the CIA is neither confirming nor denying the existence of any records dealing with AHI until we force them to have to do so. And the same thing with the FBI, because now the FBI has victims of whom I represent. So there it is, it is spreading. And there are a lot, the problem is there’s no really easy answer to these questions.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Do you have any idea Nicky? Is it, is it just one of those things that historians will find out in 50 years when everybody’s moved on?
Nicky Woolf:
Yeah, I mean, I think, as you said, I think there’s a lot of, ass covering going on, it would really undermine that first position if we now come back and, and start approaching it in a different way. Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of, it remains kind of inexplicable to me the way the, the fight that people have had to go through.
Mark Zaid:
Well, I mean, it… I like to apply Occam’s Razor to most everything I do, and I work on a lot of conspiracy cases in, in trying to whittle them down so that they’re no longer, frankly, conspiracy cases. But if you just flesh this out and think of it from the government standpoint of — if this is what we think it is, what would that mean? If we’ve known about this for decades and haven’t, we didn’t warn our, our people and they’ve been suffering for health impairment over the years, and some have died, uh, as a result of that, is the government responsible for it? And then the final real serious consideration to give, if this is again, what we think it is — and we’ve had incidents here in Washington DC, including of some of my clients at the White House — if it is an adversary targeting our people, that’s an act of war. And that has really cataclysmic concerns, if that’s what this is. So, if our government knows what it is, I could understand actually some reasons, I might not agree with it, but I can understand why they wouldn’t reveal it.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Well, this has been really fascinating and I think there’s more that’s going to come out, for the questions. So one of the first ones that I think is quite interesting, have other countries or intelligence services reported similar phenomenon? Or is this strictly a us US-centric thing?
Nicky Woolf:
Canada, straight off the bat. So in the first, the kind of Havana cohort, quite soon after Canadians started to be hit as well, I think there was 15 or 16 total Canadian cases at the same level. And they did their own separate investigation. They had separate brain scans, which came to the same conclusions that the American institutions doing brain scans have come to. Those are the two major targets. We’ve heard stories of kind of incidental stories happening to Australians. No Brits as far as I can come across
Mark Zaid:
I’ve heard anecdotal Brits, but it’s all rumor and innuendo. It’s been more, this has always struck me again, applying Occam’s Razor that I never understood, because if it is the Russians, as a main protagonist against us, why would they not be doing it to the Germans, the French, the Brits, the Five Eyes and others around the world?
Nicky Woolf:
Not to mention Navalny.
Mark Zaid:
Right? You would’ve thought this would come up. And it hasn’t, uh, other than murmurs of it, I don’t know of any press reports of foreign incidents. Uh, so that, you know, that is a perplexing question that is a fair and legitimate one that to me always raises strange doubts. It’s just trying to figure out what the hell this is.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
I mean, this is just a thought, but do you think that, you know what, if you think about Britain, the assassinations or the assassination attempts — the Russians have clearly said to themselves: “This is something we can get away with with them. Sure, they’re in NATO, but you know, we’re taking out our former intelligence officers.”
Nicky Woolf:
They don’t need to intimidate the British.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. <laugh>, but in the, you know, you haven’t seen those types of things in the United States, so are they saying to themselves, let’s keep it at the level of non-attributable, let’s do things that are messing with them, but not messing with them because they can never prove it? Or is that, is that barking up the wrong tree? Any thoughts?
Marc Polymeropoulos:
No, I think that that makes a a lot of sense. Again, the idea of a non-attributable attack, um, that, that sows all sorts of chaos. You know, if this is a Russian, in essence an active measures plan, it’s, it’s been pretty successful.
Nicky Woolf:
And then there’s also the question of as, as kind of happened to you, which is that it, and we spoke to a lot of people who, until the Havana thing happened, didn’t connect the dots between their own experience and, and this, they didn’t kind of put the pattern together. It’s, you know, possible that internal reporting has been done in a British context and it just hasn’t hit the press or, you know, there’s, there’s all kinds of things that could be going on there.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Uh, next question. Why is there not more reporting on Department of Defense anomalous health incidents?
Mark Zaid:
I mean, there have been DOD victims, NSA of course have mentioned, I have several, all from different locations. There’s been Defense Intelligence Agency victims, and I know there was at least one DOD victim in Havana at the time. I don’t know what position they held, but I know the State Department confirmed it when I was in a meeting. And I will say, the Defense Department has been really right now, is at the forefront of pushing this to help the victims. They’re, and maybe it’s lessons they learned from Gulf War syndrome where they still couldn’t figure out exactly what the cause is, but they finally got to the premise of: “We recognize you’re injured. It happened on our watch, we’re gonna take care of you.” And so the folks who are going to Walter Reed for treatment, at first, were on a one year cycle and it had to be renewed, right?
Understand, we’re here in DC you or those of you who have, worked for the federal government, right? Somebody’s gotta pay for something. And I always learned this fascinated from government agency to agency, right? It’s not one big government. This agency has a budget and that agency has a budget, and if this agency does work, they want that agency to pay for it, not this agency out of their budget. So, it has been an issue of who pays for the treatment at Walter Reed and the CIA stopped renewing people, because their medical services offices was getting involved in trying to contradict what the Pentagon and the folks at Walter Reed were saying. And then to its credit, the Pentagon said, to hell with it, anybody who’s been at our program, you’re gonna stay. You keep making your appointments, we don’t care. We’ll figure out the money later. So DOD right now is, is the kind of poster child for how to deal with things at the moment. And we’ll see, but it, it’s a big bureaucracy and there are a lot of problems and there’s a lot of people fighting against what’s happening, and it takes people to step up and do the right thing, which we’re seeing by a lot of people on the hill, thankfully and people within each of the agencies.
Marc Polymeropoulos:
So Andrew, I, you know, I think I, for a lot of the victims, I think we have a lot more faith in the DOD system on this. And I think a lot of it does have to do with what, what Mark alluded to is that they have had experience over the years in strange kinds of medical issues, which, which frankly all end up being real in the end.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
What did that feel like, Marc, when you felt like you weren’t being gaslit any longer, when you, your suffering was validated?
Marc Polymeropoulos:
You know, it was, it was a tremendous moment when I, when I was discharged from Walter Reed and I had that piece of paper in my hand, and even recently when they provided more kind of documentation for some of my compensation claims to the agency. But this is a, a tangible piece of paper, written by, you know, a team at Walter Reed who have for decades studied traumatic brain injury. We saw after two, you know, uh, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the tremendous toll TBI and post-traumatic stress and others took on our, on our US military personnel. The fact that they provided this to me. I had tears in my eyes.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
And here’s a related question. Have there been any follow up MRIs that show improvement within the brain tissue and thus can extrapolate backwards to definitively document brain injury or damage?
Nicky Woolf:
Not, not that I’ve seen a published study on. I assume individual cases will have been re-scanned probably, but those would be covered by HIPAA, I would imagine.
Marc Polymeropoulos:
I’ve had a lot of MRIs <laugh> over the years. You know, I think that, and I think there’s some, you know, folks in the audience who are, who are very well versed on this, but, you know, it’s not always entirely clear what’s gonna come out on, on imaging, and I don’t think we should put, uh, a lot into that other than if doctors see anomalies, that’s important. I think there’s, you know, for me and for some of the other patients, it’s, you know, improvement is how you feel every day.
But ultimately, you know, uh, when, when you start feeling better, you know, you’re feeling better. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and to me that’s, that’s the improvement that I wanted to see. And it’s a lot that was taught at a lot of these facilities in terms of, you know, kind of overall wellness and resiliency.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Next question, given that we have both the resources and the technology, why have we not installed detection equipment at our embassies overseas to prevent more officers from getting sick?
Nicky Woolf:
They started giving detectors quite soon after the first alleged Havana incident, but there, as far as I know, hasn’t been, isn’t a perfect detector for what this kind of thing could be.
Mark Zaid:
Yeah, it’s complicated. Uh, obviously, I guess what I would say, and sort of going back to what Nicky was talking about with it is amazing what information is out there publicly in patent applications and government contracts of how long the industries have been working on this. And I know what I had been told from inside is that frankly, our adversaries are way ahead of us, and some of it was because they, people just made decisions to where they were gonna focus on work, what was the applicability of it, others, because some countries have lower ethical medical standards than we do as far as testing out certain techniques and devices and things like that. So there’s been a lot going on that we know behind the scenes, especially the defense department, current applicability, that they’ve been studying. So, there are answers to those questions, but probably just too complicated to do here.
Marc Polymeropoulos:
Andrew, I’ll throw just one thing in here. It’s using an old kind of term we use in the counterterrorism world, it’s called getting off the X. And so, you know, one of the things that, that certainly has been passed, you know, through current agency staff is if you’re feeling something like what we are hearing in terms of sound or, or any kind of blast wave is to you know, get away from that location. Um, one of the things our doctors have told us at Walter Reed and in other places is the more exposure you have had to whatever happened, the more kind of the severity of your injury increases. And so it’s the idea of again, getting off the X. Someone’s not shooting an AK 47 at you, but someone’s doing something to you. And I mean, you think about, you know, what are countermeasures? It’s if you feel something, you know, move outta that location as quickly as possible and that, that to me is, is probably the only thing in terms of advice rather than any kind of technical mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, I mean there’s, there’s been a whole bunch of officers who have had things to try to detect some kind of microwave blast or something that just to me, that hasn’t worked.
Mark Zaid:
Yeah. And I will add there is evidence, and by, when I say evidence as a lawyer doesn’t mean it’s good evidence, but there is evidence from technology, cell phones and computers of at the same time the human is feeling something, the cell phones were going crazy and the computers were going crazy. This goes to what I was saying earlier of where my anger and frustration grows as to trying to understand what’s going on on the inside as far as studying this. Because I know I have clients who have this evidence and we’ve offered it to the government many times, and either they don’t take it or they take it and then we never, it just goes into, you know, Indiana Jones Vault at the end of the first movie and just disappears.
Dr Andrew Hammond:
Well, it’s been such a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed speaking to you gentlemen. Could you all put your hands together to thank our panel please?
Max Johnston:
Thanks for listening to The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome. For even more bonus material, subscribe to Brazen+ on Apple Podcasts. Subscribers can listen, add free across all Project Brazen podcasts, access exclusive bonus episodes, and binge brand new series before general release. Stay tuned for more.