Havana syndrome

Havana syndrome (also known as "anomalous health incidents") is a disputed medical condition reported primarily by U.S. diplomatic, intelligence, and military officials stationed in overseas locations. Reported symptoms range in severity from pain and ringing in the ears to cognitive dysfunction and were first reported by U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba, though earlier incidents may have occurred in Frankfurt, Germany. Starting in 2016 through to 2021, several hundred U.S. intelligence and military officials and their families reported having symptoms in overseas locations including China, India, Europe, Hanoi, as well as in Washington, D.C., USA.

In 2019 and 2020, some U.S. government representatives attributed the incidents to attacks by unidentified foreign actors, and various U.S. officials blamed the reported symptoms on a variety of unidentified and unknown technologies, including ultrasound or microwave weapons. The U.S. intelligence services could not determine the cause of the symptoms, however, U.S. intelligence and government officials expressed suspicions to the press that Russian military intelligence was responsible.

Beginning in 2022, several major studies were published with none of them found any evidence of the reported conditions being the result of actions by a hostile power, with some citing potential psychogenic and other explanations, such as environmental causes or pre-existing medical conditions. In January 2022, the Central Intelligence Agency issued an interim assessment concluding that the syndrome is not the result of "a sustained global campaign by a hostile power." Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed.

In February 2022, a panel of experts assembled by the Biden administration released an executive summary stating that radio waves could be the cause of some of the injuries reported by some CIA officers and diplomats, and that while stress may have had a role in persistent symptoms, mass hysteria or functional illness could not explain the initial injuries in the cases it focused on. In February 2022, the State Department released a report by the JASON Advisory Group, which stated that it was unlikely that a directed energy attack had caused the health incidents.

In March 2023, seven U.S. intelligence agencies completed a review of the proposed cases of Havana syndrome and released an unclassified report with the consensus that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unlikely". Despite this report, Pentagon-funded experiments which attempted to recreate Havana syndrome in animals by exposing them to RF waves for extended periods continued.