Is "Havana Syndrome" Real?

John Schindler is a controversial figure. He has a background in what we darkly call "intelligence," and he shows his membership in that Elite of Failures by almost always being wrong, but being wrong with utmost confidence.

You probably know of "Havana Syndrome" -- US diplomats and spies in Cuba claim they are being targeted by some kind of unknown directed-energy weapon which attacks their brains and gives them migraine headaches, vertigo, and long-term neurological problems. And not just spies in Cuba -- intelligence operatives around the world complain of similar symptoms, and can guess at the culprit: Russia, using a weapon unknown to us.

You might expect our filthy and corrupt Deep State to hype this threat to the absolute maximum. After all, they now claim that pretty much everything, including the undersea demolition of the North Sea gas pipelines built by Russia for billions of dollars, is the fault of Russia. So why not hype this threat?

And yet they don't. In fact, the reason "Havana Syndrome" isn't talked about in the always-reliable mainstream media is because the Deep State debunks it and claims that the people suffering from "Havana Syndrome" are just malingerers with pre-existing conditions imagining new symptoms, possibly to get a pay day.

That's odd. It's odd that the Russia Russia Russia Deep State suddenly wants to give Russia a pass and throw its own brethren under the bus, accusing them of, basically, insurance fraud.

It's a Mystery of the Dog That Didn't Bark type situation.

John Schindler claims that "Havana Syndrome" is real, and that everyone in the Deep State knows it's real. In fact, he claims, the Deep State even knows the specifics of the "mystery weapon" Russia is using to attack the brains of its enemies.

Below, "AHI" is bureaucratese for "Anomalous Health Incidents."

Seriously-- we pay you for this nonsense?

Let's review what Biden's DNI concluded about AHI in March 2023, as this newsletter explained at the time:

This was [the DNI's] bottom line:

"Most IC agencies have concluded that it is "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels, with two agencies at moderate-to-high confidence while three are at moderate confidence. Two agencies judge it is "unlikely" an adversary was responsible for AHIs, and they do so with low confidence based on collection gaps and their review of the same evidence."

Unfortunately, it's impossible to independently assess any of that bureaucratese, because the IC redacted the supporting analysis so heavily that it's indecipherable. The accompanying statement from DNI Haines made her position clear: "U.S. adversaries, including Russia, were not engaged in a global campaign resulting in AHIs," adding, "IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors."

In other words: it's all in your silly heads, folks.

I'm not going to mince words: that DNI statement is a bald-faced lie. The terrible truth is that, for many years, multiple hostile intelligence services have employed a Russian-designed and built acoustic directed energy weapon against Americans to harm and cripple them. The culprits are Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB (for attacks inside or near Russia), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff or GRU (for attacks further afield) and Cuba's Dirección de Inteligencia or DI, a close Kremlin spy partner since the 1960s (many of the attacks in the Western Hemisphere, including inside the U.S., are the DI's handiwork).

Our Intelligence Community is well aware of what the mystery weapon is and how it works. American spies have possessed fragmentary information about this clandestine Russian spy program for decades. Now, based on extensive intelligence collection and analysis, the IC has identified a half-dozen variants of this unique weapon, which was initially developed by the KGB during the late Cold War. The variants represent improvements in terms of capability, portability, and range. The top-shelf model is customarily deployed in a van and has an effective range of several hundred meters. The smallest weapon is man-portable in a backpack and is employed against close targets at a hundred meters or less. All variants produce similar symptoms and long-term medical harm.

Our enemies are not concerned in the slightest about "collateral damage." Many IC victims of AHI have been struck at their residences when family members are at home. Spouses, partners, and even children have been attacked, experiencing long-term health impacts. Such attacks have occurred inside the United States too. Again, Biden's IC refuses to do anything about this. Somehow this White House is happy to provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars' worth of weapons and munitions, to help Kyiv defend itself against Moscow's aggression, armaments which have been used to kill thousands of Russians -- but doing anything to protect Americans from Russian attacks, even on our own soil, is unthinkable.

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There's good evidence that the Russians have been targeting Americans with this weapon for three decades. The 1996 attacks on NSA's Beck and Gubete appear to have been a trial run of sorts for the secret device. My colleague Tom Rogan has presented plausible evidence that Russian intelligence targeted President George W. Bush with the mystery weapon during a 2007 visit to a resort on Germany's Baltic Sea coast. If that sounds crazy, that wasn't the first time the Kremlin has tried to harm top American officials with unconventional weaponry. During a 1959 visit to Moscow, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, were attacked by something, apparently a KGB secret weapon, that beamed ionizing radiation at them. The Secret Service covered up this shocking incident for decades, until it was revealed in 1976 by a high school newspaper in the suburbs of the nation's capital.

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It gets worse. A core component of the Top Secret conspiracy executed by Biden's IC regarding AHI is denying that anything is happening while suppressing evidence that something awful keeps happening. A few years ago, two FBI senior special agents took a vacation in Turkey with their families. Both agents had served as legal attaches abroad; known as LEGATs, these are FBI representatives stationed in U.S. embassies all over the world, coordinating investigations and information exchange with host-country law enforcement. Both LEGATs were known to Russian intelligence, and one had served at U.S. Embassy Moscow. While on holiday with their families, as they enjoyed an Anatolian beach week, they were attacked by a Russian intelligence operative, believed to be from GRU (specifically its sinister and shadowy wetwork Unit 29155, which has run amok all around the world in recent years), carrying the backpack version of the mystery weapon. The LEGATs and their families were bathed in invisible toxic waves in plain sight of dozens of bystanders.

Moreover, this attack was caught on film. Turkish intelligence, known as MIT, has what can be charitably termed a frenemy relationship with American intelligence agencies, and MIT was surveilling the FBI agents, suspecting they were in Turkey on a secret mission, employing a beach holiday as cover (in fact, this was just a family vacation). MIT caught the Russian operation on video, offering a good look at exactly how GRU and others employ the backpack weapon.

However, MIT refused to hand the video over when American intelligence learned of its existence and requested to see it. NSA hackers from the agency's elite Tailored Access Operations shop got down to work and stole the video by cracking into MIT classified computer networks.

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No spooks I've spoken with know what happened to that video. I strongly suspect that -- just like the Top Secret intelligence file on Iran's nuclear program displeasing to the Obama administration which I revealed here last week -- it's being analyzed by "top men" at a classified facility somewhere in the Northern Virginia suburbs, if it hasn't been somehow "misplaced" already.

A document Schindler includes there speaks of the NSA confirming, in 2014, the existence of a weapon using microwaves as its projectile.

Foreign Policy magazine knocks that down, saying "a microwave weapon would be wildly impractical."

That's an absurd statement. A microwave weapon would certainly be impractical as a general use weapon, but as niche weapon that inflicts damage without leaving a bullet (or any other) evidence behind? The CIA and NSA spend fortunes on "wildly impractical" gear including very expensive, powerful batteries smaller than a match-head. They are wildly impractical for general use, but critical for the niche use for which they are custom-made, such as powering tiny listening devices.

Update: Here's something "impractical:" The KGB used to break into safes by bringing big x-ray machines to see through the metal and see the slots the dial needed to be turned to to open them. This x-ray machines flooded the room with radiation. All of the spies who used these machines got serious radiation poisoning and died of cancer. They lost their teeth before death, and were called a Russian nickname that translates to, "Men without teeth."

But oh yeah, a microwave assassination weapon is too "wildly impractical" for the Russians to use it.

It's stupid, truculent deceptions like this that make me think maybe this idiot John Schindler is right.

You might also want to read his previous missive about one Barack Hussein Obama and his determination to find no intelligence on Iran that would hurt his drive to normalize that terror-state.

How did we get to this place, which from any counterintelligence viewpoint looks highly alarming (plus pretty bonkers)? Individuals with ties to FTOs like HAMAS, no matter how tenebrous, are not supposed to possess any security clearances, much less occupy senior security jobs in Washington, DC. Where did this all go wrong?

What happened was Barack Hussein Obama.

It's now painfully clear that since Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his people have been running the Democratic party at the top levels. The mainstream media isn't bothering to elide this any longer. Cadres decide everything, per Stalin's sagacious mantra, and Obama's chosen cadres have run the show during President Joe Biden's presidency (since Biden was suffering from age-related decline from early in his presidency, which became impossible to hide over the last year, it's worth pondering how much Joe was really commander-in-chief at all: but that's another matter for another time). We should expect the same cadres will be running things if we get President Kamala Harris. Obama-Biden will then become Obama-Biden-Harris: OBH, if you like. There's been remarkable continuity in personnel across these administrations, especially in the national security arena, which is no accident.

It's time to confront the difficult reality that Team OBH in its foreign policy has boosted avowed enemies of the United States like the Islamic Republic of Iran plus radical Islamists of many stripes, all of which have ample American blood on their hands. Why? It needs to be asked if such an outcome, which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West, isn't a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009.

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What we can state confidently about Barack Obama is that he grew up in an international and multicultural milieu where "anti-imperialist" rhetoric was de rigueur. His youthful mentor was a Stalin-loving Communist Party member. During his 1980s student days, Obama engaged in the usual left-wing protesting (apartheid South Africa was a big issue then). He always had an affection for Islam, probably due to the father he never really knew. Obama's political career was launched with the support of a prominent domestic terrorist. In all, from a counterintelligence perspective, it doesn't amount to much except inviting more questions. It's revealing that Obama's own biographer, a Pulitzer-winning liberal, deemed his subject "not normal--as in not a normal politician or a normal human being."

We then must judge Obama based on his policy. That's concrete. Take Iran, a country which loomed oddly large in American foreign policy during Obama's presidency, culminating his 2015 "Iran Deal," formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. (It's also the regime that's currently trying to influence our election and assassinate Donald Trump.) JCPOA was the crowning achievement of Obama's foreign policy, at least in his own mind, and his administration sacrificed a great deal on other fronts to get it. It helped that the media was so naïve and pliant. As Ben Rhodes, Obama's mini-me whose main task was selling JCPOA to the media, infamously explained after the Iran Deal was done, reporters are malleable idiots who "literally know nothing." It may not be irrelevant that Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the West Wing was "HAMAS."

Here Rob Malley played a pivotal role behind the scenes. The left-wing academic turned diplomatic fixer got JCPOA done for Obama, serving as the administration's mullah-whisperer. Malley returned to the Biden White House, where he was charged with resurrecting JCPOA after President Trump killed it. However, that initiative was cut short last year when Malley had his security clearances suspended, and he was kicked out of the State Department and placed under FBI investigation. We know very little about the Malley case, since the Biden White House has stonewalled Congressional inquiries into this sensitive matter, which reeks of espionage. This newsletter has reported on the Malley case in detail -- more than any mainstream media outlet has, by a wide margin -- and the possibility that he's his generation's Alger Hiss cannot be ruled out. At best, Malley was uncomfortably close to Tehran, flew too near the sun, and got burned. It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Top Secret Umbra that Rob Malley is a longtime friend of Phil Gordon, who is Vice President Harris' national security guru (Gordon too possesses questionable ties to Iranian intelligence fronts), nor that Malley recommended Maher Bitar for a position on Obama's National Security Council.

Therefore, Obama and Biden's counterintelligence problems with Iran and Islamism will surely carry over into any Harris administration. The current case of Ariane Tabatabai is illustrative. Another Friend of Tehran, Tabatabai still occupies a highly sensitive senior Pentagon position with TOPSECRET//SCI clearances, despite apparently being an agent of Tehran. As this newsletter recently reported, Tabatabai remains on the job inside one of the most secretive Pentagon offices, even though her connections to an Iranian intelligence front were publicly exposed last year. Indeed, Tabatabai visited the White House several times after her dubious connections to Tehran dating back a decade came to light. As usual, the White House is ignoring Congressional inquiries into the case. At this point, I see no reason to doubt that Tabatabai will get a promotion in the Harris administration.

At the dawn of the Obama era, a Pentagon friend and colleague, now of blessed memory, warned me that the new administration was riddled with Islamist sympathizers and related Communist-adjacent types who were seeking to swing U.S. foreign policy in a direction more pleasing to the mullahs in Tehran and jihadists worldwide.

I wonder if he is talking about my friend, the late and much-missed Rich Higgins. I've mentioned him before -- he pointed out that Muslim Brotherhood officials were allowed in the room, indeed to take part in, discussions about handbooks about how to spot an Islamist extremist, among other things. The Muslim Brotherhood are the Islamist extremists we should be on alert about.

When someone at one meeting cautioned about spreading the information they were talking about to outsiders, he wondered, "Who the f*** are we hiding this from? THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IS IN THE ROOM RIGHT NOW BEING BRIEFED ON IT!

Moreover, he predicted the emergence of a domestic front, an odd alliance of leftist radicals, terrorist fans, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and Islamists, all seeking to change America at a basic "anti-imperialist" level. I pooh-poohed his predictions as unduly alarmist, the output of a brilliant mind that was scattered by too many deployments. I was wrong.

That does sound like Rich. He had a pet theory, which I think was just simply wrong, that the Vegas shooter was some kind of antifa-Islamist plant.

But that's just a detail. In the main, he was right to be worried about our "intelligence" industry's first-name basis friendship with Islamic terrorists.

I realized how wrong I was starting a dozen years ago, and now it's time for me to blow the whistle regarding what demonstrated indelibly in my mind that there was something very wrong with the Obama White House.

He speaks of a pro-American foreign spy and friend he calls "M.," a "spook's spook."

His country's foreign intelligence service had recruited a couple well-placed moles high-up in Tehran. These moles had a track record of supplying accurate intelligence, the one embedded in the upper reaches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, especially so. They were handled with great caution and counterespionage vigilance. The agent inside the IRGC was a true golden source, a senior officer who had access to nuclear secrets. He knew a great deal about the true status of Iran's program to develop "the bomb."

What M. attempted to brush-pass me with was a dossier of original IRGC documents that were classified Top Secret and provided ample technical information about centrifuges and whatnot. Things I didn't remotely understand, my diffident study of physics having ceased in high school (not to mention that I don't know Farsi), but M. gave me the BLUF, i.e. the Bottom Line Up Front: Iran is further along with their nuclear weapons program than the U.S. Intelligence Community officially assesses, and the Obama administration publicly claims.

"Great!" I explained: "Just pass this package to my guys (i.e. the IC), they'll know what to do with it."

M. at that point went ashen faced. I knew he needed another drink, so I procured one hastily. He explained that his intelligence service had informed the Americans of the existence of the purloined IRGC dossier through standard channels, what spooks term "liaison." They offered to share it immediately. The CIA station located in his country's capital didn't take the bait. Indeed, they seemed to show no interest in the dossier at all.

Mystified, M. took matters into his own hands. He scheduled a meeting with the CIA's Chief of Station in the capital, whom he knew. M. brought the dossier with him and explained that his intelligence service had authenticated the documents. Moreover, they were willing to share information about their mole inside the IRGC, to establish his bona fides, always a risky proposition given counterintelligence concerns (plus the fact that Iran executes traitors). A face-to-face meeting with the mole might even be on the table, given the significance of the intelligence he provided.

The COS appeared wholly nonchalant and bluntly explained that he couldn't take the dossier. Since the COS and M. knew each other, the CIA official explained in hush-hush fashion that he had orders "from higher up" not to take possession of the IRGC's nuclear secrets. "Just following orders," per the Nuremberg testimony.

M. walked out of that meeting thoroughly demoralized. His high opinion of the American way was shattered. Hence his appeal to me to resolve the situation. I understood the stakes and suspected what was going on here. I took the triple-wrapped dossier and got it into U.S. intelligence channels where it would be secure. I appealed to high-up IC authorities to read it and take it seriously. Of course, I was assured that the IC had "top people" on it. In retrospect, I believe that the dossier was placed in a back room of a classified warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia, if it wasn't immediately burn-bagged.

That detailed IRGC dossier was the Wrong Narrative as far as the Obama administration was concerned, it might jeopardize their precious Iran Deal, thus it had to not exist. Therefore, it never existed. Until I went whistleblower right here.

Schindler is a vain man. He's still claiming that Trump's "Russian connections" were very real, though he now backpedals and says they were also "overblown" by "the media" and "wine-moms." He sounds like a man who played up this hoax for years, and then, when it was all proven to be a disastrous lie, is rushing to say he was always one if its critics/skeptics.

So who knows if any of this is accurate.

I'm always a bit skeptical of people who claim that they've got the goods on just about every hot story floating around. Like: You're really that central in the web that you've got the scoop on everything?

But, for what it's worth.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:20 PM

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