A Russian spy unit has been connected to an enigmatic disease that has been affecting US diplomats recently.
Workers with “Havana Syndrome” stationed worldwide have reported experiencing unexpected symptoms like dizziness.
A collaborative investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and CBS’s 60 Minutes suggests that they might have been the target of Russian sound weapons.
Moscow has refuted the allegations. In the past, US officials claimed it was improbable that a foreign power was at fault.
However, they did not provide a different explanation in their assessment of “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs), which was released last year, which frustrated people who were impacted.
The American officials also admitted that different intelligence agencies engaged in the assessment had differing degrees of confidence in it.
The first case was discovered in Havana, the capital of Cuba, in 2016; however, a recent investigation indicates that the first instances may have occurred in Germany two years earlier.
There have been more cases recorded everywhere, from China to Washington.
The Pentagon announced on Monday that a senior defense department official who attended the NATO summit in Lithuania last year showed symptoms resembling those of Havana syndrome.
Staff members of the White House, CIA, and FBI are among the American personnel affected by the illness. They have reported experiencing headaches, dizziness, headache pain, and a sharp noise in their ears.
There have been over 1,000 reports of the unusual illness, and the official diagnosis for many of the patients is still unknown. Lawmakers in the US have passed measures to assist victims.
Nevertheless, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research that was released last month claimed that in dozens of US servicemen who experienced AHIs, MRI scans had not shown any signs of brain damage.
Long-standing speculation has held that the individuals impacted may have been struck by microwaves or directed radiation shot from covert devices; this possibility was also noted in a previous US intelligence study.
According to a recent media report, there is evidence that Russian military intelligence unit 29155 may have used “directed energy” weapons to attack US diplomats’ brains.
Evidence, according to the study, places unit members in locations all over the world during times when US personnel reported occurrences.
The covert team conducts operations overseas and has been connected to a number of incidents, including the attempt to poison former Russian agent Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.
According to The Insider, a Russia-focused website, an officer in the 29155 unit received recognition for their work on the creation of “non-lethal acoustic weapons” as part of the inquiry.
According to a 60 Minutes interview with an American military investigator looking into cases of the condition, patients of the syndrome shared a “Russian nexus” as a common thread.
Greg Edgreen clarified: “There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.”
Additionally, he claimed that because his nation did not want to “face some very hard truths,” the official US standard of proof to demonstrate Russian involvement had been set too high.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded to the media probe by saying: “No one has ever published or stated any convincing evidence of these false charges anywhere. Consequently, those are all baseless charges.”
An FBI agent who experienced the syndrome described being struck by a strong force at her Florida 2021 home to 60 Minutes.
She said to the show, “It felt like a dentist drilling on steroids inside my right ear.” That sensation when something approaches your eardrum too closely? That’s how it is ten times over.
In response to the story, US authorities stated that they would “continue to closely examine anomalous health incidents” and reiterated that it was “very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible” in an interview with CBS News, the US partner of the BBC.
However, they stated that their study on such instances was a priority and that they “did not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported.”
The former national security advisor to Donald Trump, John Bolton, called the latest accusations “very concerning”.
“I don’t think the government, frankly, when I was there, took it seriously, enough,” he stated to CNN. “I don’t think they’ve taken it seriously enough since then,”
However, prominent Trump ally and Republican Senator JD Vance dismissed the report, saying on X: “Feels like a lot of journalists have lost their minds” .