The Havana Syndrome Edition

Colin here. The U.S. government spent years insisting that a weapon capable of producing the neurological damage reported by diplomats and intelligence officers would have to be the size of a truck. The device reportedly acquired by a classified mission in late 2024 fits in a backpack.

It is silent, man-portable, and capable of penetrating walls and windows at several hundred feet. Its components are of Russian origin, The Pentagon has been testing it, and on Sunday, 60 Minutes reported on it for the first time.

The device doesn’t resolve what caused the incidents, hundreds of reports of sudden, severe neurological disruption from U.S. personnel stationed in Havana, Moscow, Vienna, Hanoi, and elsewhere over the past decade. But it reopens a possibility the government had effectively closed.

Why is this interesting?

The device is less important than the institutional behavior surrounding it.

For nearly a decade, the U.S. government has been running two parallel tracks on this issue: what it privately considered plausible and what it was willing to say out loud. The official Intelligence Community Assessment, issued in 2023 and reaffirmed in 2025, concluded it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible. It used carefully calibrated and lawyerly language that seemed designed to close a door without closing the deadbolt.

Meanwhile, Biden administration officials were privately telling victims at a White House meeting in late 2024: we believe you. A written statement in support of victims was reportedly drafted and never released. The internal document and the public document were not the same.

Stanford’s Dr. David Relman, who led two government-commissioned scientific panels on the phenomenon, told 60 Minutes his findings weren’t simply debated but “dismissed, in some cases buried.” His panels had concluded that directed pulsed microwave energy was the most plausible explanation for a subset of cases. A former CIA officer told 60 Minutes the agency’s investigation had largely wound down by 2022, steering toward psychosomatic and environmental conclusions. Victims, according to that officer, were sometimes quietly mocked.

What makes the newly obtained device particularly strange is that its power isn’t in the hardware, it’s in the software. The device produces a precisely engineered electromagnetic waveform that rises and falls abruptly and pulses rapidly. Whoever built it understood the human nervous system well enough to create a weapon to wreak havoc on it.

The most interesting explanation for all of this isn’t that the science was wrong, or that some cases had conventional causes while others didn’t. It’s institutional: the government spent years managing uncertainty about a capability that was both difficult to attribute and politically destabilizing. Acknowledging a covert directed-energy weapon that could silently target American diplomats in their homes would raise uncomfortable questions about deterrence, escalation, and how long the vulnerability had gone unaddressed. The two-reality structure wasn’t an accident. It was a strategy.

This isn’t without precedent. The “Moscow Signal,” a microwave beam directed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow for years during the Cold War, was something the American government itself only publicly acknowledged decades after the fact.

Marc Polymeropoulos (read his WITI MMD here), a former senior CIA officer who woke up in a Moscow hotel room in 2017 with vertigo, tinnitus, and what became permanent neurological damage, has called this “a massive CIA cover-up” for years. He said it again this week. (CJN)