CIA Doc Sent to Investigate Illness Developed Havana Syndrome

A CIA physician who traveled to Cuba to get to the bottom of the mystery illness known as “Havana Syndrome” wound up experiencing some of the same debilitating symptoms, he told CNN.

During the network’s weekend special report “Immaculate Concussion: The Truth About Havana Syndrome,” Dr. Paul Andrews (a pseudonym) told CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD, that within a day of arrival at his Havana hotel, he was “awakened with severe pain in my right ear.”

“I had a lot of nausea and a terrible headache, and I never suffered from headaches before,” he said. “The amount of ringing in my ears was just astounding, and things were getting worse and worse and worse, and I started to hear the noise, and I’m really in disbelief.”

Andrews told Gupta he believed he suffered some sort of injury or damage to his inner ear or brain that night.

In 2016, Havana-based CIA officers first reported unexplained, persistent symptoms of impaired balance, pain in one or both ears, feelings of pressure or vibrations in the head, tinnitus, visual problems, nausea, and cognitive difficulties.

Gupta reported that Andrews’ experience “was 5 years ago. Spending time with him now, it is clearly evident that Dr. Andrews remains very debilitated.”

Andrews is a patient of Michael E. Hoffer, MD, of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. In 2020, Hoffer and colleagues published a study in Frontiers in Neurology, reporting a distinctive neurological pattern among U.S. Embassy personnel stationed in Havana such as neurological impairments with similar changes in eye movements and pupil responses.

Hoffer told CNN that tests his team administers to potential victims of the syndrome include one related to natural eye movement and one for gravity function tied to inner-ear organs. Impairment detected by the latter test can show people having to devote 60% to 70% of their energy to just stay upright, Hoffer told Gupta, who noted that all 25 American officials from Havana who consulted with Hoffer showed the same neurodysfunction.

Other experts who Gupta spoke with for the special included a Chicago-based microwave energy expert who explained how microwaves, possibly from directed-energy weapons, could interact with the brain and cause such symptoms, and an electrical engineer who said he believes he is the first American to self-test pulsed microwave energy.

James Lin, PhD, professor emeritus of the University of Illinois Chicago, described to Gupta the noise from pulsed microwave energy as a “zip” or a “click” inside a person’s head. Lin hypothesized that syndrome victims who reported very severe symptoms — having to crawl around on all fours because they could not be upright — may have experienced very intense exposure.

He said constructing such a device was possible with commercially available materials. He also told Gupta that if syndrome victims were hit by high-intensity microwaves, “it must be intentional.”

Gupta noted that Cuban investigators, scientists, and officials have held firm that no such attacks against U.S. citizens in Cuba happened. A January 2022 CIA task force interim report found that it was “unlikely [that] Russia or any other foreign adversary is conducting a widespread global campaign designed to harm U.S. officials,” but that “the agency also did not rule out that a nation state — including Russia — might be responsible for roughly two dozen cases that investigators have been unable to explain by any other known cause,” according to CNN.