Pulsed RF: Plausible Cause of Havana Syndrome

A newly declassified, though heavily redacted, report from the intelligence community has put renewed emphasis on the possibility that the condition known as “Havana Syndrome” could be caused by pulsed RF energy.

The report, Anomalous Health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms, was prepared for the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and the Deputy Director of the CIA, David Cohen. It was released to attorney Mark Zaid at the James Madison Project in Washington, DC. Salon broke the news yesterday evening.

The names of the authors of the report were censored. “The panel comprised experts from inside and outside the U.S. Government with expertise in relevant areas of science, medicine and engineering,” according to the report. All had top secret clearances.

Symptoms of Havana Syndrome include hearing loss, vertigo, headaches, nausea and various other unexplained neurological complaints.

Support for 2020 Findings of the National Academy of Sciences

The new report, dated September 2022, supports the conclusions of a 2020 assessment by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired by Stanford University professor David Relman. That panel found:

Considering the available information and the possible mechanisms, the committee felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by Department of State employees “are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”

Only about a third of the members of Relman’s group had security clearances. Linda Birnbaum, the former director of NIEHS and the NTP, was a member of the NAS panel.

Two years later, Relman was still concerned about RF radiation. “We have identified an area of science and medicine that I think is very important that we really don’t know a whole lot about,” he told CNN. “How does the human body interact with electromagnetic energy? We really need to understand that better.”

Others believe that Havana Syndrome is a form of mass hysteria. For instance, just last week, Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist, writing in Psychology Today called the whole controversy a “fiasco.” All those symptoms were “not caused by a secret weapon, but an array of health conditions and anxiety,” he argued.

Key Findings

The key conclusions of the new intelligence committee report are:

• “The signs and symptoms of AHIs are genuine and compelling.”

• “A subset of AHIs [has] a unique combination of core characteristics that cannot be explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli.”

• “Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics, although information gaps exist.”

• “Ultrasound also plausibly explains the core characteristics, but only in close-access scenarios and with information gaps.”

• “Psychosocial factors alone cannot account for the core characteristics, although they may explain some other reported incidents or contribute to long-term signs and symptoms.”

• “Ionizing radiation, chemical and biological agents, infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound propagated over large distances, and bulk heating from electromagnetic energy are all implausible explanations for the core characteristics in the absence of other synergistic stimuli.”

Here are three noteworthy snippets from the new report (unfortunately, the references are not included in what was released):

On the blood-brain barrier (p.7):

On the auditory effect first described by Allan Frey (p.25):

On low-frequency modulation/high-frequency carrier (p.28):