"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 5

Episode 5: What Should the U.S. Do About Havana Syndrome?

May 29, 2023

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 5

Episode 5: What Should the U.S. Do About Havana Syndrome?

It started in 2016 when a small group of American diplomats and spies in Havana, Cuba said they heard a piercing sound and became debilitatingly ill. Seven years later, more than a thousand Americans all over the globe now say they’ve also gotten sick. Despite several scientific studies and numerous government investigations, the debate around what’s making people sick still hasn’t been fully resolved. Could the job these foreign-service and intelligence officers do — trying to keep America safe — in outposts like Cuba and Russia and China be so stressful that it causes serious neurological symptoms? And is Havana Syndrome still a national security threat — since it’s taking out some of the best and brightest Americans in the foreign service and intelligence?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Marc Polymeropoulos: I'd been in a lot of crazy places around the world, been shot at plenty of times, but this was terrifying.

Peter Bergen: What happened?

Marc Polymeropoulos: I was on a, just a routine trip to meet with our Russian security counterparts. It was the middle of the night. I woke up to a start. I didn't hear anything. But I woke up and the room was spinning and the case of vertigo was so severe that I could barely stand up. I felt like I was gonna be physically sick. I had a splitting migraine and tinnitus, which is ringing in my ears. You know, my first thought was, my God, I must have eaten something. Must have been food poisoning.

But as it continued on the next day and several days into the trip, and then when I returned home, about a week later, the symptoms got worse. I lost my cognitive abilities. I couldn't drive. My long distance vision was going. And so it started this incredible health journey, which I'm still on.

Peter Bergen: How does that feel?

Marc Polymeropoulos: It’s something I've learned to live with and cope with. It's gotten better. Some days have been harder. It's one of those things where I could never do a job for eight hours a day. I've got two hours of bandwidth.

Before he got really sick on that trip to Moscow in 2017, Marc Polymeropoulos had spent much of his life trying to keep Americans safe, working in all sorts of senior positions for the CIA.I could tell he really loved his job. He showed me his living room wall lined with photos and mementos from his dangerous assignments overseas.

Marc Polymeropoulos: If you take a look, that's me in Baghdad with a member of our security team.

Peter Bergen: These are Saddam Hussein's arms.

Marc Polymeropoulos: Sure, the arms there and you can see the regime of figures that I was involved in, in apprehending. It was quite a unique time.

Peter Bergen: This looks like you in Afghanistan.

Marc Polymeropoulos: That's Afghanistan. So there’s a couple pictures over many years. So up top there is me with the Special Forces Team and… that's Mullah Omar's old compound there.

Peter Bergen: Oh, yeah.

Marc says he's suffering from what the U.S. government calls "anomalous health incidents." But you've probably heard it called Havana Syndrome. That's because the first cases were reported back in 2016 by Americans who were working at the U.S. embassy in Havana.People said they heard a piercing noise and suffered from symptoms like dizziness, headaches, and hearing loss.

Now, more than a thousand American government employees and their family members say they’ve also gotten sick.And cases have been discovered in places like China, in India, and even on the grounds of the White House itself.Over the last seven years I've heard A LOT of different theories and explanations about who or what might be responsible for making these people sick. That it's some sort of weapon, or another country targeting Americans.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity have concluded that the diplomats have been exposed to an advanced device that operated outside the range of…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: … believe the ailment may be caused by what's called a directed energy attack.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Cuba saying it's investigating the incidents and that quote...

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: U.S. intelligence does consider Russia to be the likeliest suspect.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: A new report from the National Academies of Sciences says the most likely explanation for this mystery is microwave radiation.

And among all these conflicting theories, there’s another one. That people could have REAL physical symptoms which are psychological, brought on by things like stress.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 5: Many scientists warned that the most likely explanation was mass psychogenic illness, or what is commonly known as mass hysteria.

But how can something like hearing loss be psychosomatic? And Marc Polymeropoulos was diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury by Walter Reed — a leading U.S. military hospital. They have an entire research center dedicated to brain injuries.

So what should the U.S. do about all this? And how are you supposed to respond to a possible enemy attack when you don’t even know what’s causing it, or if it’s even an enemy attack at all? And if people like Marc, who spent decades protecting Americans, are too sick to do their jobs, isn’t that a threat to national security? After all, Marc helped to prevent terrorist attacks all over the world.

I'm Peter Bergen, welcome to In The Room. Up next, how do you make sense of Havana Syndrome?

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Chris Miller: Hey, Peter. What's up brother? How are you, man?

Peter Bergen: Good, how are you?

Chris Miller: Hey, so you're doing the podcast thing now, huh?

Chris Miller was acting Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration. Miller had worked in other senior national security positions and he'd heard some gossip about people getting sick in Havana.

Chris Miller: It would be these furtive discussions, whispers in the hallway.

At first, he just didn't really believe that this was a real thing.

Chris Miller: Peter, I'm literally like, ‘this is bullshit. This is somebody trying to get, like, disability pay.’

He'd read an article about those early cases in The New Yorker.

Chris Miller: And I remember reading it. It was all about Cuba. And I'm like, ah, Cold War's over. I can't believe this stuff's legit. And I was pretty skeptical, to be perfectly honest with you.

But then something got him to change his mind, and it was somebody walking into his office, somebody who worked for the Department of Defense, somebody who seemed very credible, who told him about this attack he’d experienced when he was traveling in Europe.

Chris Miller: I realized that my conjecture previously from reading The New Yorker, my skepticism, was misplaced, ‘cause this guy described the attack. He described the symptoms that he was experiencing at that moment. I was like, holy moly. And I won't give you key details because, our enemies will take that and be able to reverse engineer and know what I'm talking about, but, in the military they talk about being on the X. Being on the X means you're in the kill zone, that's where the enemy wants you to get to. And then they launch their attack. And he said, he just experienced, like his head exploded with these screaming… sounds. It ended up immobilizing him briefly, but he realized from his training that he was on the X. And when you're on the X, the only thing you can do is get off the X.

That's why once he was shielded, the effects lifted. And he's like, I've just been attacked. So at that point, Peter, you're kind of like, alright, this guy's not BSing us. He's not trying to get disability. He's at a place in his career where there's no benefit for him to make anything up. And the way he described it was incontrovertible to me.

Peter Bergen: So what did you do next?

Chris Miller: Well, first off, make sure he, he and his family are being properly taken care of, and then that was the trigger to establish a full-on task force in the Department of Defense. I'm sorry to belabor this, and your listeners are probably just gonna roll their eyes and go, we don't really care about how the government works, but until you have a task force, even if the task force is one person, the government doesn't pay attention.

As Chris Miller started to pay attention, initially he thought it was possible the Cubans were behind the attacks.

Chris Miller: I could see the Cubans doing something just to be, you know… obstructionists or just to try stuff out. They're extremely good intelligence service. I mean, really, really good. And I assume, eh, they're probably a little bit bored down there because, uh, they're on the island and they're getting hemmed in, so that I could totally see how they were trying new techniques. Or, or, perhaps they were testing out equipment and techniques for someone else.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY SURGES]

And as tends to happen in the world of geopolitics, any intrigue involving a rival can easily become entangled in the politics of the moment. The U.S. had only recently reopened its embassy in Cuba, a policy of warming relations started by the Obama administration.But then as more cases of illnesses were being reported under the new administration, President Trump responded by taking action in Cuba.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Tonight the State Department is ordering all non-essential embassy personnel and all families to leave Cuba and is urging all Americans to avoid travel to Cuba.

And that wasn't all.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The State Department also suspending all routine visas to the U.S. issued in Cuba.

President Trump had promised to reverse Obama’s Cuba policy even before Havana Syndrome was ever an issue.And pulling the U.S. diplomatic staff out of Havana would certainly help him reach that goal. The Trump administration also imposed additional economic sanctions on Cuba and made it much harder for Americans to travel there.

But for some Cuba hawks in Congress, that wasn’t enough.

ARCHIVAL Marco Rubio: And the title of this hearing is attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba, Response and Oversight. We have one government panel testifying today with the following three witnesses.

At that hearing Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, said there was no doubt in his mind that the Cubans had some involvement.

ARCHIVAL Bob Menendez: The Cuban government must be held accountable for its failure to uphold international commitments and failure to protect American diplomats.

And Republican Senator Marco Rubio suggested something similar.

ARCHIVAL Marco Rubio: Potentially, Castro is aware of rogue elements within his own government that may have been behind this, because…

The Cubans denied they had anything to do with it. They even did their own investigation.And they determined every case had a simple explanation, including some cases that were psychological.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

As time passed, the notion that it was the Cubans lost some steam. Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller became increasingly convinced that it was the Russians.

Chris Miller: I felt we had enough overlay of intelligence, anecdotal information to definitely say that the Russians were involved. I gotta tell you, I think it's probably beyond just one nation. I can definitively say that whatever they're doing is causing health damage to our people. So it needs to be stopped.

And here's the thing, in Washington, there's a long history of deep suspicion of the Russians and what they're capable of.

Chris Miller: You and I, Peter are a little older and we remember the Cold War. All the crazy stuff that we both did to each other back then, you know, magic fairy dust that would be on your clothes and the Soviets could track you wherever you went. Geez. That was before cell phones, huh? Now, don't need fairy dust anymore. Or magic dust anymore. And also I'd done directed energy work in the Department of Defense prior. You're kind of like, yeah. I mean, this is kind of how stuff works.

Directed energy weapons use electromagnetic energy, and they focus it on a target. There are different kinds of weapons. For example, some use lasers. Others use high-powered microwaves.

And it's easy to understand why people who work for the U.S. government, either as spies or diplomats, would believe the Russians are capable of doing something like this. The Russians have gone to all sorts of lengths to spy on U.S. officials based in Moscow. In 1945, some Russian school kids gave the U.S. ambassador in Moscow a gift which he then hung up on the wall of his office. It turns out that “the gift” contained a listening device that would record his conversations for years to come.

But perhaps the most famous case is what's become known as the ‘Moscow Signal.’ In the 1950s the Russians began beaming microwaves at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. These transmissions took place daily for decades.At the time, most of the people working at the U.S. embassy had no idea this was happening.Its very existence was highly classified.

Jack Matlock, who worked at the embassy, was one of the few who did know what was happening. Here he is speaking in a BBC documentary.

ARCHIVAL Jack Matlock: It was classified, I guess, for several reasons. Well, we were trying to figure out just what might be its purpose.

The Department of Defense wasn’t sure if these beams were meant to intercept surveillance or to control the minds of diplomats.So it began its own set of microwave experiments on monkeys to try to figure this all out.

And you can’t make this stuff up — this highly classified project was codenamed Project Bizarre. And surprise, surprise: the research found no evidence that the energy pulses could be used to control the diplomats' minds.Yet concerns about the Moscow Signal lingered on long after the scientific testing ended, especially around the potential health effects of these microwaves. That's because for most of this time, all this was kept very secret. Until a new U.S. ambassador arrived in Moscow in 1974. He insisted that the embassy staff be briefed. Here's Matlock again, speaking to the BBC.

ARCHIVAL Jack Matlock: We reached a certain point, and particularly when, uh, one senior member of the staff was showing early signs of leukemia, uh, we thought we really had to address it.

As you can imagine, people freaked out. Especially after they heard the ambassador was sick. At first, the U.S. denied the reports.

ARCHIVAL Jack Matlock: An American Embassy spokesman in Moscow said today that U.S. Ambassador Walter Stoessel feels fine and added that reports to the contrary are inaccurate and misleading. The Boston Globe had reported today that Stoessel had contracted a mysterious blood ailment, perhaps caused by high level eavesdropping microwaves beamed at the embassy by the Soviets.

Years later the ambassador died of leukemia. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent hazard pay to embassy employees who’d been exposed to the Moscow Signal. The State Department funded a study done by Johns Hopkins. That study found no evidence that anyone had suffered quote "adverse health effects" because of the microwaves. But of course that didn't end the controversy. Even as recently as 2019 a new review of that Johns Hopkins’ study questioned some of the findings. So yeah, there's a long history here of fear and mistrust around this sort of thing.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

So the Trump administration was trying to figure out what was causing these symptoms. Fiona Hill was one of the top national security officials in the administration.

Fiona Hill: I myself have had weird experiences when I've been on official business in places.

And this whole thing was pretty familiar to her too.

Fiona Hill: I have had my phone, on several occasions just completely and utterly obliterated and not felt well. You know, I've talked in the past about times when I had something slipped in my drink. I've had, like, incredible surveillance by the, the Russians at times, physical surveillance and most definitely electronic surveillance. And so, you know, for some people maybe more susceptible to it than others.

Hill says they didn't know if these cases being reported out of Havana, were caused by the Russians or maybe even the Chinese. But the Russians in recent years had carried out some pretty brazen attempted and successful assassinations, in places such as the United Kingdom, using exotic weapons like nerve agents and radioactive polonium.

Fiona Hill: As time went on, there started to be speculation as to whether this might be something that was much more directed, with the intent to harm. There was just a lot of uncertainty as to what this was. There was of course this concern, heightened concern that it could be, you know, the Russians angry about the U.S. stepping up of its relationships with the Cubans. But again, this was all speculation. We did not have information.

She was getting regular intelligence briefings.

Fiona Hill: The facts of the matter were clear. People had been harmed, something was happening to them. It had happened in Havana, in Cuba, in several cases. Then there were other instances, you know, in the time that I was there, in China. But the briefers themselves were very cautious because if you don't have, you know, the full evidence, you know, you're not really sure you know what you have beyond the facts. They have to be extraordinarily careful about this.

So Trump administration officials suspected it could be the Russians but they weren’t sure. And the case against the Russians, if they really were involved, would have to be airtight because what would the U.S. government do next? Surely it would have to respond if a foreign state was really attacking its diplomats.

And the U.S. government has been there before. Just think about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and Russia nearly went to war in 1962. Cuba, the United States, and Russia — it's a combustible combination.

Fiona Hill: If we do find out in effect, who did it, there's probably no going back from that, if it's kind of proven it was ordered from the top.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And by late 2017, the public was starting to find out that all this was going on – reporters were asking questions about the strange cases in Havana.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: …They're diagnosed with injuries as severe as traumatic brain injury. What's the State Department doing about that?

ARCHIVAL State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert: … Um, what has happened there is of great concern to the U.S. government. I'm not gonna have a whole lot to say about this. The investigation is still ongoing. It’s an active investigation…

Several months later a study was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that some American personnel who worked in Havana appeared to quote “have sustained injury to widespread brain networks.” The study’s findings were hotly debated among scientists, but the headline stuck: something really, really bad happened to those Americans in Havana.

Here’s how a State Department spokesperson responded when she was asked about those Americans who’d gotten sick in Cuba:

ARCHIVAL Reporter 1: … is this type of attack unprecedented?

ARCHIVAL State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert: This is unprecedented. We have not seen this type of activity take place before....

ARCHIVAL Reporter 2: Anywhere?

ARCHIVAL State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert: No. Nowhere.

And yet, around this time some U.S. government officials who were sick said they couldn’t get anyone to take their illness seriously. On top of that, the Trump administration was getting some real complaints about how it was handling things. An internal review said the State Department's response was characterized by ‘mismanagement,’ a ‘lack of leadership’ and ‘systemic disorganization.’ And it also criticized the CIA for excessive secrecy.

Marc, the CIA officer who got sick in 2017, came up against that chaotic response, once he realized the symptoms he was experiencing weren’t food poisoning.

Marc Polymeropoulos: We went off to St. Petersburg for an overnight trip to visit the consulate. I had another episode of vertigo at, at a very well known restaurant in Moscow called the Pushkin Cafe. It's famous. And I almost passed out. It was so bad, and then I spent the next couple days just kind of holed up in my hotel room and ultimately made it back to the States. As I was asking around, some of my colleagues also said, ‘Hey, you know, this sounds a bit familiar with what these folks experienced, at the embassy, in Havana.’ And so I went to the Office of Medical Services and they put me through some rudimentary tests, just for balance, you know, and maybe about 10 minutes. And they said, ‘you don't look like them.’

Marc felt like the CIA was just blowing him off. They wouldn't even let him go to the same medical facilities where some other officials who’d been affected in Havana were getting real treatment.

Marc Polymeropoulos: And so all of a sudden this organization that I dedicated so much to was not there for me when I needed them. Now, I was not saying that the Russians did this. I was not saying we have to go get some. All I was saying is, can you please get me to a fricking U.S. military hospital that is treating one of my other colleagues?

And he says it didn't make sense. In the past, he'd felt really supported by the CIA.

Marc Polymeropoulos: When my family's been evacuated in tough positions, the support staff have been incredible. So this notion that when this kind of mysterious incident had happened to myself and, and to others, that they didn't come through — that was a surprise to me. Unfortunately I think it's because it's just, they were not comfortable with dealing with an unknown.

Marc's symptoms became so debilitating that he actually had to stop working at the job that he’d loved for decades. And then he had to retire. He spent the next couple of years trying to get treatment until he finally ended up at Walter Reed, the U.S. military hospital that has a specialty in treating brain injuries.

Marc Polymeropoulos: I credit the doctors and the nurses there and the support staff for really saving me because I didn't realize what kind of shape I was in.

He entered an intensive outpatient program, 10 hours a day.

Marc Polymeropoulos: They ask you every day, you know, ‘Do you wanna hurt yourself?’ And I always said no. But what was really telling is at the end of the one month program, they bring your family in and they asked my wife, ‘were you worried about Marc.’ And she said, ‘I was.’

He was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury caused by some kind of exposure event. Which was such a real relief: to finally get a diagnosis, to finally feel like someone was really listening to him.

And his healthcare journey wasn't just about finding the right doctors. It was also about being open to new techniques like meditation.

Marc Polymeropoulos: I remember in 2016 visiting the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa. As I drove up to the compound, there was a whole bunch of folks doing some yoga and, and I was very dismissive of it. I said, who the hell is doing this crap here? Well, it turns out it was members of Seal Team Six and the CIA station, so I shoulda kinda learned a little bit. You know, in my recovery at Walter Reed, things like meditation and yoga have been incredibly important. And so that kind of softer side of healing is really, really something that I have kind of grown into.

Marc says the only reason he got to Walter Reed is because he decided to take his story public, which is a big deal for a CIA officer who takes an oath of secrecy. But it worked.

He was admitted to the program at Walter Reed shortly after an article about his case was published in GQ magazine. Meanwhile, scientists were still trying to figure out what was going on. And a new study from the prestigious National Academies of Sciences tried to provide some answers. Stanford researcher, Dr. David Relman, headed up the investigation. Here he is on NPR, explaining what they found.

ARCHIVAL David Relman: We found circumstantial evidence that suggested that this form of microwave radiation in pulsed form might set up a certain form of pressure wave within the head that would then reverberate and cause damage to cells and pathways where normal neurotransmitters are communicating. And we believe, although we can't show with direct evidence, that this phenomenon could account for at least some of the clinical features that we heard about and read about.

This study picked up a ton of media attention. It was on 60 Minutes, it was all over the New York Times, but you should hear another thing from this NPR interview — something that didn’t make as many headlines.

ARCHIVAL NPR Reporter: And Dr. Relman, we should note that the State Department still considers your team's conclusions from the report to be a hypothesis. How confident are you that microwaves are what's behind these symptoms?

ARCHIVAL David Relman: We were not confident.

So they weren’t sure. The researchers also said they couldn’t rule out other causes. But that part also didn’t get a lot of coverage. Instead, what seemed to stick in the news cycle, and perhaps in the minds of some U.S. officials, was now there was even more scientific evidence there was some kind of weapon.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Then, President Joe Biden came into office. His officials acknowledged they still couldn’t say for certain what was behind Havana Syndrome.But they publicly doubled down on tackling the problem. Here’s Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken:

ARCHIVAL Antony Blinken: All of us in the U.S. government, and especially we at the State Department, are intently focused on getting to the bottom of what and who is causing these incidents, caring for those who've been affected, and protecting our people.

The government’s message: We believe you. These anomalous health incidents are going to be taken seriously. The CIA even picked a veteran from the team that tracked down Osama bin Laden to lead its task force investigating the incidents. But people kept getting sick. This thing was spreading.

In late 2021, a member of the CIA director’s own staff became ill during an official visit to India.By now there were at least a thousand cases. In the meantime, Marc had become a kind of spokesperson for the victims, many of whom felt like they were fighting this idea that they were making all this up.

Marc Polymeropoulos: So perhaps they have a point on the, on the, on the thousand plus and I'm talking about individuals who, you know, myself as a perfect example. I'd never thought of Havana syndrome going off to Moscow, on a business trip. I was under no stress there. I was actually excited and curious about going to a new place. How is that psychogenic, what happened to me?

And while Marc, who has a traumatic brain injury diagnosis, is emphatic that his own illness is not psychosomatic, he admits that he was probably under a lot more stress on the job than he was aware of at the time.

Marc Polymeropoulos: It’s a stressful job. I never really thought of it that much until I sat down with the psychologist and psychiatrist at Walter Reed later, and, and you kind of run through these stories and they say, you know, that's not normal to, you know, sit around after an embassy was attacked, have a pizza, kiss your kids and go back out in the street. And then the next day everything seems like it's fine. Um, but it's just what we did. And you don't want that stigma of any kind of mental health issues because you're gonna lose your clearance.

And even though guys like Marc may have a lot of stress and anxiety and can even experience trauma, it's pretty well known within the U.S. intelligence community, that’s something people really don’t talk about openly. At least not until pretty recently.

Which is why, when I first heard about Havana Syndrome and the possibility that a lot of these cases could be psychosomatic, that seemed like a theory worth exploring.

After all, being a CIA officer is super stressful. You may be working in a war zone or in a hostile state like Russia. You often can't tell your own family and friends what you're really doing, and then you have to persuade people to betray their own countries and give up their secrets. And then if you screw that up and they get caught, they can be executed for treason. Talk about stress!

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

By the end of 2021 the U.S. State Department had received an internal scientific analysis that said the vast majority of cases could be explained by natural causes. That analysis also recommended that the U.S. State Department quote “recognize psychological phenomena as real afflictions that cause pain.” And it actually turns out that psychosomatic illness is a lot more common than you might think.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: I think we really underestimate the mind-body connection. I think we tend to think of thoughts and ideas as something that lives inside our heads, but actually our bodies are the mouthpieces of our mind.

Neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan has traveled all over the world studying this subject.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: I'm trained to deal with neurological diseases like epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, et cetera. What you don't realize when you enter that field is that at least a third of the people you see won't have a neurological disease. They'll have significant neurological symptoms — seizures, blackouts, paralysis — but in fact, their illness will be more psychological in nature than disease related. People get real, and I'm gonna emphasize the word real, real physical symptoms understood to have a psychological cause.

Peter Bergen: So you were seeing, as a young neurologist, a lot of people presenting with real symptoms, but these were really induced by psychological conditions?

Suzanne O'Sullivan: Exactly. It's part of the standard work of any neurologist. It's spectacularly common disorder that people don't know about for some reason, I think probably because of the stigma attached to it.

Peter Bergen: Well, tell us about the stigma.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: Well, imagine that you were a person who was having convulsions and everyone said to you that it was likely that you had epilepsy, but then you were told that you were blacking out for psychological reasons. Imagine how you would be greeted by your neighbors or your boss, or people who know you, if you change that diagnosis from a brain disease to one of being sort of entirely psychological. People interpret that in many ways that are entirely wrong.

So some people think that if I say their seizures have a psychological cause, they think they're being accused of pretending or faking illness.

Some people think it means that they have a significant psychiatric problem. That it means they're fragile. So it's an insulting sort of diagnosis for them. Some people conflate it with pretending. So not necessarily faking illness, but having a kind of conscious awareness that they're doing this thing. People don't really understand the unconscious nature of these symptoms or the fact that they can affect almost anybody. They're seen to be disorders that affect the fragile, the vulnerable, a certain kind of person, and as such, they're very stigmatized.

Dr. O’Sullivan has studied a group of young children in Sweden who have fallen into a sort of coma.It’s known as “resignation syndrome” and it’s a psychosomatic illness. She traveled to Sweden to examine some of the kids who’ve been affected. Including two sisters — who were 10 and 11.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: I visited these girls in a little bedroom in Sweden, walked into the room with multiple other people, a dog, you know, chaos, and neither of these little girls really showed any acknowledgement that anything was happening whatsoever. Nola, the younger of the girls, showed no response whatsoever to any form of examination. When her father tried to pick her up, she was literally like a rag doll, just, extremely floppy. She had a feeding tube in her nose, which her parents were using to feed her. She was wearing a nappy. Her skin, her joints, everything was in good condition because she was getting excellent medical care from her parents. And they tried to sort of keep her included in the family by putting her in a wheelchair and sitting her with them at meal times. But for a year and a half doing all of this, she hadn't interacted with the family at all.

Her older sister was a little bit more awake when I called her name, she was able to open her eyes, but that's how it is at the beginning stages of this condition. It's a very insidious, kind of slowly creeps up on the children.

The family is originally from Syria. They’re from the Yazidi community, a group that’s been persecuted back in the Middle East.The two young sisters were just two and three years old when their family first arrived in Sweden and applied for asylum.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: But the asylum process is a very slow and tedious process that involves a lot of disappointment. You apply for asylum, you're refused. You apply again. You are refused. And this is the sort of pattern that often leads to resignation syndrome.

Peter Bergen: This seems pretty extraordinary that these symptoms would be so profound, yet not caused by a bacteria, virus, or some other medical cause. How do you explain it?

Suzanne O'Sullivan: Well, it's difficult to give a full explanation because we don't fully understand the mechanisms of all disorders like this, but the concept of somebody's brain completely shutting down in the face of particular stresses is not unusual at all. So our brains in order to protect us from overload, and because it can only handle so much, sometimes kind of shut down and aren't very efficient in taking in information. That sort of dissociation is normal, completely normal. But for some people, dissociation can be so extreme it can cause blackouts and loss of consciousness.

And aside from this extreme dissociation, there’s something else going on. Dr. O’Sullivan says we have all kinds of expectations about how our bodies will respond in particular situations. And sometimes we can inadvertently play out those expectations. And she says that’s happening with these kids in Sweden.

Suzanne O'Sullivan: So what's likely to be happening in these young children is that when they're in a very anxiety provoking situation — they're facing deportation from Sweden — their stress pathways are activated. So immediately they're developing physical sensations, real physical sensations. Their heart rates are increasing. You know, they're sweating, they feel dizzy, they feel tired, they have headaches. So it begins as a normal, sort of physiological stress reaction. Now, most of us, it would end there, but what's happening in the community of asylum seekers in Sweden is that they're aware that in young children who get these physical symptoms, it can sometimes lead to resignation syndrome. They will say, ‘oh, well what usually happens next’ — now, not consciously in their minds, at an unconscious level within their minds — they’re saying to themselves, ‘well, these symptoms have started and I know that what can happen to a person who have these symptoms is the next thing that happens is that they start feeling tired and unable to get out of bed.’ Then that person unconsciously is sort of, has an expectation of what is the next thing that will happen in this arc of symptoms. And those expectations are played out by the brain at an unconscious level.

Peter Bergen: So how does all this relate to Havana Syndrome?

Suzanne O'Sullivan: Well, Havana Syndrome for a neurologist who's interested in psychosomatic symptoms would be quite a classical example of how psychosomatic symptoms develop and all of the stigma that surrounds it, that can propagate the problem. In roughly December, 2016, you know, somebody in an embassy, somebody who is primed to threat, hears a noise and develops symptoms and puts that noise and those symptoms together and believes that they've been attacked by a sonic weapon.

Now we don't know what happened to that person. I've never met that person. But that isn't important. What is important is that that person's story was incredibly compelling, that that person believed strongly that the noise and the symptoms went together. And as that story spreads through a very small and contained community, it does exactly what happens in psychosomatic symptoms. It causes people to pay attention to their bodies in unnatural ways. It gives people a template of what to look out for. You know, we all feel dizzy from time to time. We dismiss these things, but if we believe we are in an environment in which we are potentially under attack, then those sort of symptoms can take on a significance. Once you pay attention to a symptom and consider it to be abnormal, then your attention is heightened and you will pay even further attention to it. And that's how disability develops.

Peter Bergen: Is it personally frustrating for you? This lack of understanding of psychosomatic illnesses?

Suzanne O'Sullivan: It is absolutely frustrating because I see a large number of patients, you know, multiple every week who are severely disabled by psychosomatic disorders. And the greatest difficulty I have with those people is the resistance to the diagnosis, which is created by the fact that they know how they will be treated when they go out into the world and try and give that diagnosis to other people. If they look for disability payments they will not be treated in the same way as they would be if they'd had an injury or they had multiple sclerosis. You know, it's very frustrating that such a common and ordinary problem, which could affect anybody, is so stigmatized that people will spend a lifetime looking for alternative causes, and I would suggest that in Havana Syndrome, they are doing so.

And she points out that some people might have gotten better a hell of a lot quicker if they'd been told right away their illness was psychosomatic. They might have gotten treatments meant to teach them how to use their bodies in a different way: things like occupational therapy.

Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who served in the Trump administration, acknowledged that it could have been really tough to come out and say cases are psychosomatic.

Fiona Hill: Look, I don't know about you but I get a headache every time there's a change in barometric pressure and a thunderstorm’s coming. And the Russians had this whole expression, they say давление, you know, pressure. I mean there's, it's a thing. There are things that can affect, you know, kind of the brain and for sure.

And for the people who've been affected, I mean obviously for them, you know, I mean it's like we know with long covid and things, what people are told that they've just got some psychosomatic… there's nothing more devastating than being told there's nothing wrong with you when you clearly, you know, have a, have an issue here. And many of the people who have been affected are extremely credible. We may never get to the bottom of this.

And she may well be right. Because it seems that every time we get closer to finding an answer, some new report or study appears disputing the latest theory or offering a new one.

Marc definitely thinks there’s more to investigate, more data points to really dig into.

Marc Polymeropoulos: The agency says that there’s no commonality in terms of the officers who have been affected by this. And I would challenge that. Because I think they're talking about it based on, uh, the, the looking at the thousand plus who reported, not those several dozen, but in the several dozen — and these are my friends and colleagues — there is a huge commonality.

Peter Bergen: Which is?

Marc Polymeropoulos: Russian operations and a history of going after the Russians.

And yet despite all his doubts about how the U.S. government has handled things, and everything he’s gone through, he still really misses working for the CIA.

Marc Polymeropoulos: I miss the camaraderie of officers who kind of agree to go to the far ends of the earth. You know, one of the things that my wife would always laugh and said, you know, why didn't we ever get posted to London or Paris or Berlin or Athens? So I, I miss being in tough places you know, doing tough things with kind of great colleagues, also the sense of mission. I have had some incredible successes in my career and some terrible failures, but I also know that there are a lot of things I did that allowed for many Americans to live.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Earlier this year, the State Department resumed full consular services at the embassy in Havana.At a press conference, when a reporter asked the State Department spokesperson if this meant there was really no longer a threat, they said the investigation was still ongoing.

Yet just recently, five U.S. intelligence agencies concluded there is no credible evidence any foreign rival has a weapon or other device that is causing these health incidents. And U.S. officials have identified a host of other explanations for the reported cases of Havana Syndrome — such as pre-existing medical conditions like migraines and MS. And also environmental factors — like odd kinds of air pressure created by air conditioning systems; sounds caused by malfunctioning electrical wiring, and even electric dog fences.

Despite all of this, the U.S. Department of Defense is now funding testing of pulsed energy on ferrets, which apparently have brains similar to humans. Does that all sound familiar? Remember those Pentagon experiments on monkeys in the 1960s.

Both the State Department and the CIA have begun compensating some of those who’ve been sick. Marc received some money. Which he says felt good.Because to get that compensation he had to submit letters from his doctors at Walter Reed. Letters that said his illness wasn’t due to a pre-existing condition: it was from a traumatic brain injury. He says it was proof that he wasn’t just making this up. And that’s the thing with Havana Syndrome. The American government is paying people — acknowledging in some way something made these people sick. But it’s also said there’s no weapon.

Still, the CIA is doing something new. Late last year the agency appointed for the first time ever a “chief wellbeing officer” whose job is pretty much what it sounds like, to promote the wellbeing of CIA officers. Things like providing additional mental health resources.

At the end of the day, whatever is causing these “anomalous health incidents” known as Havana Syndrome, the fact is that these new efforts at the CIA to be cognizant of the extreme stress that some of their officers are under is a good thing.

After all, these are the Americans who are tasked with protecting their fellow citizens and the United States.

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If you want to know some more about Havana Syndrome or about some of the people you heard from in this episode, we recommend these books:

There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, Fiona Hill’s autobiography which recounts her journey from growing up as the daughter of an English coal miner to working in the Trump White House as the top official on Russia.

Clarity in Crisis : Leadership Lessons from the CIA by Marc Polymeropolous which distills lessons from his two and half decades of service as a U.S. intelligence officer.

The Sleeping Beauties: And O ther Stories of Mystery Illness by neurologist Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan who traveled the world to investigate cases of mass psychosomatic illness.

And Robert Baloh and Robert Bartholomew’s Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.

CREDITS:

In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and Fresh Produce Media.

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon, with help from Luke Cregan.

Paul Berczeller was our consulting producer.

Our show is executive produced by Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Laura Tillman, Erik German, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.

Theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross, and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.