Speaker 1: They wanted my asshole smell.
Speaker 2: Everybody's smell is different, and the East Germans Stastasia. As
Speaker 2: you know, they had a program where they would try
Speaker 2: to get you sit on a certain chair with a cushion,
Speaker 2: and in this cushion it had special chemicals that collected
Speaker 2: your smell.
Speaker 3: I'm John Seipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
Speaker 3: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 3: all around the world.
Speaker 2: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 2: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies in our operations.
Speaker 1: We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 2: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 2: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission implausible.
Speaker 1: So Adam.
Speaker 2: In our former world, when we dealt with other hostile
Speaker 2: foreign intelligence services, the rule sort of is that they
Speaker 2: can't kill us, but they can't leave us alone either.
Speaker 2: But there's a gray area in between where just how
Speaker 2: much can they fuck with us?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Can they hurt us, damage us, discombobulate us. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you had the same thing as a journalist
Speaker 2: being manipulated, but I think it's the same sort of deal, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's kind of like our relationship. You can't kill me,
Speaker 4: but you just.
Speaker 3: Well that's the problem. Everything's done on zoom now you
Speaker 3: can't kill anybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously there are journalists who are killed.
Speaker 1: I don't want to.
Speaker 4: Belittle that, but I would say probably similar to you.
Speaker 4: Every interaction, we deal with a lot of flax, a
Speaker 4: lot of pr people, a lot of communications people, a
Speaker 4: lot of people who their job is to get a
Speaker 4: message out. And that doesn't mean it's an evil conspiracy theory,
Speaker 4: but it's you know, I want you to see this movie,
Speaker 4: or you know, we're really promoting this new initiative at
Speaker 4: the Department of State or whatever, and so there's you
Speaker 4: do develop real, really relationships with people who are paid
Speaker 4: to manipulate you. Sometimes it does get to the hostile place.
Speaker 4: You know, I've had screaming fights, I've had people try
Speaker 4: and get me fired.
Speaker 1: Break your cameras. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And obviously for many journalists in the world, it
Speaker 4: does cost them their lives or their safety. You know,
Speaker 4: I don't want to, but it is. I mean, I
Speaker 4: guess your job, my job, being a cop, like we're
Speaker 4: lied to right professionally, that is our job. And we
Speaker 4: need those liars. We need to get information from them,
Speaker 4: and we need to somehow assess what they're talking about
Speaker 4: and what is the truth underneath it, knowing we'll never
Speaker 4: know for sure.
Speaker 3: In our old world, there was something you know, I
Speaker 3: don't know better term honor among thieves or what have you,
Speaker 3: is that intelligence services wouldn't hurt each other. You know.
Speaker 3: The worst they could do is could kick you out
Speaker 3: of the country or something if you're called involved in espionage.
Speaker 3: All right, So I think today we're going to talk
Speaker 3: some about this thing that's been in the news. They
Speaker 3: often call the Havana syndrome, and it's now sort of
Speaker 3: known by a number of different names, and for those
Speaker 3: people who haven't followed it. In twenty sixteen in Havana, Cuba,
Speaker 3: there were a number of US diplomats who complained about
Speaker 3: brain injuries, headaches, nausea, migraines, and believed that something was
Speaker 3: happening to this. Maybe it was some sort of directed
Speaker 3: energy weapon. It was microwaves. It was something that they
Speaker 3: believe from the outside was being directed against US embassy diplomats,
Speaker 3: And largely there were people in the CIA station, that's
Speaker 3: our office in Havana, and there were a few Canadians
Speaker 3: as well who reported this, and it became sort of
Speaker 3: a big deal that Trump administration kicked out a number
Speaker 3: of Cubans. Marco Rubio and others were claiming that the
Speaker 3: Cubans had attacked Americans. But then shortly thereafter there was
Speaker 3: a number of these similar incidents around the world. And
Speaker 3: what makes it interesting and maybe makes it a conspiracy
Speaker 3: theory is just recently the intelligence community came out with
Speaker 3: a report that said all the evidence points against involvement
Speaker 3: of any US adversary involved in causing these incidents. In
Speaker 3: other words, the assumption was that somebody and a lot
Speaker 3: of people were pointing to the Russians. In fact, I'm
Speaker 3: one of the ones who believes in this conspiracy theory
Speaker 3: that the Russians may be involved in this. Most of
Speaker 3: the folks the intellis community it came out and said,
Speaker 3: we don't see that there's any evidence at all of
Speaker 3: a hostile power doing this. You know, I served in Moscow,
Speaker 3: and I've followed this type of issue for years and years,
Speaker 3: and I still tend to think that there's something there.
Speaker 3: So what's your take on.
Speaker 1: This, Jack, Well, there's just two things, John.
Speaker 2: One is the obvious absence of evidence is not evidence
Speaker 2: of absence. The fact that we haven't found it yet
Speaker 2: definitively doesn't mean it's not so. And then the other
Speaker 2: thing that strikes me is the term conspiracy theory. When
Speaker 2: we throw that out, generally we mean that it's something
Speaker 2: far fetched and not likely. This is a theory about
Speaker 2: a conspiracy and the fact that the Russians or you know,
Speaker 2: name your bad guy would sit down and conspire about
Speaker 2: ways of attacking US intelligence officers operating inside places like
Speaker 2: Moscow or Havana. That's not far fetched at all. That
Speaker 2: is re reality.
Speaker 3: Let me give a little background and to those people
Speaker 3: who believe that there's still something there. And to be
Speaker 3: clear here, we're friends with Mark Paul Marpolis, the guy
Speaker 3: who was one of these people who yes, exactly one
Speaker 3: very public.
Speaker 1: Baths and some others. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So some of the things is there's clear patterns that
Speaker 3: suggest something's going on here, and there's a long history
Speaker 3: one of the patterns is that around the world, for largely,
Speaker 3: the people who seem to have been hit by this
Speaker 3: and have ended up at Walter Reed and other places
Speaker 3: were people who worked in the CI and often people
Speaker 3: who worked on Russia issues. They are in places where
Speaker 3: they tend to have more of a free run, in
Speaker 3: Belgrade and Hanoi and Cuba and Guangzhou, China and a
Speaker 3: number of other places. And then the history is serious.
Speaker 3: I served in Moscow and there's decades of the Russians
Speaker 3: blasting radioactive microwaves against our embassy. A number of US
Speaker 3: presidents complained to Russian Soviet leaders saying you have to
Speaker 3: stop this or has increased cancer seem to be coming
Speaker 3: out from a number of our people. There are a
Speaker 3: number of US ambassadors eye of cancer. Eventually, even the
Speaker 3: State Department put it on sort of a health warning
Speaker 3: anybody who serves in Moscow. And there's a number of
Speaker 3: other pieces around that that we'll talk about as we
Speaker 3: go forward.
Speaker 2: The State Department needs to look into, I believe, needs
Speaker 2: to look at cancer rates inside of people who served
Speaker 2: at the embassy in Moscow over the last twenty years.
Speaker 2: I strongly suspect that instances of cancer and anomalies is
Speaker 2: going to be higher in a place like that based
Speaker 2: on things that we do know about, let alone the
Speaker 2: ones we don't. Putting carcinogenic spy dust on officers that's
Speaker 2: clearly known, Bombarding people with microwaves, maybe not as a
Speaker 2: weapon or maybe as a weapon, and a host of
Speaker 2: other things that we've encountered in our career.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a piece of this that's important. And those
Speaker 3: who were hit in this, supposedly by the Savannah syndrome
Speaker 3: great frustration with the State Department who runs our embassies
Speaker 3: overseas and CIA leadership that did not take these health
Speaker 3: risks seriously at first. And that fits another pattern if
Speaker 3: you look at the people over the nineteen fifty six
Speaker 3: sees and on from Moscow who are complaining about health
Speaker 3: problems from serving in Moscow, the State Department and subsequent
Speaker 3: administrations seem to just ignore or dismiss their concerns. And
Speaker 3: eventually people in Congress press the administration, the new Bide
Speaker 3: administration to help these people, and there was a law
Speaker 3: essentially passed that gave them the support they need to
Speaker 3: go to Walter read in other places, And to add
Speaker 3: one other piece of this, there's a contradiction here. If
Speaker 3: the intelligent community came out and said there's no evidence
Speaker 3: that this was an attack by a foreign power and
Speaker 3: said most of this seems to be just natural occurrences
Speaker 3: or pre existing conditions, there's a contradiction in the sense
Speaker 3: that Walter read. The place that has studied all of
Speaker 3: these victims have said just the opposite. The doctors have
Speaker 3: said none of these people had pre existing conditions that
Speaker 3: fit with this brain injury, and all of them that
Speaker 3: they could find a specific marker in the brain that
Speaker 3: suggests there was a similarity between them all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think to pay the State Department, it's
Speaker 2: due the agency. I think a lot of the doctors
Speaker 2: are not epidemiologists.
Speaker 3: And that's tough because the medical professionals in the bureaucracies
Speaker 3: they come and go, and so this studying of longer
Speaker 3: term issues is almost something just institutionally doesn't happen in
Speaker 3: these bureaucracies, right.
Speaker 2: I wonder if this was done and the outcomes were
Speaker 2: not good, would people still want to take your families
Speaker 2: to places like Moscow if you knew that statistically you
Speaker 2: have a higher instance of cancer. We do take our
Speaker 2: families to places that are just unhealthy on a basis.
Speaker 2: For example, I lived in Delhi and as judged by
Speaker 2: particulate matter, shit in the air quite literally because they
Speaker 2: burned cowdung during the wintertime. It is the highest rate
Speaker 2: of pollution in the world. I remember when we first
Speaker 2: went to Zimbabwe, the guy who I took the house
Speaker 2: over from was telling me about the back garden and
Speaker 2: I've got three small girls, ten and seven and six,
Speaker 2: and he says, yeah, watch out for the cobras.
Speaker 1: I'm like, huh.
Speaker 3: I was in Moscow, if you remember when the tanks
Speaker 3: surrounded the Russian Parliament and started shooting at it in
Speaker 3: the nineteen ninety three, when there was a coup attempt,
Speaker 3: and I was there and there was people shooting out
Speaker 3: of buildings and these other kind of stuff, and I
Speaker 3: remember my mother and my family being all nervous, and
Speaker 3: not long after that they actually came to visit me
Speaker 3: and stay in my apartment. And I remember at the
Speaker 3: end of the you know, my mother was there. I
Speaker 3: can't even remember a week or something, and she goes,
Speaker 3: you know, I was focusing what you see on TV
Speaker 3: and thinking about all these bigger issues. But now that
Speaker 3: I've been here, I realized, I'm much more scared of
Speaker 3: you dying in this awful traffic the way people drive me.
Speaker 3: I said, absolutely, it's crazy and dangerous.
Speaker 1: So not trying to what up you, but what upping you.
Speaker 2: In Manila, our house was just the other side of
Speaker 2: this highway. We had this like fifteen foot concrete fence
Speaker 2: and there was an explosion next door. The neighbor had
Speaker 2: the wall blown in, and it turned out there was
Speaker 2: a bus someone that Abusayaf had put an artillery shell
Speaker 2: and rigged it up with the timer and put it
Speaker 2: on a bus. It had exploded. It had killed seven
Speaker 2: or eight people when the bus blew up and the
Speaker 2: artillery shell blew through our next door neighbor's wall. And
Speaker 2: for a while there there was a question like, oh
Speaker 2: my gosh, was this possibly an attack focused on me?
Speaker 1: And the Philippine police.
Speaker 2: Later came in and said, oh no, no, no, it
Speaker 2: wasn't focused on you. It was just a regular bombing, right,
Speaker 2: It wasn't a bombing focused on you. And the only
Speaker 2: reason that the fence was blown in was because they
Speaker 2: put the artillery shell in facing in the back of
Speaker 2: the bus, facing towards the front of the bus. So
Speaker 2: it would kill everybody. But somehow somebody had pushed the
Speaker 2: shell so that it went sideways and shot actually outwards
Speaker 2: and hit our neighbor's fence.
Speaker 3: We got to take a break now, and we'll be
Speaker 3: back in just a minute, and rebec right after it happened.
Speaker 3: In twenty sixteen, I wrote an article about this to
Speaker 3: try to put some of it in context, to show
Speaker 3: about how these kind of things that happened in the past.
Speaker 3: It's rare that we've seen in places where diplomats and
Speaker 3: CI officers live attacks that are meant just to harm
Speaker 3: diplomats and CIA officers. Rather, we've seen unhealthy and dangerous
Speaker 3: efforts to use technology that does hurt us, but it's
Speaker 3: often for surveillance purposes or some other intelligence purpose. So
Speaker 3: when we talked about microwaves bashing against the US embassy
Speaker 3: for years, that was most likely an effort that they
Speaker 3: would use to turn on and turn off and trigger
Speaker 3: listening devices. Back in the fifties, they would even put
Speaker 3: radioactive little spikes in people's tires that would leave marks
Speaker 3: on the road so their surveillance cars could hold back
Speaker 3: and still follow where American diplomats would go. Years ago,
Speaker 3: we sort of found out that the Russians are using
Speaker 3: this thing they called Metca, which was we called spy dust,
Speaker 3: which was an invisible electromagnetic powder that had a customized
Speaker 3: chemical identifier. And the idea was they would smear it
Speaker 3: onto door handles or furniture of cars of people like
Speaker 3: me Americans that they suspected might be handling spies CIA officers,
Speaker 3: And what it was it was a tagging agent and
Speaker 3: it was used by the Russian security elements to covertly
Speaker 3: monitor their own community. Then what they would do is
Speaker 3: on the weekend they would go through the embassy and
Speaker 3: they had a means of looking for this chemical identifier
Speaker 3: through people's offices. So they would go into Evan's office
Speaker 3: and they would see my chemical tag in Evan's office,
Speaker 3: and if Ivan had not reported that he'd been meeting me,
Speaker 3: he would come under Connor intelligence scrutiny as possibly a
Speaker 3: spy working with And we found out eventually this was
Speaker 3: carcinogenic and it was so unhealthy to those of us
Speaker 3: who got it. And so I when I was in
Speaker 3: my first tour overseas in Helsinki, Finland, I was developing
Speaker 3: a relationship with a Russian KGB officer who eventually became
Speaker 3: one of Putin's closest advisors and then become a Minister
Speaker 3: of Defense in Russia. KGB officer, and he put this
Speaker 3: chemical tag on me. And the reason we knew about
Speaker 3: it is we knew that they did this, and so
Speaker 3: we had a means of wiping and testing after a
Speaker 3: Russian had been at our house and then sending that
Speaker 3: to our science experts to test that to see if
Speaker 3: you had been spy dusted. And I had been and
Speaker 3: I was like, oh great, So I got this carcinogenic
Speaker 3: stuff all over my house. And that was sort of
Speaker 3: the notion that when we saw this Havana syndrome, is
Speaker 3: this is odd and people are getting hurt. But is
Speaker 3: this to hurt people or is it for some other purpose.
Speaker 2: This reminds you of the story where the East Germans
Speaker 2: did get and I'm trying to think this is on
Speaker 2: the radio where I can even say this.
Speaker 3: This is not a radio Jerry, You're a little bit all.
Speaker 2: They wanted my asshole smell. Everybody's smell is different, and
Speaker 2: the East Germans Tastasia. As you know, they had a
Speaker 2: program where when you crossed over into East Germany. They
Speaker 2: would try to get you sit on a certain chair
Speaker 2: with a cushion, and in this cushion it had had
Speaker 2: special chemicals that collected your smell. And after you left,
Speaker 2: they would go out and they would take this chemically
Speaker 2: treated chemical cushion and they would take a piece of
Speaker 2: it and they would put it in a jar, and
Speaker 2: then later, with specially trained dogs, they would go into
Speaker 2: rooms or to see whether or not you had been
Speaker 2: there or not. John, I did want to ask in
Speaker 2: reading about Havana syndrome. One of the theories that I
Speaker 2: read was that perhaps that it wasn't meant so much
Speaker 2: as a weapon because it was mostly like in hotel rooms,
Speaker 2: but was a way to like disrupt sleep patterns. Because
Speaker 2: what people don't always know is so much of what
Speaker 2: we do in the n espionage world is you've got
Speaker 2: to be quick and awake and with it and able
Speaker 2: to make hard decisions and remember things. And if they
Speaker 2: can disrupt your sleep patterns, and if they can make
Speaker 2: you not be on top of your game, if they
Speaker 2: can make you stupid, you're going to make mistakes. You know,
Speaker 2: you are an expert in SDRs, and maybe explain to
Speaker 2: what people is if you can't remember license plates well
Speaker 2: or people, you're going to make a mistake and you're
Speaker 2: going to get caught. That was one theory put forward
Speaker 2: that I thought was interesting and I'd like to get
Speaker 2: your take on that.
Speaker 1: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: So in our parlance and SDR is a surveillance detection run.
Speaker 3: So when we meet a source, a spy who's working
Speaker 3: for the United States, the goal is to keep that
Speaker 3: person safe, right, so that person providing potentially life saving
Speaker 3: information to the United States government in committing trees and
Speaker 3: against his or her own country. So if you're in
Speaker 3: Moscow and you're meeting a source, you have to know
Speaker 3: one hundred percent certainty that the bad guys did not
Speaker 3: see this. We have to be right one hundred percent
Speaker 3: of the time. If they're right one time and they
Speaker 3: bring the dogs, like Jerry said, behind us to see
Speaker 3: where're going and they can figure out who was there,
Speaker 3: that Russian who were meeting, that person is going to
Speaker 3: be arrested at the very best or executed at the worst,
Speaker 3: and perhaps even their family. So we go through, depending
Speaker 3: on the country you're in, a very sophisticated means of
Speaker 3: proving that you don't have surveillance, so you might go out,
Speaker 3: you might drive around places that you can manipulate to
Speaker 3: see if someone is following You're not from overhead traffic
Speaker 3: copters or planes of people walking or cars that are
Speaker 3: following all those type of things. And so one of
Speaker 3: the things I think that might speak against this being
Speaker 3: done is to try to think about the practical operational
Speaker 3: difficulties in pulling this off. You'd have to have exquisite intelligence.
Speaker 3: You have to know exactly where these people are. You'd
Speaker 3: have to understand travel patterns, where they live, what where
Speaker 3: their windows face. If this is a weapon that is
Speaker 3: like a directed energy weapon, you'd have to have a
Speaker 3: means to get this into the country set up, have
Speaker 3: a means to do this so that you do not
Speaker 3: get caught. We're really fortunate here because our next guest
Speaker 3: is John Lee Anderson. He's a biographer and author and
Speaker 3: investigative reporter, a staff writer for The New Yorker who's
Speaker 3: lived in war zones all around the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Speaker 3: spent lots of time in Cuba. He's written a number
Speaker 3: of books and worked with our colleague Adam Davidson. So
Speaker 3: we're lucky to have him here, John Lee Anderson, Hey
Speaker 3: John John. I've read your reporting, and I've impressed with
Speaker 3: reporting on a lot of places in the world. But
Speaker 3: can you tell me a little bit about yourself and
Speaker 3: how you ended up reporting on this story.
Speaker 5: So I began reporting on the Havana syndrome when actually
Speaker 5: Adam Ntuz, who is a recent hire at The New Yorker,
Speaker 5: came to me and asked me for help. The editor
Speaker 5: had assigned him to do the story, but he didn't
Speaker 5: know Cuba. So we began working together and did a
Speaker 5: story on Havana syndrome together or Adam kept his ear
Speaker 5: to the ground and did a few follow ups, and
Speaker 5: then we did a podcast series that took place over
Speaker 5: a year, which was great fun, and we traveled together
Speaker 5: to various places. Ultimately I think digging as deep as
Speaker 5: anybody did into this phenomenon. Prior to Adam coming to
Speaker 5: me on this, I had begun to do some investigation
Speaker 5: of my own with the Americans I knew who were
Speaker 5: dealing with the Cubans at the time, and was coming
Speaker 5: away with some interesting information that was inconclusive but suggested
Speaker 5: that there were patterns to it that led back to
Speaker 5: the intelligence agencies in both countries, so it was a
Speaker 5: really good fit for me to work with Adam on this.
Speaker 3: So Johnny, it's really great to have you on with
Speaker 3: us today. Your reporting on this has been spectacular. Obviously,
Speaker 3: you did a podcast with Animentus, and you've done several
Speaker 3: articles for The New Yorker and other things. I just
Speaker 3: wanted to start with sort of a big question, based
Speaker 3: on all of your research into what was once called
Speaker 3: the Havana syndrome and how the US government has responded
Speaker 3: to it and to the people who believe they were
Speaker 3: hit and doctors and things. What are some big takeaways
Speaker 3: that you have, any surprises or anything that you could
Speaker 3: guess sort of going forward on this issue.
Speaker 5: In a way, I don't know that I've ever felt
Speaker 5: particularly surprised, because I mean, I've known Cuba over the years,
Speaker 5: going back to the very early nineties when I lived there,
Speaker 5: and then have returned over the years, sort of watching
Speaker 5: the political alchemy of the place evolve, and when the
Speaker 5: roll Castro Barack Obama opening happened, I was there a lot,
Speaker 5: and you need to be there to feel the street
Speaker 5: and know what the subtext is. Again La bola as
Speaker 5: they call it, the rumor mill, which is always more
Speaker 5: than the rumor mil. It's where the actual intelligence flows
Speaker 5: on the island, because there is no official story other
Speaker 5: than the kind of orthodoxy of the Communist Party. Fast
Speaker 5: forward to later in twenty sixteen, when we now know
Speaker 5: that the first alleged attacks occurred. These attacks took place
Speaker 5: within a couple of weeks of Fidel dying, major historic event.
Speaker 5: For all the fact that he'd been off the main
Speaker 5: stage for a decade, this was huge in an island
Speaker 5: where he had dominated everything for half a century. And
Speaker 5: when I pieced this together, I thought, well, it makes sense.
Speaker 5: I mean, I knew that in Washington, people who were
Speaker 5: part of the opening that had taken place, that there
Speaker 5: was a freeze after Obama's visit, but nobody wanted to
Speaker 5: talk about it publicly, because of course they were being deterministic.
Speaker 5: They wanted the policy to go forward. Those who'd helped
Speaker 5: open the door, Shure didn't want to close it or
Speaker 5: leak that there were difficulties. But I knew privately that
Speaker 5: there were and there was a new era of hostilities.
Speaker 5: So I immediately assumed that these attacks, these events that
Speaker 5: had affected initially the officers on the island had to
Speaker 5: do with a homegrown attempt to shut down the station,
Speaker 5: you know, to affect America's intelligence gathering ability on the island. Now,
Speaker 5: I didn't know how they would have done that. It
Speaker 5: was out of character for them to hurt physically, damage,
Speaker 5: cause pain and that kind of thing to spies on
Speaker 5: the island. It wasn't their modus operandi, and so I
Speaker 5: assumed it was some kind of untested listening device gone bad.
Speaker 5: The more I talked with people that sort of know
Speaker 5: that world, the more I assumed it was something like
Speaker 5: a new technology that they had gotten from somebody, and
Speaker 5: the obvious partner in that regard would be the Russians,
Speaker 5: and that this might have been an easy way to
Speaker 5: go about getting rid of that enhanced American intelligence gathering
Speaker 5: presence on the is it. I also entertained that it
Speaker 5: possibly it was Chinese. I'd heard that there was a
Speaker 5: lot of Chinese electronics on the island in a particular
Speaker 5: building under the purview of Cuban counter intelligence. But going
Speaker 5: back five years, she wasn't as hostile as he is today,
Speaker 5: and most people tended to dismiss it when I trotted
Speaker 5: that one out. So it kind of evolved into this
Speaker 5: idea that Russian technology in cahoots with a small group
Speaker 5: of Cuban counter intelligence, with probably a very senior person
Speaker 5: in charge of the operation, aimed at dismantling America's intelligence
Speaker 5: gathering ability. And they did it. And then my reading
Speaker 5: has always been that once they did it, they took
Speaker 5: it on the road. No surprise about the idea that
Speaker 5: Cuban hardliners would have done something like that. Someone told me,
Speaker 5: I think that two million Americans visited the island within
Speaker 5: I think it was eighteen months, or maybe it was
Speaker 5: even a year of the opening of relations. That's a
Speaker 5: lot of Americans to suddenly be swarming around Cuba and
Speaker 5: knowing those guys unwomen the way I do. I would
Speaker 5: say that that probably really freaked them out. And with
Speaker 5: Fidel's death coming right on the heels of a very
Speaker 5: unexpected outcome in the American election, counterintelligence would have been
Speaker 5: in a very paranoid state and wanting to reassert control
Speaker 5: of an island where they had all we known what
Speaker 5: was going on, and now they no longer did. They
Speaker 5: felt like their grip on knowledge of who was there
Speaker 5: and what they were up to, I think was slipping away.
Speaker 2: Let's take a breather and back in a moment, and
Speaker 2: we're back. Juddley, I share your instinct that there is
Speaker 2: a conspiracy and that there's a Russian Cuban link that
Speaker 2: we haven't come across yet. One thing that unsettles me, though,
Speaker 2: is that the gr you especially, they've generally been sloppy
Speaker 2: by and large when get involved in these things. They
Speaker 2: get caught, and there's things like travel patterns, they talk
Speaker 2: out of school, there's you know, we sort of get
Speaker 2: a sense of what's going on in the Kremlin whispers.
Speaker 2: I'm not hearing those kind of things from people who
Speaker 2: follow it. So I'm just surprised that the Russians, if
Speaker 2: this is it, that they've gotten away with.
Speaker 1: It for so long.
Speaker 5: What haven't the Russians gotten away with however, thank you
Speaker 5: in the world.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean.
Speaker 1: They do it, they get caught, but they still just
Speaker 1: fucking do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, well, you know, I say probably Russian technology,
Speaker 5: because I don't know that the Cubans have it. But
Speaker 5: you know, the Cubans have been pretty resourceful over the
Speaker 5: years in adapting to circumstances in they have a great
Speaker 5: science nucleus, and you know, they're into scientific research. I
Speaker 5: don't know what they've done in weapons research, but you
Speaker 5: know they have fifty years of investment in various sectors.
Speaker 5: The only country prior to this that we know regularly
Speaker 5: use some form of microwave technology to bombard the Americans
Speaker 5: in Moscow without apparent harm, but nonetheless bombard the embassy
Speaker 5: in the hopes of either deflecting or towarding the CI
Speaker 5: station's you know, abilities to listen from the embassy. I
Speaker 5: gather it's true that we don't have a smoking gun.
Speaker 5: It's true that we haven't found a couple of characters
Speaker 5: who are going around poisoning people's tea or putting new
Speaker 5: you know, radioactive toxins on door knobs and things. But
Speaker 5: if it's asymmetrical warfare, something Putin has done a lot of,
Speaker 5: maybe this was something they tried there and took it elsewhere.
Speaker 5: It's interesting to note, although the CI of course has
Speaker 5: never been it's always been mum on this as far
Speaker 5: as I understand. The next big station was Vienna, which
Speaker 5: is an important station, and to my knowledge, it was
Speaker 5: virtually atomized in similar at texts, and there's been no
Speaker 5: whistleblower on that, you know, The CIA has of course
Speaker 5: been hermetic about that, you don't show weakness to the enemy, right.
Speaker 5: I get that, and I'm not surprised either the fact
Speaker 5: that the intelligence community across the board decided to shelve
Speaker 5: this and did so differently than all the previous lawsuits
Speaker 5: brought by soldiers or whoever affected by you know, American weaponry,
Speaker 5: and whether it was Agent Orange or Gulf War syndrome.
Speaker 5: The US government always shelves these lawsuits. The people who
Speaker 5: make these lawsuits, whether they're State Department, other government personnel,
Speaker 5: or soldiers former soldiers, always lose their lawsuits. I noted
Speaker 5: that in this case they didn't lose their lawsuit. Those
Speaker 5: who claimed to have had injuries were paid compensation, and
Speaker 5: then the agencies expressed themselves in a very solemnonic way
Speaker 5: of saying, we feel your pain, but this is over.
Speaker 5: It's also interesting to note that, as far as I know,
Speaker 5: all such alleged attacks or complaints of them, seem to
Speaker 5: have stopped since the Ukrainian invasion occurred. Whether that's pure
Speaker 5: coincidence or not, I don't know.
Speaker 3: It seems to me that the early investigations by CIA, FBI,
Speaker 3: and State were really, really poorly done, And it wasn't
Speaker 3: even until at some point that doctors who are looking
Speaker 3: at these people were sort of trumping and going back
Speaker 3: to the agency and saying, oh, there's nothing here, it's
Speaker 3: all fake, And the doctors are coming back saying absolutely not.
Speaker 3: We see markers, we see that concussion like symptoms when
Speaker 3: there wasn't a concussion, and all these type of things,
Speaker 3: which of course then led, as you mentioned, to the
Speaker 3: payouts and that kind of thing. So in your investigating,
Speaker 3: what sense did you get from that, because my understanding
Speaker 3: is now the Hill is taking this on, and the
Speaker 3: Defense Department now seems to be doing investigating that seems
Speaker 3: more serious than those of the FBI, the agency, and
Speaker 3: State Department.
Speaker 5: And talking to the medical professionals who investigated this, they
Speaker 5: were incensed, thinking of one in particular at the University
Speaker 5: of Pennsylvania was incensed at the idea that this was
Speaker 5: somehow adolescent schoolgirls getting hysterical together, which is essentially what
Speaker 5: the naysayers are suggesting.
Speaker 2: My personal sense was, in the beginning and at the
Speaker 2: beginning of the Trump administration, especially without a smoking gun,
Speaker 2: no one wanted to take bad news about the Russians
Speaker 2: to that Oval Office that was, in my view, thought
Speaker 2: well of Vladimir Putin and said so he came out
Speaker 2: and said he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence
Speaker 2: agencies and without a smoking gun walking into the Oval
Speaker 2: Office and saying, you know, the Russians slashed the Cubans
Speaker 2: are committing an act of war, arguably against the United States.
Speaker 2: And there was some reluctance to aggressively go after this
Speaker 2: without absolute proof, and of course, the absolute proof unless
Speaker 2: we get a walk in a defector who walks in
Speaker 2: and says, okay, here's what happened. You know, we're stuck
Speaker 2: with conjecture and assessments and gut feels and circumstantial evidence,
Speaker 2: and those can be pretty compelling, but are not decisive always.
Speaker 5: That was my sense of it too. The ball was
Speaker 5: effectively dropped during the Trump administration. It's notable that the
Speaker 5: first episodes begin during his period of president elect, and
Speaker 5: it becomes public knowledge in the summer of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 5: he's six eight months in office. It coincides with the
Speaker 5: Russian investigation and the various behavior we saw from Trump,
Speaker 5: and the episodes appear to have traveled on from Cuba
Speaker 5: over the next couple of years to various places. Even
Speaker 5: if we dismissed some of them, there's no good explanation
Speaker 5: for Vienna Station and a few others around the world.
Speaker 5: I mean, if I was putin and I was doing it,
Speaker 5: I'd go to town because Trump isn't going to do anything
Speaker 5: about it. And then it was really the Biden administration
Speaker 5: where it's resuscitated and becomes a public thing.
Speaker 3: I think Bolton taking it seriously when he was his
Speaker 3: short tenure there.
Speaker 5: Yes, Bolton did. And we had a conversation with Bolton
Speaker 5: in which he basically said, well, I didn't really want
Speaker 5: to get the Boss mad by bringing up Russia. He
Speaker 5: didn't go so far as to say that he had
Speaker 5: deep sixth the topic. He continued to investigate, but that
Speaker 5: he didn't bring it to Trump.
Speaker 3: But you have an analytic cadre who's been burned over
Speaker 3: the years in Iraq and WMD and things that almost
Speaker 3: needs to have like absolute proof. And you have a
Speaker 3: White House, any white house, frankly, but this White House
Speaker 3: probably too, that says, if you're going to give me
Speaker 3: information that suggests that the Russians are at war with us,
Speaker 3: they're hurting American diplomats and that we have to respond
Speaker 3: you better be damn sure that it's one hundred percent sure,
Speaker 3: And so you probably got internal baticles. I can imagine
Speaker 3: the analyst saying, yeah, you're coming at me with a
Speaker 3: lot of patterns, a lot of possible information, but until
Speaker 3: we know for sure, there's no way where we as
Speaker 3: an organization are going to the White House with this.
Speaker 3: And there's probably a lot of frustration inside on from
Speaker 3: our side of the house saying, for christ' sake, we're
Speaker 3: the ones suffering this. We see Russians and grri Peopil
Speaker 3: in specific places, the places where it looks like this happened,
Speaker 3: where places like Havana, Vienna, Belgrade, Hanoi, China, places where
Speaker 3: the Russians can operate and sort of hide themselves pretty
Speaker 3: quickly afterwards.
Speaker 5: You know, one of the patterns that I found very interesting,
Speaker 5: and I guess it began with Vice President Kamala Harris's
Speaker 5: trip to Hanoi. There began to be a pattern in
Speaker 5: which people right next to a principal figure. Where's that that?
Speaker 3: To me?
Speaker 5: This idea of leaving a signature that to me has
Speaker 5: makes me think of only one leader in the world
Speaker 5: who likes to leave signatures.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Again, I can't prove it, but you know, two days
Speaker 5: before she gets to Hanoi, two employees of the US
Speaker 5: Embassy are evacuated with apparent symptoms of havana syndrome. Director
Speaker 5: Burns goes to New Jelly. The person with him is affected.
Speaker 5: Bolton goes to London, two of his briefers are affected,
Speaker 5: and so on. Well, Blinkn goes to Bogatah, and a
Speaker 5: few days before he gets there, I think three days before,
Speaker 5: an unnamed number of people at the embassy are withdrawn
Speaker 5: or treated. It's a bit like once they went to town,
Speaker 5: once they went on the road with this. It was
Speaker 5: this idea of we're just reminding you were doing this,
Speaker 5: and it's right next to you in each case, and
Speaker 5: that seems to me more than coincidental, because the number
Speaker 5: of senior officials who had people directly within their posse affected.
Speaker 1: Johnley, thank you very much for coming and talking with
Speaker 1: us today. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 4: Guys, how is John Lee Anderson Adam?
Speaker 3: Have you been hiding behind the scenes? Have you been
Speaker 3: here the whole time listening to this?
Speaker 4: No, I'm just showing up. But you talk to one
Speaker 4: of my favorite, literally one of my very favorite people
Speaker 4: in the world, Johnley Anderson.
Speaker 3: I think he's a fascinating guy. I know you worked
Speaker 3: with him some as a journalist, and you know he's
Speaker 3: the kind of guy that you sort of look up to.
Speaker 3: His journalist He's lived around the world, He's dug into
Speaker 3: deep places, He's personally courageous and been a lot of
Speaker 3: dangerous places.
Speaker 4: I think John Lee is the single most respected foreign
Speaker 4: correspondent in the US. He's saved my life, and I
Speaker 4: think there's a lot of journalists who can say the
Speaker 4: exact same thing. I mean, he goes to incredibly dangerous places,
Speaker 4: but he does it thoughtfully.
Speaker 3: Also, when you think about Cuba itself, there's very few
Speaker 3: people who have the expertise in Cuba that he has.
Speaker 3: He's lived there for a long time, he's got the contacts,
Speaker 3: and so if we're looking to talk to experts, hard
Speaker 3: to find a better one.
Speaker 2: So Churchill famously that Russia, right, it's a riddle rapped
Speaker 2: in a mystery inside an enigma, and I think we've
Speaker 2: only just started with the mystery and we need to
Speaker 2: get into the enigma part of it later.
Speaker 3: I think that's right. So today I think we've got
Speaker 3: a really good sense of the context, but there clearly
Speaker 3: is a lot more to this story. So in our
Speaker 3: next episode, we are going to continue looking at this
Speaker 3: with someone who is even more closely associated with as
Speaker 3: someone who is actually impacted by what we're now calling
Speaker 3: the Havana syndrome. So stay with us for the next
Speaker 3: episode of Mission Implausible.
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher,
Speaker 6: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producers are Rachel Harner and
Speaker 6: David Solinger.
Speaker 1: This has been a
Speaker 6: Production of honorable, mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia.