A CIA Officer Visits Moscow, Returns with Mysterious, Crippling Headaches
npr.org
npr.org
As for defense, it seems that detecting full spectrum weapons requires highly specialized and expensive equipment. It may not be practical to deploy such equipment in the field.
As for treating the inflicted officers, it seems strange that our premier front line agency would not err on the side of caution and allow these patriots to receive treatment from Walter Reed. Could there be more to the story than DCI Haspel remaining skeptical as justification to decline such treatment?
This is nonsense. If the power level is high enough to do damage, detecting it would be trivially easy.
Just a wire dipole, a diode, and a simple meter will do the job. At most it would require a set of dipoles to cover each band of interest.
Most radio hobbyists could make a set of dipoles from an a old coat-hanger in a few minutes.
Further if you knew what you were trying to do, you could set up your feedback transmitter in a room, record all the parameters for that room, then move to the next room, Etc.
The problem that Perlman was solving was a lot harder (a moving target) but hitting a nominally stationary target?
I guess semiconductors are covering pretty high frequencies these days though(http://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2019/may/knu_2...).
Remember, bog-standard corruption in Ukraine is a crazy conspiracy theory which should be banned from social media.
But mystical microwave illnesses? Very credible.
You have permission to re-engage your bullshit detector after all the votes are in.
What is perhaps even more interesting, eddy currents on the boundaries of the cave could be used to indicate that you were being broadcast at.
[1] https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/02/...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180802/07182740351/as-dn...
So much more likely that Wikileaks, or one of the hackers, simply copied them to a thumb drive at some point.
He woke up in the middle of the night not able to breathe with some sort of toxic gas permeating his hotel room.
Is this just a thing that happens in Russia? Was it a broken pipe?
They might have something that the CIA is unable to detect, or is unwilling to advertise its ability to detect.
Poisoning is not that hard when you're a nation state. Light coat of magic dust on your door handle is just one of many methods.
Sounds like a default setting when operating on foreign soil
I’d suggest you read the article. He was in Russia to meet with Russian intelligence, presumably to discuss whatever it is that the CIA and Russian intelligence have to talk about, which the article describes as a common thing for CIA agents to do.
This opening line? Where you say he was an undercover agent? Even though the article explicitly states he wasn't? I mean, that's why I suggested that you should actually read it.
Yes. I'd suggest you read up on what a hypothetical situation is. Also, did you notice where I wrote about American spin? Yeah, I'd highly suggest reading that part too. :)
This could honestly just be something like a very small CSF leak caused by the plane trip. It's a legit thing that can happen, especially in older folks (for it being brought on by a plane trip, that is)
It's a condition that is very often missed by even the best of medical professionals.
While there's an absolutely miniscule chance this is the case, I just sent him a message with a large amount of info in how to look into this with the centers pioneering treatment (Stanford, Cedars-Sinai, Duke) as it's a very fucking shitty condition to deal with.
But yeah, not to put on a tinfoil hat... I believe we're most definitely past the point of technological ability to do something like this. However, using it in a case like this does seem a bit odd to me.
I can also believe there would be reasons the CIA has long standing beef with Walter Reed. Politics are unfathomably nasty.
"I've asked [the CIA] repeatedly over the last year to send me to Walter Reed, and they have actively rejected this, which to me is is kind of mystifying," he said.
curious
Scientific notation is OK.
As for inability to detect whatever Russia might have done to the guy - what on Earth does that have to do with the refusal of medical help?
When the report is made public it will show no evidence of any malicious action. The idea that there is some microwave or sonic weapon being used against agents is a sensationalistic conspiracy theory.
Does not mean that there isn’t any malicious action. Clearly someone is hurting US agents in a very similar manner.
The whole reason this is an issue to begin with is because we can’t figure out how they are hurting our agents.
It's also possible some US training or accident is involved. Just because a trip to Russia or Cuba was when the problems became unbearable doesn't mean those trips were at fault. Years in combat zones can eventually cause problems.
https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...
Nah, that would be too convenient.
Also Pompeo said the suggestion is “patently false”. So there you have it folks.
A far more prosaic explanation is that Russia plays dirty.
Is it that unrealistic to think a nation that sends "little green men" to carve off parts of sovereign nations, is above disruptive methods?
The history of intelligence officers being screwed over in the interests of internal politics anywhere in the world is a long and storied one.
For example, how many officers or operatives have come back from these countries with no symptoms. Is it simply people whose job it is to keep an eye on Russia?
Or maybe it’s more weighted towards people with certain known political views.
It could be as simple as Russia watching Pompeo tear down the state department and then saying, let’s do that to the CIA too.
The common denominator is these people are working for the US Government.
My guess: Workplace Systems-Related Injuries. In other words, an occupational hazard.
Mayhaps that combined with near or far infrared? Might explain the uncontrollable migraines due to the relative prevalence of thermal sources, and over stimulation of neurons is definitely an invitation to metabolic stress. The body's reaction may very well be vasodilation to remove excessive waste product.
We're firmly in wild-ass guess territory though.
Giving your victims chronic health conditions rather than outright killing them is quite an effective tactic though. Organizations are terrible at accommodating chronic illnesses, and they're seen as not serious if you're not visibly disabled.
I really wish I could remember where I was reading about it, because it was novel enough to leave an impression, but also at the time I was going through it I had other things I was thinking through.
That said, even for America the costs would fade away into the intense military spending budget if they were willing to spend it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/14/mystery-of-son...
Spoke in person with HR office couples years back and finished with crippling headache for days. Then car dealership. Then bank office. Then airlines office.
Stay safe
None is asking, why would they do this? what do you get out of it?
Isn't that the modus operandi of most intelligence operations, you try to learn their secrets and protect your own and one of your secrets may be you have discovered theirs?
Also - to the other person who posted this fix: jinx! :)
i guess what i'm saying is that if i knew Putin were doing this to my people i would be apoplectic-- what am i missing? are we up to dirty stuff like this too? i mean, i guess something like Guantanamo counts as "dirty", but seems somehow in a different circle of hell from this... (maybe this is just my own ignorance talking).
Yes.
But I don't know of an example of messing with the personal well-being of diplomats/spies/goons/whoever who are in their country's compound rather than deployed in the field? Perhaps a taboo is being violated here?
No one got hurt by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device).
This is resonant because it's educated-class people. Not latin-american nuns being killed by death squads, harder to relate to that.
...and by the way I think that the world is fortunate at the moment in its superpower you know.
We basically you know, with all the occasional errors that your country makes as all countries do,
I am glad that the preponderant power in the world is a liberal capitalist democracy rather than being
Russia or China, right, or the European Union.
If this is a genuine issue then the mechanism is almost assuredly completely different, and personally I don't think it is some scary communist death ray that they would, for some reason, use on US and Canadian diplomats.
Unless the diplomats are all actually covert staff, in which case there would be a motive, but then some kind of chemical is much likelier.
This is IMO so implausible as to put the entire story into question. There is no way this is a microwave or sonic weapon. A microwave or sonic weapon could not cause occipital nerve damage so specific and without leaving any obvious traces of mechanical trauma and/or heat damage. It would also very probably be quite notioeable.
And this wouldn't be the first time the Russians designed something like this. There is that famous passively powered bugging of the American embassy in Moscow story, where they anticipated RFID technology, in the 60's.
And ultimately, what for? This agent appears to have retained their memory but can no longer work in the field. Why would this one field agent be so important to debilitate in this way? What benefit would Russia get from it?
I get the motivation behind killing people (dead men tell no tales), but inflicting migraines just seems useless.
Sonic waves would have to be of relatively low frequency in order to not be reflected or otherwise attenuated, so you would need low frequency waves, which, no matter what kind of interference you try to use, will never have effects moreso localized than the wavelength itself. If you were trying to get resonance with the skull at n<8, you'd be well within the audible range, too.
As for microwaves, the same issue is still there, I can't think of any interference pattern for waves of lambda>1mm that would somehow have effects that would have no detectable thermal characteristics yet be extremely localized to only a few specific parts of the brain.
Same for resonance, you'd need a wavelength comparable to the dimensions of the skull, and for that you couldn't have effects as localized as damaging only the optical nerve.
It's not out of the question that very high-powered microwaves could have some kind of electrical impact on the brain, but those impacts would not be localized to only the optical nerve and instead hit the entirety of the brain, and if you were able to get a machine that could create strong electrical currents throughout the brain the idea that this could happen enough to degrade a nerve without being somehow noticeable, for days to weeks is extremely implausible. Plus, a thin line would have not to be crossed where a lot of waste heat could be dumped in the room.
In all experiments done, effects were either wildly different or extremely rapid, and are thought to come from a completely different mechanism of rapid variations in temperatures causing physical vibrations. But again, this would need energies in the order of multiple watts applied to the human brain for quite a while, and would definitely be noticeable.
Not only that, but this would be incredibly easy to detect, you'd only need an antenna. The energies necessary for any of these effects are exceedingly high.
It just doesn't make sense, in many many ways.
Any plausible mechanism for how this could happen and not be happening in dozens of easily verifiable ways would either cause a lot of heat or be very easily detectable.
The reason the media seized on and perpetuated it (the bizarre rumor that touching something that had been invisibly stained with fentanyl would make you deathly ill) at the time was a combination of the law-and-order right insisting that the drug war was still vitally important, and the liberal left's concern for drug users during the "opiate epidemic" needing more official protection and care lest they be exposed to these Chinese-poisoned drugs. It worked for both sides, so was reported endlessly, and induced people all over the country to somatize.
Now, we have an anti-"Russian" narrative that can be attached to this that makes both the Democratic Party left and warhawks happy. I put Russian in scare quotes, because it's clearly a revival of anticommunism without the communism. Russia, Cuba, China...
Political Morgellons.
Very reasonable and well thought piece. It is highly irresponsible for of NPR talking up the next cold-war. But I figure without a foreign bogeyman to scare the American people, the spooks wouldn't be able to justify the budget.
Often, the background story to a mystery is: there’s a motivation for presenting it as such.
All these recent attacks on the CIA and other government officials by Russians in Russia and elsewhere in Europe have just confirmed that they were behind the Cuba attacks, and some originally suspected.
Edit: Looking into the research, there are dissenting voices who believe that explanations other than a weapon are possible. But the authors of the two studies I saw published leaned toward some type of offensive weapon. After WMD debacle, I should be more careful with my conclusions.
By whom?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba...
“a recording of one “sonic attack” actually is the singing of a very loud cricket, a new analysis concludes.”
> Subsequent studies of the affected diplomats in Cuba, published in the journal JAMA in 2018, found evidence that the diplomats experienced some form of brain injury, but did not determine the cause of the injuries.
The crickets may have just happened to be singing at the time.
Or some person had the brilliant idea of making a brain damaging weapon also produce cricket noises to send investigators down the wrong track.
Reading this makes me think we might have victims right here.
But it's also a big deal.
If you've been a ex-pat you will have seen it before, if you look.
Mass hysteria is about the health of populations. Often about stresses that are not necessarily obvious but also obvious.
Travel and living in a foreign country is stressful. (Havana syndrome)
Working in a factory on a low wage is stressful (mass fainting)
Sex Stuff (Penises stealing)
But while you ignore the real reason and blame something else, that's not good. It's why we still hurt witches for instance. Which you will see articles on HN that are witchcraft and people still believe them and worse people don't call them out as untrue.