The Havana Syndrome Hoax, Explained

This article originally appeared on The Dossier and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Jordan Schachtel

Havana Syndrome is all the rage these days among current and former government bureaucrats.

What is Havana Syndrome, anyway?

In short, a significant amount of American government intelligence officers have reported symptoms that range in severity from pain and intense ringing in the ears to cognitive issues. Several of these officials that have come forward have a background in intel work relating to Russia. Despite the U.S. Intelligence Community continuing to conclude that there is no real evidence to demonstrate a link between the noises in their ears and Vladimir Putin, many insist that Russia is to blame. And the men and women spearheading the Havana Syndrome awareness effort just so happen to be very politically involved.

The corporate media is sounding the alarm about a new report from CBS that dropped this weekend, which claims that the Russian government has maintained a decade long, top secret directed energy weapon program, and has been using these tools exclusively against U.S. government intelligence agents.

You can watch the full episode here:

Now, there seems to be an infinite amount of plot holes in the narrative.

But first of all, is the makeup job of the FBI agent some kind of April Fools joke?

Clearly, neither the FBI nor CBS has any interest in protecting her identity. Moreover, CBS subtly acknowledges on multiple occasions that the FBI has been in the loop regarding her appearance and talking points on CBS. This means that CBS and the FBI have been working in concert on this story, which leads to a variety of questions about the independence of 60 Minutes in reporting the story accurately and without bias.

Throughout the piece, there is a stunning lack of any real evidence that delivers a direct link between Russian agents, directed energy weapons, and the variety of claimed injuries. Certainly, some of these injuries appear to be very real, but they arrive without a sound link to this claimed innovative attack.

If we are to believe the narrative, Vladimir Putin has been authorizing his intelligence officers to fire sci-fi-like ray guns against American intelligence officers, and he’s been doing this since 2014. Despite this 10 year campaign, our intelligence agencies have failed to provide anything more than a very casual evidentiary trail.

This opens up a pandora’s box of further questions:

• Why isn’t Moscow using this weapon against Zelensky?
• Why is there no evidence of Russia using these devices on any real kinetic battlefield, such as Ukraine, Syria, etc?
• Are we to believe that American intelligence officers are such prized, irreplaceable resources, that an entire Kremlin program, which could have so many applications elsewhere, is solely directed at them?

As the great journalist Hans Mahncke noted on X, it’s also important to scrutinize the individual current and former government agents who claim to be suffering from Havana Syndrome. Here’s some that definitely stick out:

• Marc Polymeropoulos, who retired from the CIA in 2019, is currently an MSNBC contributor. He was one of the many former government agents who claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation.
• Miles Taylor, who wrote the infamous “Anonymous” anti-Trump letter, has made a career of leveraging his government credentials to write best selling Trump bashing fan fiction.
• Olivia Troye, a former adviser to VP Mike Pence, has followed a similar path to Mr Taylor, using her former credentials to land lucrative gigs in the corporate media machine.
• Mark Lenzi, who waged a campaign to get social media to censor critics, falsely accused several people of running “Russian controlled accounts.”

And it’s not just the Russia hoaxers who have an incentive to declare that they’ve been subdued by “Havana Syndrome.” Thanks to our misguided Congress, now everyone who works for the federal government is incentivized to discover that they too have been attacked by Putin’s RayGun.

The devil is in the details…

The Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act, which passed in 2021, gives an untaxed lump-sum payment of one years’ salary to government employees with a proven “neurological injury.” Several government departments have extended these benefits to former employees and even family members of government employees. For career bureaucrats, this can amount to upwards of $150,000 in an untaxed special bonus payment.

In similar fashion to Covid hysteria, the government has incentivized Havana Syndrome to become an epidemic of widespread proportions.

And many powerful actors are playing along — with some personally making lots of money off of the Havana Syndrome hoax — to make the case for more aggressive geopolitical maneuvering against the Russians.

In what appears to be an incredible coincidence, the newly rolled out Havana Syndrome “reporting” comes right before the House is set to vote on both the seizing of Russian assets and a massive infusion of cash for the war in Ukraine.

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