Post by addisona on Jun 4, 2022 7:31:52 GMT
As code names go, Patient Zero wouldn’t be the first choice of many secret agents. But it’s one that a CIA officer then based in Cuba has been saddled with since December 30, 2016, when he walked into the US embassy’s Havana health centre. There he told a nurse about peculiar and disturbing sensations of sound and pressure he had endured at his home in the city, leading to dizziness and headaches. In his compelling later account, he said it felt as though a powerful, high-pitched sonic beam had been aimed directly at him.
Patient Zero, later described as a fit-looking man in his 30s and an experienced spy, was sent to Miami for tests in early 2017, which diagnosed a roster of medical issues, including hearing loss. After his return to Cuba, Patient Zero approached a friendly colleague, revealed his harrowing ordeal and said he would soon be leaving Cuba. Before he did so, though, he played his friend a recording of the sound he said had tormented him.
The colleague – a fellow CIA officer working undercover at the embassy – was dumbstruck. The humming, buzzing noise seemed eerily similar to one that had disturbed him a few months earlier outside the Spanish-style home he shared with his family in Havana. “It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV,” this officer later told ProPublica, an independent US investigative newsroom, in an anonymous interview. His neighbour, yet another CIA officer, had also heard odd noises, and to him they seemed “mechanical-sounding”.
Neither man noted any associated symptoms, though the neighbour had been concerned enough to ask for maintenance workers to investigate. Nothing was found, and after a few weeks the mysterious sounds faded, then disappeared.
But in the light of Patient Zero’s troubling experience, his friend felt duty-bound to raise the alarm. Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA man then working in Havana, remembers Patient Zero’s own zealous campaign: “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” Armstrong has said. The concerned officer went to the embassy’s chief of mission, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who called a general meeting in the Havana embassy. “If you have any doubts about anything,” DeLaurentis urged the gathered staff, “step forward and we’ll have you evaluated.”
As 2017 progressed, a steady stream of spies and diplomats, as well as family members, reported a constellation of symptoms and odd, pervasive sounds and sensations: dizziness, tinnitus, memory impairment, fatigue, loud ringing, grinding metal, the feeling of air inside a moving car with the windows partially rolled down. Some had been affected while staying in Havana hotels, others at their own homes. DeLaurentis’s personal assistant said that she had been left unsteady and exhausted after hearing odd noises while in her 21st-floor apartment. Of the 80-odd people who came forward, some two dozen were flown to Miami and Philadelphia for examination and treatment.
Tests included MRI brain scans, along with procedures to assess vision, auditory response and motor control. One female diplomat recalled being asked to keep her balance on a moving platform, and falling repeatedly. When her tests concluded, a specialist offered a snap diagnosis – employing the fearful, nebulous sci-fi-esque nickname that some researchers and sufferers had by then adopted: “It’s definitely the Thing.”
These extraordinary events must be viewed through the prism of Cuba-US relations, which long ranked among the most vitriolic on earth. When then US president Barack Obama moved to normalise relations – the US embassy in Havana was reopened in 2015 after a 54-year absence – it was heralded by some as an historic rapprochement, and by others (step forward Cuban-American US Republican senator Marco Rubio) as “a concession to tyranny”. Donald Trump duly poured scorn on this tentative reconciliation, and when Fidel Castro died – just 17 days after Trump’s election victory – he delivered a gloating statement and threatened to curtail relations once again.
At a stroke, mutual fear and suspicion bubbled straight back to the surface. CIA and staff at the recently reopened embassy were acquainted with age-old tactics designed to unnerve foreign operatives in hostile territory: they would come home from a weekend away to find the family freezer unplugged and all the food ruined, or spot unfamiliar cigarette butts in the ashtray. Patient Zero revealed that in the run-up to his “sonic attack” he’d noticed regular intrusions into his home while absent, in which items had been conspicuously tampered with.
www.smh.com.au/national/for-your-ears-only-what-s-really-behind-havana-syndrome-20220506-p5aj70.html
Patient Zero, later described as a fit-looking man in his 30s and an experienced spy, was sent to Miami for tests in early 2017, which diagnosed a roster of medical issues, including hearing loss. After his return to Cuba, Patient Zero approached a friendly colleague, revealed his harrowing ordeal and said he would soon be leaving Cuba. Before he did so, though, he played his friend a recording of the sound he said had tormented him.
The colleague – a fellow CIA officer working undercover at the embassy – was dumbstruck. The humming, buzzing noise seemed eerily similar to one that had disturbed him a few months earlier outside the Spanish-style home he shared with his family in Havana. “It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV,” this officer later told ProPublica, an independent US investigative newsroom, in an anonymous interview. His neighbour, yet another CIA officer, had also heard odd noises, and to him they seemed “mechanical-sounding”.
Neither man noted any associated symptoms, though the neighbour had been concerned enough to ask for maintenance workers to investigate. Nothing was found, and after a few weeks the mysterious sounds faded, then disappeared.
But in the light of Patient Zero’s troubling experience, his friend felt duty-bound to raise the alarm. Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA man then working in Havana, remembers Patient Zero’s own zealous campaign: “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” Armstrong has said. The concerned officer went to the embassy’s chief of mission, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who called a general meeting in the Havana embassy. “If you have any doubts about anything,” DeLaurentis urged the gathered staff, “step forward and we’ll have you evaluated.”
As 2017 progressed, a steady stream of spies and diplomats, as well as family members, reported a constellation of symptoms and odd, pervasive sounds and sensations: dizziness, tinnitus, memory impairment, fatigue, loud ringing, grinding metal, the feeling of air inside a moving car with the windows partially rolled down. Some had been affected while staying in Havana hotels, others at their own homes. DeLaurentis’s personal assistant said that she had been left unsteady and exhausted after hearing odd noises while in her 21st-floor apartment. Of the 80-odd people who came forward, some two dozen were flown to Miami and Philadelphia for examination and treatment.
Tests included MRI brain scans, along with procedures to assess vision, auditory response and motor control. One female diplomat recalled being asked to keep her balance on a moving platform, and falling repeatedly. When her tests concluded, a specialist offered a snap diagnosis – employing the fearful, nebulous sci-fi-esque nickname that some researchers and sufferers had by then adopted: “It’s definitely the Thing.”
These extraordinary events must be viewed through the prism of Cuba-US relations, which long ranked among the most vitriolic on earth. When then US president Barack Obama moved to normalise relations – the US embassy in Havana was reopened in 2015 after a 54-year absence – it was heralded by some as an historic rapprochement, and by others (step forward Cuban-American US Republican senator Marco Rubio) as “a concession to tyranny”. Donald Trump duly poured scorn on this tentative reconciliation, and when Fidel Castro died – just 17 days after Trump’s election victory – he delivered a gloating statement and threatened to curtail relations once again.
At a stroke, mutual fear and suspicion bubbled straight back to the surface. CIA and staff at the recently reopened embassy were acquainted with age-old tactics designed to unnerve foreign operatives in hostile territory: they would come home from a weekend away to find the family freezer unplugged and all the food ruined, or spot unfamiliar cigarette butts in the ashtray. Patient Zero revealed that in the run-up to his “sonic attack” he’d noticed regular intrusions into his home while absent, in which items had been conspicuously tampered with.
www.smh.com.au/national/for-your-ears-only-what-s-really-behind-havana-syndrome-20220506-p5aj70.html