And yet while he was debating the war in Ukraine at the Security Council today, House Republican Mike McCaul called on Blinken to testify before the Congress about his role in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. McCaul, a fiery Texan and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a scathing report about the pull-out on September 8. Shortly afterward, he issued a subpoena for Blinken. McCaul initially requested Blinken to appear last week, but the secretary was in Egypt, trying to secure that impossibly elusive Gaza ceasefire deal. So McCaul moved the date to today. And having failed to secure it—because, as he knew, Blinken would be at UNGA—he subsequently filed a motion last week to hold Blinken in contempt.
The State Department has pushed back, pointing out the number of times that Blinken has testified in Congress about Afghanistan (14) and in front of McCaul’s committee (four). Further, they pointed out that State had offered McCaul other scheduling options, and he had rejected all of them, including an offer for Blinken to testify in November. (The House is out in October and only reconvenes after the election.) “They obviously want to get it in before the election,” a Democratic committee member said. (The resolution makes a point of tying Kamala Harris to the chaos, noting that she has said she was “the last person in the room” before Biden made the decision to withdraw.)
Why is McCaul doing this, other than to create pre-election headaches? Well, the Biden administration has pointed to McCaul’s long-shot bid to stay on as head of the powerful and prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee. Republicans have set term limits of five years for such roles (Dems haven’t), and McCaul is approaching its expiration. To extend his chairmanship past the allowable five years, he has to ask Speaker Mike Johnson for a waiver, which McCaul did back in July. But the competition is fierce, with at least six Republicans on the committee vying for the leadership post.
On top of that, in August, conservative journalist Jerry Dunleavy, who had joined McCaul’s team to investigate the Afghanistan withdrawal, resigned in protest, saying, essentially, that McCaul had been pulling his punches.“That’s why he’s doing this now. He needs to look tough,” a senior administration official told me. “And honestly, he’s quietly said that to people.” McCaul’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The committee votes on the contempt motion tonight and, if it passes (as is widely expected), it will go to a floor vote as soon as tomorrow. It will likely pass there as well. That will make Blinken the first secretary of state in American history to be held in contempt. The White House, for its part, understands there’s little they can do at this point to prevent this outcome. “When there’s leadership and politics involved, it’s really hard to stop that train,” the official said.
The Truth Is Out There
Meanwhile, last week brought a new development on the intriguing topic of Anomalous Health Incidents, or A.H.I.s, previously known as “Havana Syndrome”—one of the longest-standing, and strangest, mysteries in Washington. Brian Karem, a reporter for Salon, published the results of a FOIA request he’d submitted to the C.I.A. that turned up a heavily redacted whistleblower complaint filed by an agency employee. It alleged that C.I.A. higher-ups were tampering with witnesses, suppressing evidence, and generally forcing a false consensus on the Anomalous Health Incidents.
The phenomenon, if you recall, was first reported by U.S. embassy personnel in Havana, thus the name, in 2016. State Department and C.I.A. employees reported hearing a strange sound and feeling pressure in their skulls, which, according to the victims, caused a bouquet of debilitating symptoms: vomiting, vertigo, migraines, amnesia, vision and hearing loss, and the like. The symptoms came and went and often lingered for years.
After Havana, overseas government employees reported similar experiences in China, Russia, Australia, Austria, the U.K., Taiwan, Georgia, and even on U.S. soil, as I reported in 2020, in the D.C. suburbs. People also reported that even their pets and children had been “hit,” and many State Department and C.I.A. employees were forced to retire early because of the syndrome’s physical toll. Early evidence and speculation seemed to point to a directed energy weapon wielded by the Russians.
The Hill took notice, as did the then-new Biden administration. But in March 2023, the C.I.A. released a report that seemed to put the whole thing to bed. Even as the number of people affected continued to climb and the geographical reach spread, agency investigators said they’d found no evidence of a weapon or a foreign adversary as the culprit. C.I.A. Director Bill Burns and administration officials made clear that, while they didn’t doubt their employees were in real pain, there was no concrete evidence of a common cause. And that, the C.I.A. wanted to believe, was that.
But of course, it wasn’t. Victims continued to sound the alarm and advocate for more clarity. Everyone inside Langley seemed to know someone who’d been “hit,” and they found no reason to disbelieve their colleagues. Meanwhile, independent investigators and journalists stayed on the case. In April, Christo Grozev, Roman Dobrokhotov, and Michael Weiss published a piece in The Insider that pointed to a Russian G.R.U. unit that had been hopscotching across the globe and attacking U.S. officials.
The whistleblower complaint, filed in January 2023, claims the C.I.A. discouraged victims from speaking to the F.B.I.—which was investigating the incidents as potential crimes committed against U.S. citizens at home and abroad—and that those who did speak to the bureau were punished at the agency. In the complaint, the whistleblower wrote, “I have reason to believe this assessment”—referring to what became the Agency’s nothing-to-see-here report—“is designed to convey the appearance of I.C. consensus when no such consensus exists.” Further, the whistleblower accused the agency of withholding information from Congress.
The complaint led to an investigation by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) last year. It is still ongoing. The whistleblower, according to their attorney Mark Zaid, is still a C.I.A. employee and has been involved in the investigations into A.H.I.s. “They’re still inside,” said Zaid, who represents many of the A.H.I. victims, as well as another agency whistleblower whose complaint kicked off Donald Trump’s first impeachment. “They’re not low level, but not senior. They are someone who has had access to this information throughout the federal government. This person is not a victim, but they have participated in many of the investigations on the inside.”
As someone who has been writing about this phenomenon for the past four years, I have to confess that it only gets curiouser and curiouser. Why would the C.I.A. be so eager to dismiss something that so many of its own employees, current and former, are convinced is real? And who is right: the people who fervently believe this is a Russian directed energy attack, or the people who fervently believe it’s a case of mass psychosis?
A topic that was once fair game in Washington national security circles has now become akin to talking about U.F.O.s. People will tell you quietly they believe something happened, but they don’t know what. “You’ll notice it’s the same few people who are keeping the story alive,” one Hill staffer working on the issue told me.
For what it’s worth, the staffer believes that something had happened to the A.H.I. victims, but what, exactly, and why hush it up? “The former [C.I.A. director of operations] said this has to go away, because we’ll never have anyone [agree] to go abroad again,” a former agency employee told me. Who, indeed, would willingly relocate themselves and their families overseas and risk a debilitating attack from an untraceable source? And remember: This wasn’t happening to diplomats in Kabul or Mogadishu. It was happening in the cushy posts, places like London and Vienna.
Others posited that these attacks would constitute an act of war and acknowledging them would compel Washington to respond in some very concrete way. There is also another theory. “The thought is, to what extent are we, the U.S., doing the same thing or similar?” said Zaid, the attorney for the whistleblower. “We invented this technology as a collection mechanism, and other countries have improved it and weaponized it.” If this were the case, the C.I.A. could be wary of information about its own classified technology getting out. Why else, Zaid went on, would Burns and Blinken wear “wearable detection devices for directed energy”? I asked him if I heard that right. “I’ve been told—and by multiple people—that they do that,” Zaid shrugged. “Which makes perfect sense.”
“That’s totally nuts,” a senior administration official scoffed. “That’s bonkers.” But the official thought about it for a moment and admitted that there are guys who travel with high-ranking officials like Blinken and Burns, the networking guys, who carry all kinds of sensitive electronic equipment, so that the secretary and director can, for example, make secure calls from their planes. Maybe the rumored detection devices were part of the kit? “I have no idea,” this official said. “And if I asked them, they wouldn’t tell me.” Then they thought about it some more: “No, that’s nuts. Why would they be covering up evidence of Russian malfeasance? It doesn’t add up. We fucking hate the Russians, we call them out all the time.”
It was a lot harder, the official said, to tell the A.H.I. victims that what had happened to them, hadn’t happened. “It would be so much easier if it were the Russians or the Chinese,” the official sighed.
