article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba-microwave.html
Doctors and scientists say microwave strikes may have caused sonic delusions and very real brain damage among embassy staff and family members.
William J. Broad Sept. 1, 2018
During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control.
More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.
Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late 2016, hit more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. The Cuban incidents resulted in a diplomatic rupture between Havana and Washington.
How an Alleged Sonic Attack Shaped U.S. Policy on Cuba
In 2016, diplomats at the United States Embassy in Havana were mysteriously stricken. Was it an attack? There is no official explanation, but the episode has played a big role in America’s current political disengagement with Cuba.
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“Imagine a CSI investigation — this famous TV program — where the investigators don’t have the murder weapon, don’t have the place, don’t have access to the victims. How the hell do you investigate that? It’s impossible!” Late 2016, Havana. “Dr. Rosenfarb, are you aware of any type of technology that would cause this?” “No, I’m not, sir.” American diplomats were complaining of crushing headaches, extreme fatigue. “Who would do this?” And, an intense sound. “Secretary Tillerson ordered the departure of non-emergency personnel.” The Cubans? They said they knew nothing about it. “Sporadic attacks continued until late April. But that sound is why this building is nearly empty at this important moment for Cuba. For the first time in 60 years, its leader will not be a Castro. “Two things we know for sure.” Here’s what the U.S. government has said about the sound: “People were hurt, and the Cuban government knows who did it. Whatever happened to these people happen as a result of some sophisticated technology that, quite frankly, is so sophisticated we don’t understand it. It leads you then …” In Washington, Senator Marco Rubio convened a hearing. “It was the early opinion of the security professionals who looked at it that it was likely a form of harassment.” “O.K. In late 2016, staff at the United States Embassy in Havana began complaining of strange noises, and among the descriptions that they complained of, high-pitched beam of sound or just intense pressure in one ear. There are 24 Americans, who during their time in Havana, have experienced symptoms that are consistent with what you would see in mild traumatic brain injury and/or concussion.” Doctors said that diplomats’ brain matter had actually changed. What started out as a mysterious nuisance — “We know it happened to 24 people” — — became a suspected instrument of attack. “Tillerson reacted as he would have reacted when he was an oil executive. He heard something happen in an oil rig. Get everybody out of there.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ordered his staff: “We are convinced these were targeted attacks. We don’t like our diplomats being targeted.” Depart your post, he said. Leave Cuba. And they did. Everyone from the people who discussed trade down to those who processed visas. The incident had become political. “This is entirely about the health, and the safety, and the well-being of Americans. We still have an investigation that’s underway. So I hope Cuba would focus instead on helping us with the investigation and be less concerned about claiming this is political.” [music] “So here the contrast, the contrast which is —” Carlos Alzugaray was a Cuban diplomat for decades. He’s a bit of an unofficial government spokesperson. “Why throw down the Embassy? The bad thing about it is that probably the guys who have been affected more are the regular Cubans, not the government.” By the time the diplomats left, the warming started by President Obama had undeniably chilled. The U.S. issued a travel advisory, and tourism dropped. On the streets of Havana, the idea that Cuba was involved in a sonic attack was met with skepticism. It wasn’t long after the incident became public that sound experts began downplaying the idea of a sonic attack. Sound can’t easily change brain matter, among other reasons. “You’ve got a long, long way to go before you even attribute this to sound. It’s not going to cause physical effects. If the sound goes through air before reaching you, it’s not going to cause that.” “It may have been a situation where people were drawn more closely together.” It wasn’t only the sound experts who struggled to explain what happened. “Infectious cause is what I would say.” Engineers also tried. “It could have just been a malfunctioning ultrasonic device, perhaps used for some other nefarious purpose.” And psychologists. “Well, these people were on an island. Fears can spread in a tight group. Things can get more intensified. Anything is possible.” A microwave expert. “If you direct a beam of microwave, the microwave would produce an acoustic wave.” This doctor said it could have just been a virus. ”An infection, of some type.” “So an ultrasonic weapon is not science fiction. I could build one. I could put it in the house of somebody I didn’t like, and I could annoy them. What its — really seems science-fiction is the idea that you could build an ultrasonic rifle that will shoot 100 meters and target somebody, and shoot through a wall and get just that one person.” Dr. Leighton is referring to this hotel, where some diplomats reported hearing the sound. Look up. It’s unlikely you could direct a weaponized sound wave across this street, 11 stories up through walls and windows, and hit individuals repeatedly without anyone noticing. The U.S. wouldn’t share any evidence of an attack with the Cubans. So they did their own investigation. For reference, 140 decibels is about the sound of a plane’s jet engine at takeoff. “You ask, what we think is that some people were ill, and that there was a psychogenic contagion. And other people started reporting that they were feeling ill. These are English-speaking communities that are relatively isolated from the Cuban population. They live among themselves. They exchange. And any kind of anxiety or stress —” Doctor Sosa is referring to mass hysteria, a psychological condition. There was no, quote unquote, attack. This theory is actually the current official Cuban standpoint. Today, the lights are on at the Embassy, but the doors remain locked. ”The administration’s reaction to all of this is so drastic, to make permanent the drawdown of the U.S. Embassy to ridiculously low, unnecessary levels, which has an element of spite to it.” Fulton Armstrong is a former C.I.A. analyst who covered Cuba. He made a career in searching for motives. “They were so desperate to make their case that it was sonic attacks. This is serious stuff. You’re accusing them of doing line-of-sight attacks with a weapon that no one knows exists. So, once the political people got stuck in their own internal contradictions, it was almost impossible, then, to get a real serious discussion of what was going on. The administration had already decided it was going to use it, the legitimate symptoms of U.S. government officials, for a political maneuver that looks like a lot of other political things that this administration has done. And that is, at any cost, undo what the predecessor did.” “There are a number of people in the administration, and some in Congress, who didn’t want to see normalization of relations. So, for those who didn’t like the policy changes by President Obama’s administration, it’s worked out pretty well.” “You have the State Department work, practically all the major executive jobs have not been covered. It’s the perfect situation for someone like Marco Rubio to hijack a policy and push.” “And so it leads you to conclude that the Cuban government either did this, or they know who did it. And they can’t say, because …” “Marco Rubio got his way. Sometimes, in U.S. politics, the strongest voice is the voice that predominates even when the bureaucracy isn’t with you.” “Whoever did this — did this …” “The bureaucracy has allowed the political voice to come in and dictate a lot, including analysis of the so-called sonic attacks issue.” “And then it leads you down the road of motivation. It makes you start to think, who would do this? Who would do this? Someone who doesn’t like our presence there, and someone who wants there to be this sort of friction between the U.S. So who would be motivated to create friction? Or who would not be in favor of an increased U.S. presence in Cuba? We don’t want to be in this position. We have no choice. We cannot send Americans into Foreign Service and their relatives to a country where their safety cannot be guaranteed.” Senator Rubio, a son of Cuban exiles, has been a longtime critic of the Castro government. He’s always been an opponent of reestablishing ties with Cuba. Now, I’m not under any fantasy that Cuba is going to transition from one day to the next and turn into Canada, but there has to be progress in that direction. And there’s never been a step in that direction to the extent that they’ve taken these steps, they’ve been largely cosmetic. And they’ve retreated from some of those positions. So who would be motivated to create friction? Or who would not be in favor of an increased U.S. presence? Maybe it was a third country. Which third country would want to disrupt the U.S. presence there? And the logical conclusion is Russia and Vladimir Putin.” “Has the State Department raised attacks against U.S. personnel in Cuba with the Russian government?” “That’s a very good question. I think it would be better to address that issue in a classified setting.” “Why would the fact or lack of existence of a communication to the Russian government be something that we can’t discuss in public?” “To give you the full reply would be required, and I believe that would be more appropriate in the classified setting.” “Has Raul Castro ever said to any U.S. diplomat, ‘I didn’t do it, but it’s possible that some of my guys did it without me knowing about it?’” “I do not believe that communication has ever occurred.” “You don’t want to discuss something that is not in a proper setting, or is that just you’re — you’ve just never heard?” “That is my recollection that I’ve never heard that.” “O.K. “The meeting is adjourned.” The U.S. has still not given an official explanation of the sound or its intent, if any. But its effect has been to play a big part in the current disengagement with Cuba. This is happening at a pivotal moment. Raul Castro is stepping down, and Miguel Díaz-Canel will likely be president. “The notion that we have just a skeletal staff at the Embassy — fewer people than we had during the time of isolation, is just unconscionable.” “Well, the transition is not — I mean, it’s a one-party transition. I mean the outcome’s not in doubt. You know, you would love to see a new generation of leadership that begins to move in the right direction, and I think those moves would be reciprocated by American policy makers. But it’s not going to happen because of a unilateral American opening. That was the flawed thinking behind an opening towards China, and China today is no more democratic and no more free than it was. And that was not the experience in the aftermath of the Obama opening. It did not lead to any changes in governance or on the economic condition of Cubans in the big picture.” “After more than five very difficult decades, the relationship between our governments will not be transformed overnight.” “What are we doing? We’re pulling out of the game. They would prefer to buy American rice and American chicken. They would prefer to have Americans come down and do travel in Cuba. They like us. But if we’re going to treat them in the way that we’re treating them, they will make their own future without us. They say they’ve been making their future for the last 60 years without us, and they’re prepared to do it, perhaps with some hyperbole, for another 60 years.” [music]
The medical team that examined 21 affected diplomats from Cuba made no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published in JAMA in March. But Douglas H. Smith, the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a recent interview that microwaves were now considered a main suspect and that the team was increasingly sure the diplomats had suffered brain injury.
“Everybody was relatively skeptical at first,” he said, “and everyone now agrees there’s something there.” Dr. Smith remarked that the diplomats and doctors jokingly refer to the trauma as the immaculate concussion.
Strikes with microwaves, some experts now argue, more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety.
In particular, a growing number of analysts cite an eerie phenomenon known as the Frey effect, named after Allan H. Frey, an American scientist. Long ago, he found that microwaves can trick the brain into perceiving what seem to be ordinary sounds.
Hearing Microwaves
Scientists have known for decades that the brain can perceive some microwaves as sound.
MICROWAVES hitting the head in the area around the temporal lobe were perceived as sound in a 1962 experiment. Several theories have sought to explain the exact mechanism but it remains in dispute.
TEMPORAL
LOBE
Cochlea
Eardrum
SOUND WAVES entering the ear make the eardrum vibrate. These vibrations are conveyed to the cochlea and converted into electrical signals. The brain’s temporal lobes receive signals from the ears and process them into sounds and speech.
By The New York Times | Sources: Allan H. Frey; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The false sensations, the experts say, may account for a defining symptom of the diplomatic incidents — the perception of loud noises, including ringing, buzzing and grinding. Initially, experts cited those symptoms as evidence of stealthy attacks with sonic weapons.
Members of Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security, say it has been scrutinizing the diplomatic mystery this summer and weighing possible explanations, including microwaves.
Asked about the microwave theory of the case, the State Department said the investigation had yet to identify the cause or source of the attacks. And the F.B.I. declined to comment on the status of the investigation or any theories.
The microwave idea teems with unanswered questions. Who fired the beams? The Russian government? The Cuban government? A rogue Cuban faction sympathetic to Moscow? And, if so, where did the attackers get the unconventional arms?
At his home outside Washington, Mr. Frey, the scientist who uncovered the neural phenomenon, said federal investigators have questioned him on the diplomatic riddle and that microwave radiation is considered a possible cause.
Mr. Frey, now 83, has traveled widely and long served as a contractor and a consultant to a number of federal agencies. He speculated that Cubans aligned with Russia, the nation’s longtime ally, might have launched microwave strikes in attempts to undermine developing ties between Cuba and the United States.
“It’s a possibility,” he said at his kitchen table. “In dictatorships, you often have factions that think nothing of going against the general policy if it suits their needs. I think that’s a perfectly viable explanation.”
Developing a new class of weapons
Allan H. Frey, at his home outside Washington. In 1960, he stumbled on an acoustic effect of microwaves that was eventually named after him.Credit…Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times
Microwaves are ubiquitous in modern life. The short radio waves power radars, cook foods, relay messages and link cellphones to antenna towers. They’re a form of electromagnetic radiation on the same spectrum as light and X-rays, only at the opposite end.
While radio broadcasting can employ waves a mile or more in length, microwaves range in size from roughly a foot to a tiny fraction of an inch. They’re seen as harmless in such everyday uses as microwaving foods. But their diminutive size also enables tight focusing, as when dish antennas turn disorganized rays into concentrated beams.
The dimensions of the human head, scientists say, make it a fairly good antenna for picking up microwave signals.
Mr. Frey, a biologist, said he stumbled on the acoustic effect in 1960 while working for General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University. A man who measured radar signals at a nearby G.E. facility came up to him at a meeting and confided that he could hear the beam’s pulses — zip, zip, zip.
Intrigued, Mr. Frey traveled to the man’s workplace in Syracuse and positioned himself in a radar beam. “Lo,” he recalled, “I could hear it, too.”
Mr. Frey’s resulting papers — reporting that even deaf people could hear the false sounds — founded a new field of study on radiation’s neural impacts. Mr. Frey’s first paper, in 1961, reported that power densities 160 times lower than “the standard maximum safe level for continuous exposure” could induce the sonic delusions.
His second paper, in 1962, pinpointed the brain’s receptor site as the temporal lobes, which extend beneath the temples. Each lobe bears a small region — the auditory cortex — that processes nerve signals from the outer and inner ears.
Investigators raced to confirm and extend Mr. Frey’s findings. At first they named the phenomenon after him, but eventually called it the microwave auditory effect and, in time, more generally, radio-frequency hearing.
The Soviets took notice. Not long after his initial discoveries, Mr. Frey said, he was invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to visit and lecture. Toward the end, in a surprise, he was taken outside Moscow to a military base surrounded by armed guards and barbed-wire fences.
“They had me visiting the various labs and discussing the problems,” including the neural impacts of microwaves, Mr. Frey recalled. “I got an inside look at their classified program.”
Moscow was so intrigued by the prospect of mind control that it adopted a special terminology for the overall class of envisioned arms, calling them psychophysical and psychotronic.
Soviet research on microwaves for “internal sound perception,” the Defense Intelligence Agency warned in 1976, showed great promise for “disrupting the behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel.”
Furtively, globally, the threat grew.
The National Security Agency gave Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer who routinely gets security clearances to discuss classified matters, a statement on how a foreign power built a weapon “designed to bathe a target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system.”
Mr. Zaid said a N.S.A. client of his who traveled there watched in disbelief as his nervous system later unraveled, starting with control of his fingers.
The high-pitched chirping that diplomats heard while working at the Consulate General of the United States in Guangzhou, China, might be explained by a phenomenon known as the Frey effect — radio-frequency hearing.Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Washington, too, foresaw new kinds of arms.
In Albuquerque, N.M., Air Force scientists sought to beam comprehensible speech into the heads of adversaries. Their novel approach won a patent in 2002, and an update in 2003. Both were assigned to the Air Force secretary, helping limit the idea’s dissemination.
The lead inventor said the research team had “experimentally demonstrated” that the “signal is intelligible.” As for the invention’s uses, an Air Force disclosure form listed the first application as “Psychological Warfare.”
The Navy sought to paralyze. The Frey effect was to induce sounds powerful enough to cause painful discomfort and, if needed, leave targets unable to move. The weapon, the Navy noted, would have a “low probability of fatalities or permanent injuries.”
In a twist, the 2003 contract was awarded to microwave experts who had emigrated to the United States from Russia and Ukraine.
It is unknown if Washington deploys such arms. But the Pentagon built a related weapon known as the Active Denial System, hailing it in a video. It fires an invisible beam meant to deter mobs and attackers with fiery sensations.
Russia, China and many European states are seen as having the know-how to make basic microwave weapons that can debilitate, sow noise or even kill. Advanced powers, experts say, might accomplish more nuanced aims such as beaming spoken words into people’s heads. Only intelligence agencies know which nations actually possess and use such unfamiliar arms.
The basic weapon might look like a satellite dish. In theory, such a device might be hand-held or mounted in a van, car, boat or helicopter. Microwave arms are seen as typically working over relatively short distances — across the length of a few rooms or blocks. High-powered ones might be able to fire beams across several football fields, or even for several miles.
The episode in Cuba
The Soviet collapse in 1991 cut Russia’s main ties to Cuba, a longtime ally just 90 miles from the United States. The shaky economy forced Moscow to stop providing Havana with large amounts of oil and other aid.
Vladimir Putin, as Russia’s president and prime minister, sought to recover the economic, political and strategic clout that the Soviets had lost. In December 2000, months after the start of his first presidential term, Mr. Putin flew to the island nation. It was the first visit by a Soviet or Russian leader since the Cold War.
He also sought to resurrect Soviet work on psychoactive arms. In 2012, he declared that Russia would pursue “new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals,” including psychophysical weapons.
In July 2014, Mr. Putin again visited Cuba. This time he brought a gift — the cancellation of some $30 billion in Cuban debt. The two nations signed a dozen accords.
A Russian spy ship, Viktor Leonov, docked in Havana on the eve of the beginning of reconciliation talks between Cuba and the United States in early 2015, and did so again in subsequent years. Moscow and Havana grew so close that in late 2016, the two nations signed a sweeping pact on defense and technology cooperation.
Raul Castro, president of Cuba, with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, at a welcoming ceremony for Mr. Putin in Havana in 2014.Credit…Ismael Francisco/Associated Press
In Havana’s harbor, men fishing near the Russian warship, Viktor Leonov, in 2015.Credit…Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press
As a candidate, Donald Trump faulted the Obama administration’s normalization policy as “a very weak agreement” and threatened to scrap it on reaching the White House. Weeks after he won the election, in late November 2016, the American embassy in Havana found itself battling a mysterious crisis.
Diplomats and their families recounted high-pitched sounds in homes and hotel rooms at times intense enough to incapacitate. Long-term, the symptoms included nausea, crushing headaches, fatigue, dizziness, sleep problems and hearing loss.
The State Department filed diplomatic protests, and the Cuban government denied involvement. In May, the F.B.I. opened an investigation and its agents began visiting Havana a half year after the incidents began. The last major one hit that summer, in August, giving the agents relatively little time to gather clues.
In September 2017, the Trump administration warned travelers away from Cuba and ordered home roughly half the diplomatic personnel.
Rex W. Tillerson, who was then the secretary of state, said the embassy’s staff had been targeted deliberately. But he refrained from blaming Cuba, and federal officials held out the possibility that a third party may have been responsible.
In early October, President Trump expelled 15 Cuban diplomats, producing a chill between the nations. Administration critics said the White House was using the health issue as a pretext to end President Barack Obama’s reconciliation policy.
The day after the expulsions, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a closed, top secret hearing on the Cuba situation. Three State Department officials testified, as did an unnamed senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Hypothesis
Beatrice A. Golomb, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, here in a beachside office, argues that microwave strikes can explain the diplomatic ills.Credit…Tara Pixley for The New York Times
Early this year, in January, the spooky impact of microwaves on the human brain never came up during an open Senate hearing on the Cuba crisis.
But in a scientific paper that same month, James C. Lin of the University of Illinois, a leading investigator of the Frey effect, described the diplomatic ills as plausibly arising from microwave beams. Dr. Lin is the editor-in-chief of Bio Electro Magnetics, a peer-reviewed journal that explores the effects of radio waves and electromagnetic fields on living things.
In his paper, he said high-intensity beams of microwaves could have caused the diplomats to experience not just loud noises but nausea, headaches and vertigo, as well as possible brain-tissue injury. The beams, he added, could be fired covertly, hitting “only the intended target.”
In February, ProPublica in a lengthy investigation mentioned that federal investigators were weighing the microwave theory. Separately, it told of an intriguing find. The wife of a member of the embassy staff, it reported, had looked outside her home after hearing the disturbing sounds and seen a van speeding away.
A dish antenna could fit easily into a small van.
The medical team that studied the Cuba diplomats ascribed the symptoms in the March JAMA study to “an unknown energy source” that was highly directional. Some personnel, it noted, had covered their ears and heads but experienced no sound reduction. The team said the diplomats appeared to have developed signs of concussion without having received any blows to the head.
In May, reports emerged that American diplomats in China had suffered similar traumas. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the medical details of the two groups “very similar” and “entirely consistent” with one another. By late June, the State Department had evacuated at least 11 Americans from China.
To date, the most detailed medical case for microwave strikes has been made by Beatrice A. Golomb, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. In a forthcoming paper to be published in October in Neural Computation, a peer-reviewed journal of the MIT Press, she lays out potential medical evidence for Cuban microwave strikes.
She compared the symptoms of the diplomats in Cuba to those reported for individuals said to be suffering from radio-frequency sickness. The health responses of the two groups, Dr. Golomb wrote, “conform closely.”
In closing, she argued that “numerous highly specific features” of the diplomatic incidents “fit the hypothesis” of a microwave attack, including the Frey-type production of disturbing sounds.
Scientists still disagree over what hit the diplomats. Last month, JAMA ran four letters critical of the March study, some faulting the report for ruling out mass hysteria.
But Mr. Zaid, the Washington lawyer, who represents eight of the diplomats and family members, said microwave attacks may have injured his clients.
“It’s sort of naïve to think this just started now,” he said. Globally, he added, covert strikes with the potent beams appear to have been going on for decades.
Francisco Palmieri, a State Department official, was asked during the open Senate hearing if “attacks against U.S. personnel in Cuba” had been raised with Moscow.
“That is a very good question,” Mr. Palmieri replied. But addressing it, he added, would require “a classified setting.”
For his part, Mr. Frey says he doubts the case will be solved anytime soon. The novelty of the crisis, its sporadic nature and the foreign setting made it hard for federal investigators to gather clues and draw conclusions, he said, much less file charges.
“Based on what I know,” he remarked, “it will remain a mystery.”
