"The biggest cover-up of my adult life": Inside the CIA's attempt to make Havana Syndrome disappear

[Nevilledog]

https://theins.ru/en/inv/290088


On December 16, 2020, John Thorne, a staff operations officer posted to a Central Asian country, arrived at the U.S. Embassy at his usual hour, around 7:15 or 7:30 in the morning. He was surprised at first to see both his chief and the deputy chief of station already gathered in the conference room in the CIA station inside the embassy compound. Thorne soon learned why. The deputy, “Sam,” was seriously ill, his eyes completely bloodshot as if all the blood vessels in them had popped. He was “mentally out of it, like he was in a fog,” Thorne recalled.

Sam had worked harder than usual the day before and decided to sleep in late. He awoke in the master bedroom of his house while his wife and child were a floor below in the kitchen. Suddenly, he felt “a buffeting subwoofer in his head and chest.” Sam was incredibly dizzy. His wife and their three-and-a-half-year-old son were walking up the stairs and they both experienced the same odd sensation. Their boy said his “ears felt funny.” Sam told his wife to go back downstairs with their son, as he tried to figure out the source of whatever was causing his family physical distress. He broke a cardinal rule of tactical training: he returned to the “X,” or site of an attack, which intelligence officers are instructed to avoid if they befall any abnormal symptoms in the field suggestive of being targeted by a hostile adversary. Sam stood in front of the window of his bedroom, which shared a wall with his son’s room, looking out onto a row of apartments across the way. He went into his son’s room and it was as if he’d stepped back in front of the subwoofer.

The family’s driver took his wife and son to school. Sam stayed behind, then drove his own car to the embassy, where he realized whatever had happened wasn’t over. He couldn’t work or think clearly, and he looked like hell. He also worried about his wife and son.

Thorne left the CIA station for Sam’s place after consulting with his colleagues, armed with a digital camera, to look for anything out of the ordinary in the house. “I was with our support officer. We found nothing inside, but noticed that the Soviet-era apartment buildings behind it had direct line of sight into the bedroom window and their kid’s bedroom window” where Sam was hit with the intensest pressure, pain, and vertigo. Thorne and Sam’s wife drove to the school where she’d just dropped her son off; then he drove both back to the embassy where an on-site medical unit began examining the entire family. “That’s when they started doing the blood tests.”

*snip*

[Blues Heron]

1. Good old Havana syndrome making a big comeback! I always figured it was some bad seafood or something

Maybe ciguetera ?

[a kennedy]

2. 60 Minutes right??? This just makes me sick.

[edhopper]

3. Dot ru means Russia

In other words, bullshit.

[erronis]

4. Surprised the OP doesn't understand the source.