Those weird Cuban attacks

Sean Rameswaram: Back in 2016, a few weeks after the presidential election, something very strange started happening in Cuba. A CIA officer got sick after hearing this weird, high-pitched noise in his home. Then a few more undercover agents started reporting the same thing. What felt like a beam of sound aimed directly at them. A pressure that wouldn't go away until someone opened a door. The United States started investigating. So did Cuba. But no one could figure out what was going on. It was a complete and utter mystery.

A good reporter, like a good detective, is always challenged by a mystery. Sebastian Rotella is a good reporter at ProPublica. And in this world of intelligence and national security, which I've been covering for a long time, there are a lot of secrets and few genuine mysteries. He and his colleague Tim Golden have spent the better part of a year investigating those strange incidents in Cuba that started in late 2016.

Sebastian Rotella: I think we have to set the context, which is geopolitical, and which is the Obama administration in its final years undertook this process of reaching out to Cuba and succeeding to a large extent in developing this rapprochement with Raul Castro's government. And in 2016, that really comes to fruition. For more than half a century, the sight of a U.S. president here in Havana would have been unimaginable. But this is a new day. This is a new day. Diplomatic relations are fully established. The embassy grows in size, including the presence of a small CIA station.

So then there are two major events in the fall. There is, of course, the election of Donald Trump, which casts some question marks over this rapprochement, some shadow, because Trump's very clear position on this issue was that he thought that rapprochement was a mistake. And there's the death of Fidel Castro, which marks an enormous moment in Cuban history.

The ashes of Cuba's late leader Fidel Castro have reached their final destination after crossing the country. The three-day, 800-kilometer funeral procession had retraced in reverse Castro's route to seizing power in Havana to the city he launched his revolution six decades ago. And in the final weeks of 2016, these incidents begin. Three or four CIA officers based in Havana. These officers in their homes feel an intense sensation of pressure, accompanied by a sort of shrill, piercing sound, which feels almost like a beam, a ray of sound and sensation.

Often at night, sometimes while they're in bed, asleep, in their homes or their hotel rooms here in Cuba. But if they got up out of bed, if they left the room where they were in, it would stop. If they walked back into where they had felt this incident, this attack as they described it. They feel like they can step out of it or into it and experience this sensation. It was quite overwhelming. And now they're experiencing a series of symptoms: dizziness, pain in the ear, hearing loss, headaches, and difficulty sleeping. Some suffered traumatic brain injury.

They assumed that it was some kind of harassment, perhaps with some kind of sonic weapon. And there are things like that out there. Or because there is so much electronic monitoring and because Cuba is very aggressive and very good at monitoring but doesn't always have the most up-to-date technology, that it was perhaps some kind of monitoring equipment that had malfunctioned and unintentionally caused these sensations.

As the symptoms get worse and as these incidents continue into the new year, the charge d'affaires of the embassy brings it to the attention of the Cubans. The Cubans say, in fact, there's even a conversation between Raul Castro, the president, and the charge d'affaires, Jeffrey De Laurentiis, which is rather extraordinary, which the Cubans assure them they don't know what's going on, and they want to help them get to the bottom of it.

These officers, they go to the nurse at the embassy, and then they are flown to Miami. There they find the symptoms which are described as comparable to a concussion without a concussion. So this is kind of like immaculate concussion. You know, we don't know what happened. And yet they look almost exactly like the patients we would see in a concussion clinic. Dizziness, headaches, difficulty in memory, pain in the ear. The diagnosis is not clear. The medical part is as much a mystery as who did this, how they did it.

There's no sense. They didn't see anyone suspicious outside. They didn't find any kind of equipment. The Americans didn't detect anything, and the Cubans assure them that they weren't doing it. This remains a secret for the first couple of months because it was seen in sort of the cloak and dagger arena. But at a certain point, as the incidents continue toward the end of March of 2017, it's decided that because one of the intelligence officers tells a diplomat who is not an intelligence officer about it and plays a recording of the sound.

And this diplomat listens to the sound and is convinced that it is very similar to the noise that he's been hearing for months in his garden outside his house, which he thought and his next-door neighbors thought were insects, cicadas, which if you've ever heard them in the tropics in Cuba and Brazil and places like that are very loud and very metallic sounding. And so I could imagine that it does sound like insects, but it's true that it has a remarkably sort of metallic and mechanical sound.

The U.S. Embassy in Havana has played these recordings for Americans who are working there so they know what to listen to after it's made public. Many more people come forward, and some they find them to have nothing wrong. But these people are being flown to Miami and diagnosed at this clinic. Now it's a mix of people who work in different roles in the American embassy. And the cases are different. Some people, particularly the intelligence officers, felt an immediate dramatic sensation and pretty immediate symptoms. Others heard sounds and came forward and then were diagnosed with symptoms but without having had some dramatic incident precipitated.

And there are also a group of Canadians who live in proximity to some of the American victims who also come forward once they hear about it. And there's a group of them, about eight of them, who are found to have had symptoms as well. Certainly, at this point, most people are convinced that it's something intentional and something malicious. Why does it keep happening? And there are a couple of reasonably dramatic incidents in April where a young diplomat who is living in a hotel is awoken by a sensation that's very dramatic and feels kind of paralyzed by it. And there's a doctor who comes in also actually to work on this case who has a similar experience.

Now it's even more dramatic for the leadership of the embassy because they say to the Cubans, "These people aren't living here. These people just came in. This seems much more targeted and specific." In August of 2017, there are a couple more incidents, which brings a total of incidents to 24. And soon after that, the decision is made by the U.S. government to do what's called a withdrawal of most of the diplomats and their families.

The Trump administration announced Friday that it is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana. This comes after diplomats and staff suffered mysterious health attacks that caused minor brain injuries. Cuba has denied any involvement in the incidents. And you have to remember that this is in the context of the Trump administration, which has come in and decided to roll back to dismantle a lot of the accords that have been reached and take a much tougher stand toward the Cubans.

And what the Trump administration says is it stops short of accusing the Cubans of actually doing this, but it says, "We blame the Cubans for not protecting our diplomats. Why does this keep happening?" And meanwhile, the CIA obviously is looking into it. The FBI is looking into it. And certain people in sort of the hawkish political spectrum, like Senator Rubio, has been very assertive in his comments about this and saying that the Cubans, as he said publicly, the Cubans either did it or they know who did it.

"If you're a United States government employee in Havana, the Cuban government knows when you came, when you left, and where you are at every single moment. The idea that an environment like that, like Cuba, especially in Havana, an American, 22 Americans could be attacked and the Cuban government not know who did it, is absurd."

So what the hell happened to these people? Sonic attacks? Microwaves? Lasers? Or maybe it was nothing at all? That's next on Today Explained.

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Sebastian Rotella: All right. Well, let's go through them all. Sonic warfare. The problem with that one? The problem with that one is there's no sonic weapon that can cause the symptoms that they thought they could cause. Okay. And also, you would have to have an apparatus of pretty remarkable size.

All right. Microwave radiation? The problem is, from what we're told, that in order for microwaves to have caused these symptoms, they would have had to have been so intense, they would have actually burned or the people would have felt great heat. And no one felt heat. And no one did. And lasers, same situation? The idea of electromagnetic or what are called neuro-weapons, which are electromagnetic pulsing or hypersonic technology. And there we're told by experts that in some ways those fit the description, but there's a problem, which is that in order to work, to have been to deliver this, they would have had to be in the room. They'd have to be close within the house of the person. They would have had to have broken into these homes or hotel rooms, set up the device, used it, and then theoretically gone in and retrieved it because no trace of a device was found. So again, the idea that someone was able to do that in these settings, both with the U.S. increasingly on guard for it, the Cubans having the security apparatus they do, there's a problem with that too.

You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads. One thesis is that there's a new weapon that we don't know about. That is not microwave radiation, lasers, or sonic. Not, at least not in the ways we know them to be. Okay. They obviously think about foreign third-party actors, the Russians being the most likely suspect. Our sources say the latest incident suggests Russia might be involved in the attacks. It's known that Russia, in part of its aggressive global campaign of recent years, one of the places where it really tried to reestablish itself is in Latin America. But they don't find either direct evidence of the presence of hostile intelligence services doing something like this. They don't find a weapon. And they don't find, which is the most remarkable thing as time goes on, circumstantial evidence.

Usually, you have things like chatter. You have intercepts. You have the movement of operatives. You have people talking about something they've done or communicating about it. That is hard to hide. For example, on the Russian thesis, look at the Russian pattern in recent years. Yes, they've done some audacious things like interfering in the U.S. elections with cyber-attacks and fake news, poisoning a former spy in England. But in all those cases, they were good enough to get it done, but they weren't good enough to hide their tracks. They left a pretty dramatic trail. Is it possible that the Russians or any other foreign service in a place like Cuba could do repeated attacks like this and leave no trace whatsoever?

And again, the one thesis that keeps coming up, which would explain some aspects of this mystery, is the idea that it was unintentional, that it was surveillance technology that failed, which would explain why Cubans have denied it in the sense that what they're saying. If that thesis is true, the Cubans are denying it because they didn't do it intentionally and maliciously. So they're telling a half-truth, so to speak.

So what you're saying is after over a year of these incidents, after it involving multiple countries, multiple agencies of the United States, multiple in-depth reports from organizations like ProPublica, the New York Times, this is still a mystery. This is still a mystery, and there's a great chasm between the way parts of the government talk about it and the reality on the ground or the way people talk to you about it in private. For example, the White House and the State Department use the term "attacks." The FBI and others in the intelligence law enforcement community are very careful not to use that term for the simple reason they just don't have that evidence. And so there's this dissonance between the public discourse where people are talking about 26 attacks and the reality where there's not even enough evidence, particularly the FBI, which takes sort of the point of view that what can I prove in court? They don't have a weapon. They don't have a suspect. They don't have circumstantial evidence. They don't have people talking about the crime. So they're going to stop short of that.

The other thing that is, I think, remarkable about the case and which only increases the doubt and the ambiguity is that there is a real division that is only intensified among the diplomats who are on the island. That is among the people who were victims, the patients, and their colleagues and their friends who were skeptical from the beginning and have become increasingly more skeptical that their colleagues were the victims of some kind of attack. What some people think is that perhaps the initial incidents may have been caused by something man-made and that some of the later ones, as people became aware of it, could have been the results of stress or psychological factors.

We know so little still about what happened here. But one thing we know is that on the eve of Cuban-American rapprochement, something happened that threw the whole thing off. I think that's right. And I think those who are suspicious would say, as often happens with crimes of state, timing means a lot. So those who think that this is intentional by someone would say, isn't it remarkable that Trump is elected, Fidel Castro dies, and these incidents begin. So there are people who think that can't be coincidental. It just all seems like a movie in search of an ending. It would be a great movie. I guess the problem would be, you know, you need a hero, you need a villain, you need a weapon, and all those things are kind of lacking right now.

Sean Rameswaram: Sebastian Rotella is a senior reporter at ProPublica. I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.

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Spencer Hall: Spencer Hall, you're the host of the It Seem Smart podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network and SB Nation. And new episodes drop on Tuesday. What can people expect in their feeds today? They can expect part one of a two-part episode. You ask what sporting event could be so insanely either corrupt or sideways or askance or chaotic that it would merit two parts, that'd be the Tour de France. Really? The bikes? I like to call it French NASCAR. Yeah. I also enjoy referring to it as the most consistently enhanced sporting event in the history of humanity. It's not just that the Tour de France has involved some episodes of cheating, pushing the rules, or let's put it this way, innovation. It's that it's involved it from the start. It's been consistent. It's been spectacular. It's been tragic and tragicomic. Okay, so a two-parter about the Tour de France. It starts today, and I imagine it concludes, what, next week, huh? Anywhere they get their podcasts, just from the Vox Media Podcast Network and from our site, SBNation.com.