US intelligence agency CIA doctor Paul Andrews was one of the first people sent to Havana, Cuba, to investigate a series of mysterious health incidents that were affecting embassy and agency personnel in 2017. At the time, he was afflicted with the same set of debilitating symptoms, he told the chief medical correspondent of the CNN Sanjay Gupta, in his first public interview for a special feature on CNN : “Immaculate Concussion: The Truth About Havana Syndrome”.
Andrews, who uses a pseudonym to speak publicly, had already been studying the first victims of what became colloquially known as the “Havana syndrome”, or officially as “anomalous health incidents”. Doctors in Florida recorded a number of symptoms that indicated the victims were suffering from a brain injury that was affecting their balance, among other things. Andrews traveled to Cuba to investigate about two months after learning about the first cases.
He wasn’t too worried about his own safety at first. On his first night, he went to sleep around 11:30 pm in his hotel room. But just before 5am, he was awakened by a severe pain in his right ear, nausea, and a terrible headache. He then began to hear a clicking noise that previous victims reported hearing at the onset of their symptoms — a sound Andrews had previously only heard in audio clips.
His first thought was that he was dreaming.
“This can not be happening. And I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, and things were getting worse and worse,” he recalled. “I’m really in disbelief. And I start to think, is this a dream? I had no idea”.
As authorities at the time suspected some sort of sonic attack, Andrews went to the bathroom and sat with headphones on for 45 minutes. The symptoms did not subside and at 6am he decided to pack up and leave the room.
But he found he could barely pack his bags. He checked the bathroom “at least four or five times” to make sure he had his toothbrush, then did the same, taking his coat out of the closet. On his way to meet colleagues at the hotel’s restaurant, he couldn’t figure out whether to push or pull doors. And he realized that his balance was “far off.”
Certain that he and his colleagues were being watched, he tried to tell his colleagues in a low voice that he thought he might have been hit – but he wasn’t sure they understood. For the rest of the day, Andrews said he was in a kind of mental fog: nauseous, disoriented and struggling with basic tasks like counting money and showing his ID card to security personnel.
When he returned to the United States, he called the same doctor in Florida he was working with to investigate the original victims and said he needed help.
a mysterious disease
Anomalous health incidents – AHIs for short – are still a source of mystery and debate within the intelligence community. A panel investigating the incidents, which have now impacted dozens of US officials around the world, said some of the episodes could “plausibly” have been caused by “pulsed electromagnetic energy” emitted by an external source. But the panel did not reach a definitive determination.
An interim report released earlier this year by a separate CIA task force examining who may be behind the episodes indicated that Russia or any other foreign adversaries are unlikely to be carrying out a widespread global campaign aimed at undermining US officials. But the agency also did not rule out that a nation state — including Russia — could be responsible for about two dozen cases that investigators have been unable to explain through any other known cause.
In short, the sources say that, after years of investigation, the intelligence community is no closer to determining who or what is causing these symptoms — or even if all of the roughly two dozen unsolved cases are caused. by the same actor or mechanism.
Some victims — now including Andrews — have raised concerns about how the agency handled the initial share of cases. Former CIA officials claimed that his symptoms were not taken seriously at first by the CIA leadership, in part because many of the signs were subtle and could be associated with any known health conditions.
“The narrative was going in the wrong direction. And no matter what I did or said to people, it just kept going,” Andrews said. “In fact, to this day, a lot of things that were done didn’t seem up to my standards.”
Some officers who were impacted declined to report for fear of jeopardizing their careers, Andrews said.
“Another person at one point told me as an aside that he or she thought they might have been hit and that they’re either listening or ear pain was present,” he said. “And I said, are you going to report this? And they said, absolutely not.”
Victims have widely praised CIA Director Bill Burns’ handling of the issue, and the Biden administration has been careful to avoid any indication that it is not taking victims seriously.
“I think we’ve made significant progress in ensuring that people get the care they need and deserve,” Burns said in public comments at the Aspen Safety Forum in July. “We have tripled the number of full-time staff in our medical office dealing with this issue. We’ve developed very important relationships, not just with Walter Reed, but, you know, private medical systems to make sure people get care.”
In 2021, Congress passed legislation requiring compensation for victims, and some of those payments were disbursed, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The CIA declined to comment on this story.
Five years later
More than five years later, Andrews still suffers from debilitating symptoms. He still has balance and vision issues that made it nearly impossible for him to function normally. He has trouble reading, going for walks or running as it makes him nauseous. Being in a crowd in a museum isn’t possible either: turning your head left and right to look at the art and avoid bumping into other people makes you dizzy and sick.
“Does it get to the point where you just don’t want to leave the house because you say what the point is? I want to do it, but I know it’s going to make me sick,” he said. “I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want to trip and fall.”
“It’s very frustrating that all the things you want to do, you can’t,” he said.
Andrews was examined by a battery of doctors, who found damage to his vestibular structures – the body parts that govern balance and orientation. But like many victims of the problem, Andrews doesn’t have a single, clear diagnosis. Some victims have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, which he questions because while he says the signs are clearly brain injuries, they appear to be a different type of brain injury than doctors have seen before.
For Andrews, like the intelligence community, there is little certainty about who or what is behind this strange phenomenon than when he traveled to Cuba in the spring of 2017.
“I certainly learned more about the condition than I wanted to,” he told Gupta.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
