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

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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.”

The tests found something remarkable: Sam and his wife had biomarkers, namely plasma neurofilament light chain and glial fibrillary acidic protein, two proteins specific to the brain, had leaked out of brain cells, bypassed the blood-brain barriers and made their way into their blood stream, a diagnostic sign that each had suffered a traumatic event to the brain, such as a stroke or head injury. Sam’s biomarkers were about three standard deviations above average; his wife’s were two. Sam’s were consistent with what a clinician might expect to find in someone who’d sustained the secondary blast from an improvised explosive device – a warzone casualty. The outside of Sam’s body was fine. But something catastrophically violent had taken place on the inside and, to a lesser degree, to everyone else in his household that morning. Sam and his family were medevaced out of the Central Asian country. He never returned to work at that embassy. He took the blood samples home in their son’s lunchbox, packed in ice. Once back in the United States, Sam received an email from a Cuban official he’d become acquainted with, asking if he was all right.

“This is how the CIA created the whole standard operating procedure on what to do if people were affected by AHIs,” Thorne said, referring to Anonymous Health Incidents, which for the last decade have been recorded by U.S. government personnel all over the world, with initial symptoms similar to those Sam and his family experienced. Chronic headaches, vertigo, tinnitus, insomnia, nausea, and lasting cognitive impairment sometimes persist indefinitely; in other cases victims have gone blind or deaf on one side of their body, or developed what’s known as Minor’s Syndrome, a rare condition in which bone matter in one’s inner ear becomes perforated, requiring surgery.

AHI is more colloquially known as “Havana Syndrome” owing to the cluster of cases reported in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, not long after the U.S. Embassy in Havana reopened there during the Obama administration’s rapprochement with the Castro regime. The syndrome has been one of the most perplexing controversies in American national security, the subject of countless news items, congressional investigations and government statements, with skeptics insisting it is either one of the most stubborn examples of social contagion — i.e. mass hysteria — or that it is triggered by environmental conditions such as crickets or heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems on the fritz. But biomarkers cannot manifest in someone’s bloodstream because of a psychological condition.

Several AHI victims with credible stories and verifiable medical records previously worked as spies, military officers, or diplomats overseas. And most have done work for their country aimed at countering threats from Russia. They share another thing in common: they speak of moral injuries more grievous than their physical ones because the former were inflicted not by trained Russian operatives but by cynical American ones.

John Thorne (not his real name) is not an AHI victim, but he was one of the first CIA officers to respond in the field to what’s known in the AHI community as a cornerstone case. And because of his background as such, he volunteered to join a team of investigators the CIA assembled at the start of the Biden administration to look into these unexplained phenomena.

The Global Health Incident Cell (GHIC), as the team was called, according to another former CIA officer familiar with its composition and methodology, found there was no evidence to suggest these injuries are real or that any hostile foreign adversary is behind them. To date, the CIA is one of over a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies to maintain that it is “very unlikely” a foreign adversary is responsible for AHI.

The GHIC was the brainchild of Bill Burns, a longtime State Department diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. Shortly after being confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee to head the CIA in March 2021, Burns authorized a task force to investigate AHI. “I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious,” he said four months into the job.

However, Thorne told The Insider that the GHIC’s investigation was driven not by rigorous fact-gathering and dispassionate analysis but by an agenda not to uncover the truth or even take its own remit seriously. Now retired from the CIA, he has stepped forward for the first time to reject his own organization’s official assessment and to speak of America’s foreign spy service as a house divided. “You had about 50 percent of the building that believed [AHI] was true. The other 50 percent believed that it was a fake issue. And it became very divisive. And it created a lot of infighting in the headquarters and within the intelligence community.”

Thorne said the GHIC was rife with big egos and sinecurists, and two thick layers of upper and middle management that dismissed AHI as a hoax unworthy of CIA resources while characterizing the victims as fantasy merchants or grifters. The GHIC’s substantive work lasted mere months, with most eight-hour days dedicated to only a half hour of real effort for Thorne. “It took us a decade to find Osama Bin Laden but months to get to the bottom of Havana, which is: there is no bottom, because there is no Havana,” Thorne said, summarizing the GHIC’s mentality. The unit’s true purpose, he said, was “to bring down the temperature on AHI at CIA headquarters… The phrase was ‘there is no there there.’”

The hell there isn’t, Thorne counters.

“I believe that it was the Russian Intelligence Services that were behind AHI. It was a directed attack.”

“The biggest cover-up I’ve seen in my adult life”

The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel have spent the last three years looking into AHI and the U.S. government’s dogged insistence that evidence is lacking to link these injuries to Russian actors. In 2024, we found there was evidence in two cases, one in Frankfurt, Germany in 2014 and the other in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2021, implicating members of Unit 29155 of the GRU, or Russian military intelligence, also responsible for a spate of well-documented poisonings and bombings throughout Europe, plus one abortive coup.

The Insider has spoken to dozens of former or active U.S. intelligence officers with familiarity with this investigation, which one high-level CIA official called “the biggest cover-up I’ve seen in my adult life.” Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University who helmed two studies of AHI — the first for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the other for the U.S. intelligence community — before going on to advise Biden’s White House, agrees there is a cover-up. “If there had been bigger ones than this,” Relman said, “I’d hate to see what those looked like.”

A dire picture emerges of the CIA's response to a health crisis affecting at least dozens of its personnel and quite possibly hundreds more. Some victims with verifiable medical conditions have retired well before the natural terminus of their careers, their lingering symptoms so debilitating they can no longer work in the national security field or even function in day-to-day life. Some have been treated for clinical depression or contemplated suicide as their only recourse. At least one victim, a CIA employee, reportedly died by suicide. Others have died of mysterious cancers or rare degenerative diseases brought on, their families believe, by directed energy attacks sustained years earlier in the field.

For an ailment that is said not to exist, the CIA has put extraordinary effort into trying to silence or discredit those unsatisfied with the official explanation about AHI. Senior leadership even authorized one of their own to infiltrate a victims’ support network, hosted on encrypted messaging platforms, to conduct illegal domestic surveillance on their former colleagues, who by then were private citizens, according to confidential sources.

Moreover, those who adopted the see-no-evil approach at CIA were rewarded with promotion within the building, in some cases to the fabled Seventh Floor of CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, where executive leadership make decisions and judgment calls that can lead the United States into wars such as the one now raging with Iran. The former head of the GHIC, in fact, is now the Deputy Director for Analysis for the CIA.

Other AHI skeptics at the CIA have since retired and gone to work with each other at lucrative consultancies or private intelligence firms.

A previous Deputy Director for Analysis called the in-house investigation into AHI, “One of the most comprehensive, thorough investigations of anything” in that officer’s 37-year career, adding that while the victims’ suffering is no doubt real, they’re fixated on proving a foreign power is to blame for their personal and professional suffering. “Analysts and victims are not coming from the same mindset,” that officer maintains.

“It was demoralizing to see behind the curtain within the GHIC what was going on and what people were saying,” Thorne told The Insider and 60 Minutes. “And these are the ones who are supposed to be supporting the victims, supporting the issue, looking into it. It was just, it was just rotten.”

“I don’t know how they sleep well at night,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the former deputy chief of operations for the CIA’s Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, who first experienced AHI symptoms while on an official trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2018. “These are colleagues that they did this to. So to me, [there’s] a sense of betrayal.” Polymeropoulos, like Sam, is a cornerstone case.

Another victim, considered among the most compelling of cornerstone cases, said the GHIC senior leadership constituted “a handful of individuals responsible for driving the organization into irrelevance and losing all trust and faith of the American people.”

The CIA declined to comment on this story.

An unbelievable weapon

Thorne’s disclosures come at a revelatory moment in the ongoing debate about AHI, with mounting evidence suggesting he is correct and his ex-colleagues are not: AHI is real and the Russians are indeed responsible.

In November 2024, Maher Bitar, the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council, told a collection of half a dozen AHI victims (Polymeropoulos and Sam among them), “We believe you.” A month later, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), released an unclassified report lambasting the intelligence community’s work, saying it lacked “analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation,” with much of the criticism placed on the CIA in the more trenchant classified version of the HPSCI report, per those familiar with it. “It appears increasingly likely…that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs,” the public version found.

Now there’s even a portable device said to cause the kind of neurological damage consistent with AHI.

As first reported in January by Sasha Ingber, an intelligence blogger, and CNN, undercover agents from the Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, purchased the device on the black market in 2024, using funds from the Pentagon.

The Insider and 60 Minutes have learned that this device, bought by a mission whose price-tag was over $15 million. Three sources confirm that it was purchased as a miniaturized microwave weapon from a complex Russian criminal network. It is designed to be concealed and small enough to be carried by a person, using relatively little power. It runs silently and doesn’t create heat like a microwave oven. The device is programmable for different scenarios and can be operated by remote control. The range of the beam is several hundred feet, and it can penetrate windows and drywall. Its vital components were made in Russia. Our sources say the key is not the hardware, but the software. Programming shapes a unique electromagnetic wave that rises and falls abruptly and pulses rapidly. This still-classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year on rats and sheep. The results show injuries suggestive of those seen in humans.

Pulsed microwave is exactly the kind of directed energy an expert panel assembled by the U.S. intelligence community, and co-chaired by David Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, concluded was a “plausible” explanation for AHI. Microwave energy is electromagnetic energy that conforms to a certain range of frequencies and when pulsed, is transmitted in short bursts of energy. It can electrically activate tissue in the brain and heart to send electrical signals through their own native processes. “In other words,” Relman said, “mimicking what the brain normally does, but now you're driving it with your pulses from the outside.” Another source familiar with the U.S. testing of the acquired device said the results “refute the bogus assessment that non-thermal energy cannot cause injury.”

Others have told The Insider and 60 Minutes that the U.S. intelligence community has collected security camera footage in Istanbul and Vienna showing Americans suffering a violent physical reaction consistent with AHI.

These new data points, which have not been previously reported, may account for why two American spy organs, the National Security Agency and the U.S. Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center, altered their assessments in 2024 about whether a foreign actor could develop such a weapon or use it to harm Americans. One agency found there was a “roughly even chance” such a device had been developed; the other gave the same probability that it could have already been used. If a stealth weapon of this kind is available for sale on the Russian black market, what does that say about the potential for its proliferation among state and non-state actors?

And why has the CIA continued to dig its heels in on this issue, with the Seventh Floor still adamant that, in the words of its commissioned investigators, “there is no there there”?

“Modernizing” the CIA

Former officers familiar with the GHIC and its investigation tell The Insider the problem isn’t confined to AHI as a singular phenomenon; it goes deeper into how the organization has restructured itself in the last decade under a controversial program known as “modernization.” Introduced by CIA Director John Brennan in March 2015 at the end of the Obama administration, it fundamentally overhauled how the CIA collected and processed intelligence – and not always for the better, if those queried for this investigation are to be believed.

Prior to modernization, the gathering of human intelligence at the CIA was the strict purview of the Directorate of Operations, where the case officers and foreign chiefs of station worked out of U.S. missions abroad under diplomatic or nonofficial cover, recruiting and running foreign agents. Their information along with signals intelligence then formed the backbone of the analytical assessments arrived at by the Directorate of Analysis, which would also come up with policy recommendations for the National Security Council at the White House.

As in any sprawling bureaucracy, the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Analysis fiefdoms often disagreed and held each other in mutual suspicion, which sometimes could harden into outright hostility. One of the areas of responsibility where this happened rather frequently was Russia. “Brennan did not like the fact that his Russia operations team and Russia analytic teams gave briefings that at times were wholly inconsistent from each other with respect to the subject matter,” said Ed Bogan, a former CIA chief of station in South Asia and Eastern Europe, who also spent decades doing counterterrorism. Even well into modernization, the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Analysis seldom see eye-to-eye on America’s longtime Cold War adversary.

They diverged in their opinion of how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would proceed in February 2022. The Directorate of Analysis formulated the assessment that war would be over quickly, with Russian forces occupying Kyiv in three days and reaching the Polish border in two weeks. “They got it completely wrong,” one former CIA officer attached to Kyiv Station said. “Anyone who’d spent five minutes in Ukraine before 2022 would have told you the Ukrainians would fight like hell because they’d already been doing so since 2014,” the year Russia first invaded, seizing Crimea and launching a dirty war in the eastern part of the country. The Directorate of Operations, this source adds, was responsible for training Ukrainian paramilitaries and intelligence officers for a decade, which gave them more intimate knowledge of how Ukrainian defenses work — unlike those who’d never stepped foot inside the country.

Modernization’s answer to the dueling fiefdoms was to blend them together and into so-called mission centers, whose leadership could come from either the Directorate of Operations or the Directorate of Analysis. Operations people could thus find themselves answering to clergy not of their own parish. Blending wasn’t unprecedented, just unusual. Other centers had integrated the Directorate for Operations and the Directorate of Analysis officers before modernization, such as the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, the brain trust of the entire U.S. government effort to hunt and destroy al-Qaeda after 9/11. By 2015, the CTC was in high esteem because it was responsible for locating Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

“Modernization was a stupid name the McKinsey consultants came up with and gave Brennan to use because they thought it sounded cool,” one former senior Directorate of Operations officer told The Insider. “It was designed to remove people who were senior Directorate of Operations leaders from their positions, to replace them with senior Directorate of Analysis leads.”

Unsurprisingly, it was widely unpopular within the Directorate of Operations.

When the CIA’s fabled Near East Division, which handled spies recruited in the Middle East, was transformed into the modernized Near East Mission Center, operations personnel erected a snarky shrine to their old division on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters: a burning candle with a photo of Bashar al-Assad, along with a highly classified calendar called “the Women of Bashar,” showing all of the mistresses the Syrian strongman was bedding, one for every month of the year. The operations staff behind the shrine were angrily told to remove it.

Yet another was the architect of modernization, John Brennan. The former CIA director is still viewed within the Directorate of Operations as someone harboring a lasting professional grudge against the rival fiefdom because he unsuccessfully tried to join its ranks. “Brennan failed the Farm and never forgave us for that,” one former operations officer told The Insider, referring to the CIA’s training grounds at Camp Peary in Virginia, where the Directorate of Operations officers are taught how to recruit spies and steal secrets, often under duress and at great risk to their physical and psychological wellbeing. Brennan was one of the few analysts, pre-modernization, to serve as chief of station, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the nineties. He never quite sloughed off his analytic priors, however, telling National Public Radio in 2016 that the CIA doesn’t “steal secrets” — something the Directorate of Operations, in fact, does on an hourly basis.

“There is a significant amount of hubris that exists within the Agency, especially amongst analytic elements,” Thorne told The Insider. “And they’re the ones…who are meant to inform policymakers. Too often, however, they think their job is to craft policy.”

Modernization didn’t fix the dysfunction; in many cases, it exacerbated it. The most seismic change brought about by it was that the Directorate of Analysis now had access not just to the finished intelligence reports approved by the Directorate of Operations, as was the process before, but to operational cable traffic, which included potential source identification and information about how a case officer adjudicated that source’s credibility. The analysts, it was felt, were now able to interfere in the once rarefied realm of operations, including by tasking operations officers in the field from their perch in remote mission centers. Alien clergy no longer just snooping around the parish, but now writing the sermons.

“To practitioners, modernization meant handing over cash to consultants to tell the Langley-bound dilettantes that they can run espionage networks and covert operations as effectively as the experienced professionals,” according to John Sipher, a former CIA chief of station in Moscow and longtime Russia hand. “They couldn’t.”

An earlier CIA director, Robert Gates, had worried about how the analytic encroachment on operations would feed this bifurcated and antagonistic culture within the organization. In a speech Gates delivered to an auditorium full of CIA analysts in March 1992, he said they “must seek out the expertise in the DO [Directorate of Operations], including in areas where covert action is involved, where operations and reports officers have great experience, expertise, and day-to-day working insights.” A “special burden,” Gates added, fell on leaders of hybridized centers, “who must ensure that neither the perception nor the reality of politicization gets a toehold.”

An agency divided

But the reality and perception of politicization is what has kept the CIA from disclosing the truth about AHI, according to John Thorne, Dr. David Relman, and former CIA officers familiar with the GHIC, who agreed to talk to The Insider on the condition of anonymity. Analysts ran the unit, even though almost all of the cornerstone AHI cases they examined affected officers from operations. The biases of the Directorate of Analysis were evident from the start, these sources insist.

The head GHIC was a senior analyst who’d worked in the Counterterrorism Mission Center, the hybridized paradigm for modernization, where he’d work on the team that found bin Laden. Because this person is still undercover, The Insider will call him “Shawn Nichols.” The lanky son of a Russian literature professor, Nichols played basketball as a practice player in college and was known for his aggressive style and habit for drawing fouls. One contemporary wrote of him, “His first year he played just 10 minutes but took six free throws. He missed them all.” Nichols also got into trouble at school, having been arrested by local police at his university town after one loud and unruly off-campus party (he was charged with “false informing”).

He built his stature with the bin Laden op at the Counterterrorism Center, which had been hunting the fugitive mastermind of 9/11 for years. “The targeter on the team who found bin Laden was a woman who worked the file obsessively,” according to a former executive-level CIA officer. “She’s the model for the Jessica Chastain character in Zero Dark Thirty.” Nichols came in as deputy department chief to an operations officer, while the targeter developed and pursued a strategy for tracking the leader of al-Qaeda. “And she finds out he’s living in a fucking garrison town in Pakistan.” When it came time to go down to the White House to explain that the CIA thought they’d located America’s most wanted terrorist in Abbottabad, it was Nichols who gave the briefing because that was the domain of analysts and he was the top analyst on the bin Laden team. He thus became a shining example for modernization under Brennan, who took over the Agency in 2013, two years after SEAL Team Six killed bin Laden.

Nichols, the same source said, had a “legendary” tendency for dictating an analytical line. “He read more than anybody. He’d come in early, read everything. Then he’d write an analytic piece and send it all the way down to the line analyst. Below him were departments, below them, groups, below them, branches. [Nichols] would send his own analysis down five layers and say, ‘I’d like you to take a look at this.’ What this meant was: ‘Send it back up to me so I can send it out.’ There was no editorial review process. This is the position he wanted to put out.”

After the Counterterrorism Center, Nichols became the chief of analysis at the Near East Mission Center, where he worked directly under Morgan Muir, the head of the Near East Mission Center, a proponent of modernization.

Nichols brought in his own people from these centers to staff the upper echelon of the GHIC. All were analysts. One was Mara Kaplan, who had been the analytic chief in the Yemen and Somalia Department at the Counterterrorism Center before becoming deputy head of the GHIC. Another was Dan Miller, who had served in the Near East Mission Center with Nichols, then became the senior analyst in the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center.

One person active in the intelligence community described Miller as the “poster child of the sort of analyst who will write or say whatever will secure career advancement” and cater to what he believes policymakers want to hear.

Dr. David Relman told The Insider he knew Miller as someone who made up his mind about AHI well before the facts were in, and even before he was seconded to the GHIC. “Dan seemed to be playing an outsized role in providing the foundational briefings for external groups that were brought in to give their assessments,” such as the intelligence community’s expert panel Relman co-chaired on plausible explanations for AHI. “Miller kept insisting that there is nothing within the laws of physics that would allow us to view pulsed microwave technology as a plausible explanation. ‘You can go ahead and do what you wanna do,’ he’d say, ‘but we're telling you there cannot be anything here to see. On the basis of theory and principle.’”

This made absolutely no sense to Relman, especially since his expert panel had uncovered reams of evidence, including classified intelligence, showing the Soviets had been experimenting with pulsed microwave energy for half a century. The physics were indeed plausible, in both theory and practice. “What they found was that effects could range from loss of consciousness to seizures to altered cognition, memory lapses, inability to concentrate, headaches, all the way to much more acute findings like intense pressure, pain, disorientation, and difficulty with balance, many of the things that we heard about from victims of Havana Syndrome.”

A Scandinavian skeptic of AHI accidentally vindicated Relman on this score. Last month, the Washington Post reported that a Norwegian government scientist constructed a pulse microwave emitter and tested it on himself in order to debunk the idea that such a device can cause neurological symptoms consistent with AHI. Instead, he developed those symptoms while serving as his own guinea pig.

To Relman, the GHIC was anything but collaborative or accommodating to the expert panel he convened and whose staff director, a former senior CIA officer who had worked on biological threats in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, was seconded to the GHIC. “He was given an office in the GHIC vault,” Relman said. “And so he sat there with them. And the idea was that we would sort of coordinate with each other, the GHIC and the panel would keep each other informed of what we were each doing.”

That may have been the idea, but it didn’t play out that way. “The staff director would be invited to their weekly check-in meetings, and he would know of evidence that had been uncovered during the previous week.” Sometimes that evidence was not presented at the meeting for others to hear about, and the staff director would inquire as to why, only to be told by the GHIC brass that the evidence hadn’t been fully developed yet or wasn’t credible, or that they had no idea what he was talking about.

About halfway through the expert panel’s yearlong investigation, which culminated in 2022, the staff director was informed he was no longer welcome at GHIC meetings, although he kept his desk in the vault for a while. “He felt like he was PNGed,” Relman said, referring to the protocol in which a country declares an accredited foreign diplomat persona non grata and expels him from its soil owing to some real or perceived breach in bilateral relations. “He would close his door and feel like they were listening to his conversations. And so, he just abandoned the office and had to find an empty place elsewhere.”

Nichols, Kaplan, and Miller formed a troika of top-level analysts who all agreed with one another and “were kind of like a cabal within the GHIC leadership,” Thorne explained. “We almost never saw them. They never were in briefings and never were in meetings. I can’t account for what they did all day.”

The troika also came up with conditions for due diligence at the outset of the GHIC, according to a former senior CIA officer familiar with the unit and its methodology. “No one affected with AHI was allowed to work in the unit, or to contribute to it, or touch this issue at all. And the rule was, ‘We don’t want to talk to you, the victims, and we don’t want to see your medical reports.’”

The perception was yet again that the Directorate of Analysis was impinging on the Directorate of Operations and diminishing its role in uncovering the cause of something that was of acute concern to its staff because its highly trained operatives were being taken off the chess board.

The head of operations in the GHIC wasn’t even a full-time employee of the CIA. He was part-time and had a side business selling first aid kits online, according to a former senior intelligence officer with knowledge of the unit and its personnel. “He’d tell people, ‘we don’t want anybody to report on this. Don’t reply to cables, don’t task anybody.’ That’s part of how they operated.”

The GHIC even instructed operations personnel at overseas stations, who would naturally collect information on suspected attacks on their own, to stand down. Thorne’s boss at one point told him the unit was not supporting fieldwork on AHI because the issue had gotten too distracting for case officers who needed to, as she put it, “get back to the real spy business at hand.”

“It was like a police squad telling detectives not to go out and gather evidence for a cop killing because it was a waste of their time,” Thorne said.

According to a senior intelligence officer with knowledge of the GHIC leadership, Kaplan, the deputy director of the unit, was fond of telling people: “Our job is to disprove everything that comes into this office,” which sounds rather like the opposite of a forensic investigative approach and more of a rubber-stamping of predetermined conclusions. When reached for comment for this story, Kaplan, now the executive director of Aardwolf Global Solutions, a Virginia-based advisory firm specializing in strategic intelligence, replied via email: “I do not want to participate.”

Thorne’s appointment to the GHIC was itself an anomalous incident of sorts. He had on-the-ground experience with a cornerstone AHI case, which made him naturally empathetic to what AHI victims were reporting about their ordeal. “I think just by nature of my position they needed people, and maybe it was timing… But they were aware and they knew that I had the background in it. And they knew where I was coming from.”

“Within the first few days getting there at headquarters,” he said, “I noticed that there seemed to be a mentality that they were working towards looking at the environmental and atmospheric issues, versus it being a state actor. And that was a pervasive mindset that I found that was in the AHI Unit.”

Contributing to that mindset was the fact that the GHIC was tasked with investigating not just a small subset of cases of AHI, where the professional backgrounds and medical histories of the victims did not lend themselves to blithe explanations of psychosomatic disorders or the rapid onset of symptoms owing to preexisting conditions. Some of the cornerstone cases had been in hostile situations at different points in their careers — firefights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, with plenty of battle scars and post-traumatic stress, but nothing that sent them to yearslong rehabilitative care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Rather, the GHIC had to pore through all the reported AHI cases, around 1,500 in total, and most of them, unlike the cornerstone cases, more easily explained by known medical or environmental conditions.» Thorne believes quite a lot were driven by fear of what was circulating within the intelligence community, about invisible energy beams that could fry your brain, hurt your loved ones, and render you unfit for service.

“Havana syndrome was a powerful sociopolitical wave,” Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist wrote in her book The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness. “I cannot imagine how hard it would have been to resist developing symptoms in that setting, and how difficult it would have been to accept a mass psychogenic explanation with all the ‘experts’ disparaging it so.”

The irony, then, is that the CIA created a mass psychogenic explanation for AHI by opening up too wide an aperture for inquiry, into which poured those who imagined symptoms or simply wanted to join a growing cohort of afflicted, whether out of empathy or attention-seeking or some other motive. The GHIC allowed itself to digest so many false positives that even the serious cornerstone cases, of which there were fewer than a hundred, got drowned out in a cacophony of noise and nonsense.

“When they opened it up for everybody to report anything and everything, I think people started to think that it was fake because you had all these crazy reports coming in along the lines of, ‘Hey, my son hears a fly buzzing around,’ and we had to report that and send it back. I could see, if I'm sitting on the desk and I'm reading that coming back in, someone thinking this entire endeavor was stupid.”

It also became a lot easier to downplay or ignore Russian responsibility through mirror-imaging. The CIA Special Activities Center, a division responsible for carrying out covert and paramilitary operations, determined there was simply no way 1,500 people could have been attacked with directed energy weapons for the simple reason that SAC itself couldn’t do that without having its operatives caught.

But what if a Russian intelligence unit hadn’t gone after 1,500 people around the world, or anybody in the United States? What if they’d only targeted a couple dozen Russia-focused American operatives over a ten-year period, in places where they’ve historically shown both a capability and willingness to conduct kinetic operations with impunity, from the United Kingdom to former Warsaw Pact nations?

Thorne’s role in the GHIC was geographically delimited along those parameters. His first area of responsibility was South and Central Asia, and he later also worked on Europe and Eurasia, which gave him access to any cables coming in from CIA stations in those parts of the world. “I would be in charge of coordinating any response back to the station, using canned language that we’d send back if an AHI were reported. We were told not to contact the station directly informally, only through official channels. It was pretty lackluster.” While Thorne wasn’t quite told not to respond, the sense was that he was wasting his time because nothing would happen back at headquarters if a case, or information pertaining to one, were reported in cable traffic.

One cable, which Thorne was not privy to because it arrived after he’d left both the GHIC and resigned from the CIA, was in response to The Insider and 60 Minutes’ previous investigation into AHI.

In March 2024, we reported that a victim known as “Joy,” an American nurse and the wife of a Justice Department attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, positively identified Albert Averyanov, the son of the commanding founder of GRU Unit 29155, skulking around outside her home on October 7, 2021. That same day, Joy felt a piercing, acute sound penetrate her left ear and intense pressure in her head while she was doing a load of laundry. Following the joint investigation, the CIA station in Tbilisi uncovered evidence ratifying The Insider and 60 Minutes’ claim that Averyanov had traveled to Georgia in that timeframe. The cable sent from the station back to CIA headquarters wound up in the GHIC. The GHIC dismissed it, three former CIA officers confirm. Dan Miller saw the cable, according to one, and replied: “So what?”

For Thorne, this was the refrain used for all information that came in corroborating testimony of AHI victims or suggesting Russian intelligence attribution. “‘It’s all circumstantial.’ I heard that hundreds of times,” he said.

Except the presence of any Unit 29155 operative is not circumstantial, because this unit is dedicated to military operations, not pure espionage. Its presence therefore means that it is planning to perpetrate, or has just perpetrated, an attack of some sort.

One former Seventh Floor executive from the Directorate of Analysis, who wasn’t at CIA when the GHIC was put together or set about its work but had a broad understanding of its activities, disputed the characterization of analysts’ ignoring crucial data about AHI and their connection to Russian state actors. “I think the intelligence community concluded that they didn’t have the evidence to say that a state was behind a majority of the things. They weren’t commenting on any particular case. It’s entirely possible that a subset of those cases was a result of something a foreign adversary had done.”

That source also said the pressure went the other way, to prove something that wasn’t there. “No one wanted to be the analyst that said, ‘We don't think that the Russians are doing this.’ They all would have liked a different position. But they’re all trained to speak truth to power. There are many [Directorate of Operations] officers who just don’t get it or think that’s not right.”

“Bullshit,” said “Adam,” an operations officer who was part of the cluster of attacks reported in Havana in late 2016. “They kept moving the goalposts for evidentiary support. First it was: ‘Show us people being hit.’ We got CCTV footage showing it. Then it was: ‘Get a device.’ We got a device. Then it was: ‘Prove the device works.’ We proved it. Now it's: ‘Prove the microwave beam will cut through nine concrete walls, eight pieces of steel, bullet-proof glass – and everything’s buried under 65 feet of earth.”

“We went to war in Iraq with a post-it note,” Adam said, “and on this issue you could fill the Library of Congress with evidence the Russians are doing this and it’ll never be enough for the analysts.”

David Relman, the Stanford doctor who interrogated plausible causes for AHI for the U.S. intelligence community, said the GHIC’s forensic methodology was jerryrigged to come up short. “They created sophomoric clinical diagnoses for some cornerstone cases so as to give the clear impression that whenever and if ever they did a deep dive they would always find a known explanation. They had an inverted investigatory logic. Why not start with a highly credible and objective look at cornerstone cases and then see where that leads you?”

To date, Relman emphasized, no one has offered a serious technical critique of the Experts Panel report about plausibility, including on that report’s finding that a concealable device, which is capable of being used inconspicuously in civilian areas and producing enough pulse microwave radiation to cause the physiological and cognitive injuries that present in AHI victims, was indeed scientifically possible. “They simply wave their hands and say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’”

Unhappy hour

The final indignity for Thorne wasn’t even the dismissal of evidence of this nature; it was the outright contempt his cohort had for people like former station colleague Sam. “I’ll never forget, in one instance a senior member of the AHI Unit came into my office. And we were having a happy hour later that week. And that officer came in and said, ‘Yeah, we're gonna have a happy hour. We're all gonna have simulated AHIs and drink together.’ And she basically emulated that she was having a stroke, making fun of the victims. And to me, that was deplorable. It was disgusting. She acted like she was being electrocuted.”

When Polymeropoulos learned of the happy hour incident, he immediately called the Seventh Floor, as well as the National Security Council, headed by Jake Sullivan, to register his disgust. No action was ever reported to have been taken against the GHIC official.

The country in Central Asia where Sam and his wife were hit also saw other U.S. government employees and their families targeted, Thorne said, adding that these cases have not been reported publicly. “There’s nanny cam footage of the officer’s infant going nuts during a hit. Did an infant have a psychosomatic response?”

After Polymeropoulos was diagnosed by Walter Reed’s National Intrepid Center of Excellence with a traumatic brain injury from his incident in Moscow, he and other victims started receiving similar care and formed virtual support groups, hosted on encrypted messages apps such as Signal and Wickr, which had been developed by the CIA. “We're talking about how we're feeling. Many of my colleagues who were victims had suicidal thoughts, were helping each other. We're talking about treatment options.”

Seventh Floor leadership at the CIA, Polymeropoulos said, tried to infiltrate these victim support groups, spying on Americans on U.S. soil. Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan and modified in 2008, regulates the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance and collection on American citizens. The CIA, per that order, is not authorized to “engage in electronic surveillance within the United States except for the purpose of training, testing, or conducting countermeasures to hostile electronic surveillance.”

If the CIA incidentally uncovers evidence that implicates a U.S. citizen in spying for a foreign adversary, the center is dutybound to refer the case to the FBI, which has the legal authority to investigate Americans.

“Any Agency effort to secretly infiltrate, and literally spy on, AHI victims groups not only crosses an ethical line but may very well have created legal liability for those involved,” Mark S. Zaid, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer representing Polymeroupolos and other AHI victims, said. “Domestic surveillance operations are not what the Agency is supposed to engage in, most notably against its own people.”

Another tragic irony in how the CIA conducted its investigation into AHI is that it inadvertently amplified — by orders of magnitude — the impact of what may very well have been a small-scale program of a dedicated Russian military intelligence unit against U.S. servicepeople.

“This thing has ripped the building apart,” Thorne said. “I’ve seen cases in which station chiefs didn’t want to bring on any AHI victims because of how their views might affect morale in the station. I’ve also seen cases where chiefs didn’t want anyone who worked in the AHI unit coming to their stations for the same reason.” Still other victims refuse to come forward, even internally at the CIA, for fear that it might impact their ability to ascend the ranks of the organization they faithfully serve.

A former executive-level CIA officer who had access to all classified intelligence on AHI told The Insider that the 2024 Intelligence Community Assessment, in which the CIA and other agencies assessed it was “very unlikely” a foreign adversary was responsible for this phenomenon, “bore no resemblance to the body of collected intelligence we had on this issue. I was stunned by the disparity. The only conclusion I can draw is that the analysts who led the GHIC gamed the system.”

The CIA, this source noted, did not coordinate with any other U.S. intelligence agencies and released an interim Intelligence Community Assessment about AHI in January 2022 that dismissed allegations of foreign responsibility, setting in motion a media narrative that AHI is unsubstantiated. The GHIC was still convened when that assessment was made public.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, told 60 Minutes that a new review of AHI intelligence will be “comprehensive and complete…we remain committed to delivering the truth that the American people deserve.”

Not since James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division who went on a pervasive, paranoid hunt for Soviet moles in the organization after his friend and colleague, Kim Philby, turned out to be one in MI6, has there been such a culture of enmity and mutual suspicion in the sanctum sanctorum of American intelligence. “Even if one person got hit,” Thorne said, “it set off a chain reaction that’s incredible,” Thorne said, “almost like the perfect op. There were minimal casualties, but we destroyed the Agency because of it.”

With additional reporting by Michael Rey, Oriana Zill and Kato Kopaleishvili.