11 ms·

The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome

71 points by dbuxton 8y ago

warent 8y ago
I'm an American going to Havana tomorrow until Friday. Here's to hoping my head doesn't get long-range microwaved...?
- carloscarnero 8y ago
  Actually... we welcome you here! Have a nice stay.
- creep 8y ago
  Lol... yikes. Bad joke, friend.
  - warent 8y ago
    Only wish I was joking, but I'm feeling genuine concern. The travel advisory[1] notes to "exercise increased caution." carloscarnero has been reassuring though! [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Cuba.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Are you CIA? Potentially, who knows. Otherwise you'll be fine. Have a mojito and montecristo no 4.
- dgut 8y ago
  As an American, Cuba is probably the safest place you can visit in LA.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    What about Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile..? I think Cuba is pretty safe but it's not the only safe country in LA.
- mimi89999 8y ago
  I recommend avoiding staying close to windows. I think that such an attack is very unlikely to happen in a crowded area. Not sure if earmuffs can help. The article only reported cases of diplomatic personnel being affected, but I found some other sources stating that tourists were also affected, but those sources are not as reliable as this one. Anyway, with the number of tourists traveling there, it is very unlikely that you might get affected.
ashleyn 8y ago
Is it just me or does it seem this would be trivial to detect with tangible proof? One or several software-defined radios can be set up to listen to the full breadth of the radio spectrum. If an incident like this is ever reported again, correlate the waterfall view with the time of the incident, and see if there were any increases in activity in that period. I currently believe this was a mass hysteria.
- seventytwo 8y ago
  It's not trivial. Beams could be narrow and could only be on for short periods of time. Combine that with all kinds of noise, stray signals, and other false positives, and you'd still be searching for a needle in a haystack. It's not clear what frequency to even look for...
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  SDR radios generally have a somewhat limited spectrum. A few MHz to a few GHz is fine for most data transmit/recieve projects, but there's no great reason to use those frequencies for this. Also, one thing you pay for through the nose when buying a spectrum analyzer is scan time. If you want narrow buckets and a broad frequency, a cheap SDR is going to take on the order of one second to scan from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. If your radio pulse lasts for a few milliseconds and has a bandwidth of a few kHz, you're unlikely to see it unless you have a big FPGA, big RAM buffer, and high-end filters on a $XXXXX scope.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pmorici 8y ago
  High end state of the art spectrum analyzers from Keysight and similar companies can look at 1Ghz of bandwidth at a time and they cost upwards of $200k and take ~12u of rack space. RF is anything from 3kHz to 300Ghz. Unlikely that a $50 hobby SDR with 20Mhz of bandwidth is going to glean much of use unless you get lottery lucky.
owenmarshall 8y ago
So the first “victims” were CIA officers, and the CIA the first to start pushing to close the embassy and return to the status quo developed and favored by the CIA for decades. No evidence exists to suggest anything actually happened to the victims, and what limited scientific evidence does exist is being criticized. And all of this just happened to directly support the official hard line position taken by the new US government. What a remarkable set of coincidences!
- wizzard 8y ago
  Did you read the article? If you did then you’re being purposely misleading about what you read. The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected. There is plenty of evidence of brain injury, just no evidence of how it happened or what agent(s) caused it. And how about the coincidence that the hard line position of the new US government lines up perfectly with the desires of hard line Cubans, Russia, and China. You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization.
  - owenmarshall 8y ago
    > There is plenty of evidence of brain injury >> In fact, aside from the victims’ accounts, there was no conclusive evidence that anyone in Cuba was attacked at all. >> an investigation carried out by Canada and Cuba has thus far found no evidence of attacks. >> After the study was published, JAMA received letters from other specialists, arguing that the study was flawed, especially in neglecting psychological explanations. >> "After a year and a half, the most powerful nation on earth hasn’t been able to present one single piece of evidence" >> But he acknowledged that more data were needed to convince skeptics that the syndrome was real. He said his team was awaiting “potential tangible evidence” from a new neuroimaging study involving the victims. > You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization Sure, plenty of other parties interested in stopping the normalization of relationships exist. But their state intelligence agents aren't the ones claiming injury from a mysterious attack that no one seems to be able to prove happened. > The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected. Psychosomatic illnesses are a real thing. They can cause real and serious impact to people's health. A psychosomatic illness arising after the stress of living and working in a country that has been "the enemy" for six decades, after being told that you will be under "constant surveillance by Cuban intelligence", after their intelligence agents make it clear to you that you're under surveillance? After three agents of your state intelligence suddenly come down with a mysterious, unexplainable illness? Seems entirely plausible to me.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number. There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is precisely one. We already know she works in the embassy in Havana, which means she's one of a couple hundred people, she's female, which cuts that number in half, she has twins, which cuts that number by about 100.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  How do you know the fact that "she" had a husband and twins is not also made up?
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    That's a good point, but why add it in the first place?
    - mercer 8y ago
      To be ahead of the curve and mislead?
    - iaw 8y ago
      There are several mentions of the timing of CIA operatives getting sick that would allow foreign intelligence analysts to identify them if they had other sources of information about the events. There's unlikely to be the information you think in that article otherwise the CIA is going to be having a hard time. In all likelihood the CIA worked with the reporter to ensure the right disinformation came out. Note that the FBI refused to comment but there seems to be a lot of inside info about the CIA...
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  Unless the real one doesn't have twins, and they added it in the story to protect his/her identity.
empath75 8y ago
I would be stunned to discover that this is anything other than a case of mass hysteria. Psychosomatic symptoms are still symptoms and stress and anxiety can cause physical changes to the body and brain and long lasting effects.
- tim333 8y ago
  Dunno though. From the article: >But their skepticism vanished when they saw the patients. “There was not one individual on the team who was not convinced that this was a real thing,” Smith said. and from another article: (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.h...) >"We have seen this before when the Soviets irradiated the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the days of the Cold War," he said. So the Soviets / Russians have form and the symptoms fit. There was also a van seen which could have had the gear: >...looked outside her home after hearing the disturbing sounds and seen a van speeding away. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba-microwave.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba...)
Pica_soO 8y ago
Surely the CIA wouldn't sabotage a political program to de-escalate a conflict? Especially one, which allows for regular flights to a tropical island where they have nice cocktails with little umbrellas. This is a classy agency after all. Though a little bathing holiday, might help wash off all those ashes from their legacy.
molticrystal 8y ago
They said it wasn't likely a toxin, or at least there were no toxins that screening picked up on. But could some other fungus/mold or other pathogen infect the people there or could they accumulate a toxin that wasn't screened for? Just how clean did they get and keep that place at?

71 points by dbuxton 8y ago

warent 8y ago

I'm an American going to Havana tomorrow until Friday. Here's to hoping my head doesn't get long-range microwaved...?

carloscarnero 8y ago
Actually... we welcome you here! Have a nice stay.
creep 8y ago
Lol... yikes. Bad joke, friend.
- warent 8y ago
  Only wish I was joking, but I'm feeling genuine concern. The travel advisory[1] notes to "exercise increased caution." carloscarnero has been reassuring though! [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Cuba.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
paulie_a 8y ago
Are you CIA? Potentially, who knows. Otherwise you'll be fine. Have a mojito and montecristo no 4.
dgut 8y ago
As an American, Cuba is probably the safest place you can visit in LA.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  What about Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile..? I think Cuba is pretty safe but it's not the only safe country in LA.
mimi89999 8y ago
I recommend avoiding staying close to windows. I think that such an attack is very unlikely to happen in a crowded area. Not sure if earmuffs can help. The article only reported cases of diplomatic personnel being affected, but I found some other sources stating that tourists were also affected, but those sources are not as reliable as this one. Anyway, with the number of tourists traveling there, it is very unlikely that you might get affected.

ashleyn 8y ago

Is it just me or does it seem this would be trivial to detect with tangible proof? One or several software-defined radios can be set up to listen to the full breadth of the radio spectrum. If an incident like this is ever reported again, correlate the waterfall view with the time of the incident, and see if there were any increases in activity in that period. I currently believe this was a mass hysteria.

seventytwo 8y ago
It's not trivial. Beams could be narrow and could only be on for short periods of time. Combine that with all kinds of noise, stray signals, and other false positives, and you'd still be searching for a needle in a haystack. It's not clear what frequency to even look for...
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
SDR radios generally have a somewhat limited spectrum. A few MHz to a few GHz is fine for most data transmit/recieve projects, but there's no great reason to use those frequencies for this. Also, one thing you pay for through the nose when buying a spectrum analyzer is scan time. If you want narrow buckets and a broad frequency, a cheap SDR is going to take on the order of one second to scan from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. If your radio pulse lasts for a few milliseconds and has a bandwidth of a few kHz, you're unlikely to see it unless you have a big FPGA, big RAM buffer, and high-end filters on a $XXXXX scope.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pmorici 8y ago
High end state of the art spectrum analyzers from Keysight and similar companies can look at 1Ghz of bandwidth at a time and they cost upwards of $200k and take ~12u of rack space. RF is anything from 3kHz to 300Ghz. Unlikely that a $50 hobby SDR with 20Mhz of bandwidth is going to glean much of use unless you get lottery lucky.

owenmarshall 8y ago

So the first “victims” were CIA officers, and the CIA the first to start pushing to close the embassy and return to the status quo developed and favored by the CIA for decades. No evidence exists to suggest anything actually happened to the victims, and what limited scientific evidence does exist is being criticized. And all of this just happened to directly support the official hard line position taken by the new US government. What a remarkable set of coincidences!

wizzard 8y ago
Did you read the article? If you did then you’re being purposely misleading about what you read. The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected. There is plenty of evidence of brain injury, just no evidence of how it happened or what agent(s) caused it. And how about the coincidence that the hard line position of the new US government lines up perfectly with the desires of hard line Cubans, Russia, and China. You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization.
- owenmarshall 8y ago
  > There is plenty of evidence of brain injury >> In fact, aside from the victims’ accounts, there was no conclusive evidence that anyone in Cuba was attacked at all. >> an investigation carried out by Canada and Cuba has thus far found no evidence of attacks. >> After the study was published, JAMA received letters from other specialists, arguing that the study was flawed, especially in neglecting psychological explanations. >> "After a year and a half, the most powerful nation on earth hasn’t been able to present one single piece of evidence" >> But he acknowledged that more data were needed to convince skeptics that the syndrome was real. He said his team was awaiting “potential tangible evidence” from a new neuroimaging study involving the victims. > You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization Sure, plenty of other parties interested in stopping the normalization of relationships exist. But their state intelligence agents aren't the ones claiming injury from a mysterious attack that no one seems to be able to prove happened. > The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected. Psychosomatic illnesses are a real thing. They can cause real and serious impact to people's health. A psychosomatic illness arising after the stress of living and working in a country that has been "the enemy" for six decades, after being told that you will be under "constant surveillance by Cuban intelligence", after their intelligence agents make it clear to you that you're under surveillance? After three agents of your state intelligence suddenly come down with a mysterious, unexplainable illness? Seems entirely plausible to me.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number. There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is precisely one. We already know she works in the embassy in Havana, which means she's one of a couple hundred people, she's female, which cuts that number in half, she has twins, which cuts that number by about 100.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
How do you know the fact that "she" had a husband and twins is not also made up?
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  That's a good point, but why add it in the first place?
  - mercer 8y ago
    To be ahead of the curve and mislead?
  - iaw 8y ago
    There are several mentions of the timing of CIA operatives getting sick that would allow foreign intelligence analysts to identify them if they had other sources of information about the events. There's unlikely to be the information you think in that article otherwise the CIA is going to be having a hard time. In all likelihood the CIA worked with the reporter to ensure the right disinformation came out. Note that the FBI refused to comment but there seems to be a lot of inside info about the CIA...
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Unless the real one doesn't have twins, and they added it in the story to protect his/her identity.

empath75 8y ago

I would be stunned to discover that this is anything other than a case of mass hysteria. Psychosomatic symptoms are still symptoms and stress and anxiety can cause physical changes to the body and brain and long lasting effects.

tim333 8y ago
Dunno though. From the article: >But their skepticism vanished when they saw the patients. “There was not one individual on the team who was not convinced that this was a real thing,” Smith said. and from another article: (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.h...) >"We have seen this before when the Soviets irradiated the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the days of the Cold War," he said. So the Soviets / Russians have form and the symptoms fit. There was also a van seen which could have had the gear: >...looked outside her home after hearing the disturbing sounds and seen a van speeding away. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba-microwave.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba...)

Pica_soO 8y ago

Surely the CIA wouldn't sabotage a political program to de-escalate a conflict? Especially one, which allows for regular flights to a tropical island where they have nice cocktails with little umbrellas. This is a classy agency after all. Though a little bathing holiday, might help wash off all those ashes from their legacy.

molticrystal 8y ago

They said it wasn't likely a toxin, or at least there were no toxins that screening picked up on. But could some other fungus/mold or other pathogen infect the people there or could they accumulate a toxin that wasn't screened for? Just how clean did they get and keep that place at?