The Defense Department has spent greater than a yr testing a device bought in an undercover operation that some investigators suppose might be the reason for a collection of mysterious illnesses impacting US spies, diplomats and troops which are colloquially generally known as Havana Syndrome, in accordance to 4 sources briefed on the matter.
A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, bought the device for tens of millions of {dollars} within the waning days of the Biden administration, utilizing funding supplied by the Defense Department, in accordance to two of the sources. Officials paid “eight figures” for the device, these folks mentioned, declining to supply a extra particular quantity.
The device is nonetheless being studied and there is ongoing debate — and in some quarters of presidency, skepticism — over its hyperlink to the roughly dozens of anomalous well being incidents that stay formally unexplained.
NCS has requested the Pentagon, HSI and the DHS for remark. The CIA declined to remark.
The device acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, one of many sources mentioned, which some officers and teachers have speculated for years might be the reason for the incidents. Although the device is not totally Russian in origin, it incorporates Russian parts, this particular person added.
Officials have lengthy struggled to perceive how a device highly effective sufficient to trigger the sort of harm some victims have reported might be made moveable; that is still a core query, in accordance to one of many sources briefed on the device. The device might slot in a backpack, this particular person mentioned.
The acquisition of the device has reignited a painful and contentious debate inside the US authorities about Havana Syndrome, recognized formally as “anomalous health episodes.”
The mysterious sickness first emerged in late 2016, when a cluster of US diplomats stationed within the Cuban capital of Havana started reporting signs per head trauma, together with vertigo and excessive complications. In subsequent years, there have been circumstances reported world wide.
In the next decade the intelligence neighborhood and the Defense Department have sought to perceive if these officers had been the victims of some sort of directed power assault by a overseas authorities — with senior intelligence officers saying publicly that there wasn’t sufficient proof to help that conclusion and victims arguing that the US authorities has gaslit them and ignored essential proof that Russia was attacking American authorities officers.
Still, protection officers thought of their findings critical sufficient that they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees late final yr, together with reference to the acquired device and its testing.
One key concern now for some officers is that if the expertise proves viable it could have proliferated, a number of of the sources mentioned, that means that a couple of nation might now have entry to a device which may be able to inflicting career-ending accidents to US officers.
NCS was not in a position to study the place — or from whom — HSI bought the device, however HSI has a historical past of collaboration with the Defense Department for operations that happen everywhere in the globe. The workplace has broad jurisdiction to examine crimes linked to customs violations, together with investigations into the proliferation of US-controlled expertise or experience abroad.
Those investigations are “the single biggest collaboration point between HSI and the US military,” in accordance to a former Homeland Security official.
For instance, when the US army got here throughout US expertise in Afghanistan or Iraq that raised questions on how these parts got here to the area, it will flip to HSI, in accordance to the official.
It was additionally not clear how the US authorities realized of the existence of the device so as to buy it. Havana Syndrome — and its trigger — have remained frustratingly opaque to each the intelligence neighborhood and the medical neighborhood.
One drawback going through the medical neighborhood is that there is nonetheless not a transparent definition of “anomalous health incidents” or AHIs. Tests had been achieved, in some circumstances, lengthy after signs started, making it tougher to perceive what bodily occurred.
In 2022, an intelligence panel investigating the reason for AHIs mentioned that some of the episodes might “plausibly” have been attributable to “pulsed electromagnetic energy” emitted by an exterior supply.
But in 2023, the intelligence neighborhood mentioned publicly that it could not link any cases to a overseas adversary, ruling it unlikely that the unexplained sickness was the results of a focused marketing campaign by an enemy of the US. As lately as January of 2025, the broader intelligence neighborhood evaluation remained that it was impossible that the signs had been attributable to a overseas actor — at the same time as an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emphasised that analysts can not “rule out” the likelihood in some small variety of circumstances.
That stance has lengthy incensed victims, a lot of whom imagine strongly that intelligence exists providing black-and-white proof that Russia is behind their signs, some of which have been extreme sufficient to pressure retirement.
Some present and former CIA officers have raised issues that the company soft-pedaled its investigation, NCS has previously reported.
The acquisition of the device has been handled by some victims as potential vindication.
“If the [US government] has indeed uncovered such devices, then the CIA owes all the victims a f**king major and public apology for how we have been treated as pariahs,” Marc Polymeropoulos, one of many first CIA officers to go public with accidents he says he sustained in an assault in Moscow in 2017, mentioned in a press release to NCS.
NCS’s Kylie Atwood contributed to this story.