‘Lambs to the slaughter’ (Part 1)
How the CIA failed its officers in Cuba and the FBI failed them at home
It was about 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, and two CIA officers were sitting in the window of the Green Eggs Café at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in downtown Philadelphia, catching up with each other and enjoying a leisurely breakfast.
Adam and Michael (not their real names, which the CIA forbids them to use) were in Philadelphia to receive treatment for a debilitating range of symptoms from which they – and about two dozen others – had been suffering since their service in 2016 and 2017 at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. In almost all cases, the onset of these symptoms, which included dizziness, vertigo, headaches and nausea, had been sudden and, to those affected, inexplicable.
As other U.S. personnel posted elsewhere came down with similar symptoms, the federal government insisted on using bureaucratic gobbledygook to refer to those episodes, calling them “anomalous health incidents.” But the feds were too late. Because the phenomenon first came to light in the Cuban capital, some in CIA headquarters were keen to tie it to the Castro government, so they fed a catchy name for the symptoms into the public sphere: “Havana Syndrome.”
For many, including Adam and Michael, the symptoms not only continued for several months, but worsened. Some never fully recovered.
What made the Havana victims’ circumstances even worse was the lack of support they received from their own agency. Senior CIA officials tried to convince them that they were imagining things, even as the evidence mounted that they had been attacked. Adam, Michael and their colleagues felt betrayed.
“They just did not want to believe us,” Michael said.
(Officially, Adam is only allowed to say he was a U.S. government employee in Cuba who retired from the CIA. However, the agency allows him to acknowledge that in 2018 then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo awarded him the Exceptional Service Medallion, a CIA award given “for injury or death resulting from service in an area of hazard.” The High Side independently confirmed that Adam was working as a CIA case officer in Cuba.)
Now, in Philadelphia, the next unsettling turn in their story was about to unfold. As Adam tucked into his pancakes, they noticed a tall, white, middle-aged man on the sidewalk photographing them with a camera that was slung around his neck.
The lean, white-haired man was only 15 to 20 feet away “at most,” Adam said. “We noticed he was pointing the camera at us in the window and was taking pictures, and we both looked at each other and then looked around the restaurant, and we’re like, ‘What is he taking pictures of?’”
Other than themselves, the café was almost deserted. And unlike the colorful mural that decorated the building on the other side of the parking lot across the street, which the photographer was ignoring, the beige walls around the restaurant’s large windows were bland and unremarkable.
“It’s just the restaurant window, with me and [Michael] in the window, and a plain concrete wall,” Adam said. Michael and Adam were sure that the man was there to photograph them, even though, Adam said, he tried to “obfuscate” that fact by sometimes pointing the camera away from them. “He was very much focused upon the two of us,” Michael said.
After a few moments, the mystery photographer stepped behind a lamppost. “He’s checking his pictures on his camera to make sure that whatever it is has turned out … then shuffles back over in front of the window, and he starts photographing us again,” Adam said. At this point, Michael pulled out his iPhone and took a series of photographs of the man. After spending no more than two minutes taking photographs, according to Adam, the individual ducked into a nearby alleyway and disappeared.
But that wasn’t the end of it, according to Michael, who said that as he and Adam walked away from the café, the man reappeared behind them, tailing them for about a dozen blocks before they split up to throw him off.
Adam and Michael notified local FBI counterintelligence agents of what had happened, giving them the photos Michael had taken. Using closed circuit cameras in the area, the agents traced the man’s path to and from the café, according to Adam. He had been staying at a nearby hotel, where cameras caught him taking an elevator down and exiting the building with two women, with whom he walked down the street before taking a left on 13th Street, close to the café, at which point the women went their own way.
After taking his photographs at the café and then tailing Adam and Michael, the man returned alone to the hotel, checked out and caught a cab to the airport, from where he took a flight to another country that the FBI declined to identify to the CIA men. Nor would the bureau tell them where the mystery photographer was from, other than to acknowledge that he was a foreign national, according to Adam.
Michael, however, said that he learned secondhand from security officers at CIA headquarters that the man “had ties to Cuba.” Whatever his origin, the FBI told Adam and Michael that the government had “flagged” the man’s identity in case he ever tried to re-enter the country.
The encounter alarmed the CIA officers. “Why would you go take pictures of a concrete wall, with just a window with two guys eating breakfast, and then immediately leave the country?” Adam said. “Something doesn’t add up.”
Although they had no evidence of malfeasance on the photographer’s part, to Adam and Michael the episode appeared to be the latest incident in an extraordinary campaign of harassment that made it clear someone was trying to intimidate them and other Havana Syndrome victims long after they had returned to the United States. This campaign used spy-versus-spy tactics that CIA officers often face in hostile capitals such as Moscow and Havana but from which they had previously been presumed safe in America.
In addition to overt surveillance, these intimidation tactics included breaking into, stealing from and fouling their homes, remotely accessing and tasking their phones, and mailing sinister packages to them from abroad, all while the victims fought bitterly against an intransigent CIA bureaucracy that seemed to have little interest in helping them recover from their injuries.
The wide-ranging intimidation campaign, which has not been previously reported, targeted not only Havana Syndrome patients, but their doctors and other medical staff. The harassment became so egregious that the CIA deployed its Threat Management Unit to ensure that the homes of Havana Syndrome victims were as secure as possible. Nevertheless, the CIA and the FBI displayed so little interest in figuring out who was behind the campaign that some targets wondered if the agency itself was the guilty party.
As members of the original Havana cohort contended with this intimidation campaign, the number of Havana Syndrome cases continued to grow, with scores of CIA, State Department, FBI and other U.S. government personnel stricken in locations ranging from Guangzhou, China, to Vienna, Austria, to Washington, D.C. But even as the numbers grew, the truth about Havana Syndrome remained frustratingly out of reach, hidden in “the wilderness of mirrors,” as legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton described the world of spy and counterspy.
For this two-part series, The High Side spoke with several of the original CIA victims whose experiences in Havana first brought the “anomalous health incidents” phenomenon to the public eye, including some who have never spoken out before. The High Side also consulted doctors and other medical experts who have studied Havana Syndrome, as well as military experts, some of whom reported that the U.S. government has long had a directed beam device that causes symptoms similar to those experienced by Havana Syndrome victims.
It all begins with the question: What really went down in Havana?