After working on 5g for over 2
years, the following sounds a bit too familiar
for comfort:
[Referring
to these microwave weapons]
"Microwave arms
are seen as typically working over relatively
short distances — across the length of a few
rooms or blocks. High-powered ones might be able
to fire beams across several football fields, or
even for several miles."
Kate
Microwave Weapons Are
Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy
Workers
Doctors and scientists say microwave
strikes may have caused sonic delusions and
very real brain damage among embassy staff
and family members.
During
the Cold War, Washington feared
that Moscow was seeking to turnmicrowave
radiation into covert weapons of
mind control.
More
recently, the American military
itself sought to develop microwave
arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and
even spoken words into
people’s heads. The aims were to
disable attackers and wage
psychological warfare.
Now,
doctors and scientists say such
unconventional weapons may have
caused the baffling symptoms and
ailments that, starting in late
2016, hit more than three dozen
American diplomats and
family members in Cuba and China.
The Cuban incidents resulted in a
diplomatic rupture between Havana
and Washington.
The
medical team that examined 21
affected diplomats from Cuba made
no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published
in JAMA in March. But Douglas H. Smith,
the study’s lead author and
director of the Center for Brain
Injury and Repair at the
University of Pennsylvania, said
in a recent interview that
microwaves were now considered a
main suspect and that the team was
increasingly sure the diplomats
had suffered brain injury.
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“Everybody
was relatively skeptical at
first,” he said, “and everyone now
agrees there’s something there.”
Dr. Smith remarked that the
diplomats and doctors jokingly
refer to the trauma as the
immaculate concussion.
Strikes
with microwaves, some experts now
argue, more plausibly explain
reports of painful sounds, ills
and traumas than do other possible
culprits — sonic attacks, viral
infections and contagious anxiety.
In
particular, a growing number of
analysts cite an eerie phenomenon
known as the Frey effect,
named after Allan H. Frey, an
American scientist. Long ago, he
found that microwaves can trick
the brain into perceiving what
seem to be ordinary sounds.
Hearing
Microwaves
Scientists
have known for decades that the
brain can perceive some
microwaves as sound.
MICROWAVES hitting
the head in the area
around the temporal lobe
were perceived as sound in
a 1962 experiment. Several
theories have sought to
explain the exact
mechanism but it remains
in dispute.
TEMPORAL
LOBE
Cochlea
Eardrum
SOUND
WAVES entering
the ear make the eardrum
vibrate. These vibrations
are conveyed to the
cochlea and converted into
electrical signals. The
brain’s temporal lobes
receive signals from the
ears and process them into
sounds and speech.
The
false sensations, the experts say,
may account for a defining symptom
of the diplomatic incidents — the
perception of loud noises,
including ringing, buzzing and
grinding. Initially, experts cited those symptoms as
evidence of stealthy attacks with
sonic weapons.
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Members
of Jason, a secretive group of
elite scientists that helps the
federal government assess new
threats to national security, say
it has been scrutinizing the
diplomatic mystery this summer and
weighing possible explanations,
including microwaves.
Asked
about the microwave theory of the
case, the State Department said
the investigation had yet to
identify the cause or source of
the attacks. And the F.B.I.
declined to comment on the status
of the investigation or any
theories.
The
microwave idea teems with
unanswered questions. Who fired
the beams? The Russian government?
The Cuban government? A rogue
Cuban faction sympathetic to
Moscow? And, if so, where did the
attackers get the unconventional
arms?
At his
home outside Washington, Mr. Frey,
the scientist who uncovered the
neural phenomenon, said federal
investigators have questioned him
on the diplomatic riddle and that
microwave radiation is considered
a possible cause.
Mr. Frey,
now 83, has traveled widely and
long served as a contractor and a
consultant to a number of federal
agencies. He speculated that
Cubans aligned with Russia, the
nation’s longtime ally, might have
launched microwave strikes in
attempts to undermine developing
ties between Cuba and the United
States.
“It’s
a possibility,” he said at his
kitchen table. “In dictatorships,
you often have factions that think
nothing of going against the
general policy if it suits their
needs. I think that’s a perfectly
viable explanation.”
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Developing a new
class of weapons
Image
Allan H. Frey, at his
home outside Washington. In 1960,
he stumbled on an acoustic effect
of microwaves that was eventually
named after him.CreditAlex Wroblewski for The
New York Times
Microwaves
are ubiquitous in modern life. The
short radio waves power radars,
cook foods, relay messages and
link cellphones to antenna towers.
They’re a form of electromagnetic
radiation on the same spectrum as
light and X-rays, only at the
opposite end.
While
radio broadcasting can employ
waves a mile or more in length,
microwaves range in size from
roughly a foot to a tiny fraction
of an inch. They’re seen as
harmless in such everyday uses as
microwaving foods. But their
diminutive size also enables tight
focusing, as when dish antennas
turn disorganized rays into
concentrated beams.
The
dimensions of the human head, scientists say,
make it a fairly good antenna for
picking up microwave signals.
Mr. Frey,
a biologist, said he stumbled on
the acoustic effect in 1960 while
working for General Electric’s
Advanced Electronics Center at
Cornell University. A man who
measured radar signals at a nearby
G.E. facility came up to him at a
meeting and confided that he could
hear the beam’s pulses — zip,
zip, zip.
Intrigued,
Mr. Frey traveled to the
man’s workplace in Syracuse and
positioned himself in a radar
beam. “Lo,” he recalled, “I could
hear it, too.”
Mr.
Frey’s resulting papers —
reporting that even deaf people
could hear the false sounds —
founded a new field of study on
radiation’s neural impacts. Mr.
Frey’s first paper, in
1961, reported that power
densities 160 times lower than
“the standard maximum safe level
for continuous exposure” could
induce the sonic delusions.
His second paper, in
1962, pinpointed the brain’s
receptor site as the temporal
lobes, which extend beneath the
temples. Each lobe bears a small
region — the auditory cortex —
that processes nerve signals from
the outer and inner ears.
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Investigators
raced to confirm and extend Mr.
Frey’s findings. At first they
named the phenomenon after him,
but eventually called it the microwave auditory
effect and, in time, more
generally, radio-frequency hearing.
The
Soviets took notice. Not long
after his initial discoveries, Mr.
Frey said, he was invited by the
Soviet Academy of Sciences to
visit and lecture. Toward the end,
in a surprise, he was taken
outside Moscow to a military base
surrounded by armed guards and
barbed-wire fences.
“They had
me visiting the various labs and
discussing the problems,”
including the neural impacts of
microwaves, Mr. Frey recalled. “I
got an inside look at their
classified program.”
Moscow
was so intrigued by the prospect
of mind control that it adopted a special
terminology for the overall
class of envisioned arms, calling
them psychophysical and
psychotronic.
Soviet
research on microwaves for
“internal sound perception,” the Defense Intelligence
Agency warned in 1976,
showed great promise for
“disrupting the behavior patterns
of military or diplomatic
personnel.”
Furtively,
globally, the threat grew.
The
National Security Agency gave Mark S. Zaid, a
Washington lawyer who routinely
gets security clearances to
discuss classified matters, a statement on
how a foreign power built a weapon
“designed to bathe a target’s
living quarters in microwaves,
causing numerous physical effects,
including a damaged nervous
system.”
Mr.
Zaid said a N.S.A. client of his who
traveled there watched in
disbelief as his nervous system
later unraveled, starting with
control of his fingers.
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Image
The high-pitched
chirping that diplomats heard
while working at the Consulate
General of the United States in
Guangzhou, China, might be
explained by a phenomenon known as
the Frey effect — radio-frequency
hearing.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New
York Times
Washington,
too, foresaw new kinds of arms.
In
Albuquerque, N.M., Air Force
scientists sought to beam
comprehensible speech into the
heads of adversaries. Their novel
approach won a patent in 2002, and an
update in 2003. Both
were assigned to the Air Force
secretary, helping limit the
idea’s dissemination.
The lead
inventor said the research
team had “experimentally
demonstrated” that the “signal is
intelligible.” As for the
invention’s uses, an Air Force disclosure form listed
the first application as
“Psychological Warfare.”
The Navy
sought to paralyze. The Frey
effect was to induce sounds
powerful enough to cause painful
discomfort and, if needed,
leave targets unable to move.
The weapon, the Navy noted,
would have a “low probability of
fatalities or permanent injuries.”
In a
twist, the 2003 contract was
awarded to microwave experts who had emigrated to
the United States from Russia and
Ukraine.
It
is unknown if Washington deploys
such arms. But the Pentagon built
a related weapon known as the
Active Denial System, hailing it in a video. It
fires an invisible beam meant to deter mobs
and attackers with fiery
sensations.
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Russia,
China and many European states are
seen as having the know-how to
make basic microwave weapons that
can debilitate, sow noise or even
kill. Advanced powers, experts
say, might accomplish more nuanced
aims such as beaming spoken words
into people’s heads. Only
intelligence agencies know which
nations actually possess and use
such unfamiliar arms.
The basic
weapon might look like a satellite
dish. In theory, such a device
might be hand-held or mounted in a
van, car, boat or helicopter.
Microwave arms are seen as
typically working over relatively
short distances — across the
length of a few rooms or blocks.
High-powered ones might be able to
fire beams across several football
fields, or even for several
miles.
The episode in
Cuba
The
Soviet collapse in 1991 cut
Russia’s main ties to Cuba, a
longtime ally just 90 miles from
the United States. The
shaky economy forced Moscow to
stop providing Havana with large
amounts of oil and other aid.
Vladimir
Putin, as Russia’s president and
prime minister, sought to recover the
economic, political and strategic
clout that the Soviets had lost.
In December 2000, months after the
start of his first presidential
term, Mr. Putin flew to
the island nation. It was
the first visit by a Soviet or
Russian leader since the Cold
War.
He also
sought to resurrect Soviet work on
psychoactive arms. In 2012, he declared that
Russia would pursue “new
instruments for achieving
political and strategic goals,”
including psychophysical weapons.
In July
2014, Mr. Putin again visited
Cuba. This time he brought a gift
— the cancellation of some $30 billion in
Cuban debt. The two nations signed
a dozen accords.
A
Russian spy ship, Viktor Leonov, docked in Havana on
the eve of the beginning of
reconciliation talks between Cuba
and the United States in early
2015, and did so again in
subsequent years. Moscow and
Havana grew so close that in late
2016, the two nations signed a sweeping pact on
defense and technology
cooperation.
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Image
Raul
Castro, president of Cuba, with
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s
president, at a welcoming
ceremony for Mr. Putin in Havana
in 2014.CreditIsmael
Francisco/Associated Press
Image
In
Havana’s harbor, men fishing
near the Russian warship,
Viktor, Leonov, in 2015.CreditRamon
Espinosa/Associated Press
As a
candidate, Donald Trump faulted
the Obama administration’snormalization policy as
“a very weak agreement” and
threatened to scrap it on reaching
the White House. Weeks after he
won the election, in late November
2016, the American embassy
in Havana found itself battling a
mysterious crisis.
Diplomats
and their families recounted
high-pitched sounds in homes
and hotel rooms at times intense
enough to incapacitate. Long-term,
the symptoms included nausea,
crushing headaches, fatigue,
dizziness, sleep problems and
hearing loss.
The
State Department filed diplomatic
protests, and the Cuban government
denied involvement. In May, the
F.B.I. opened an investigation and
its agents began visiting Havana a
half year after the incidents
began. The last major one hit that
summer, in August,
giving the agents relatively
little time to gather clues.
Video
00:00
13:36
TIMES
DOCUMENTARIESBy
Jonah M. Kessel,
Melissa Chan and
John Woo13:36How an
Unexplained
Incident Shaped
U.S. Policy on
Cuba
In 2016, diplomats at
the United States Embassy in
Havana were mysteriously stricken.
Was it an attack? There is no
official explanation, but the
episode has played a big role in
America’s current political
disengagement with Cuba.Published On
In
September 2017, the Trump
administration warned travelers
away from Cuba and ordered home roughly
half the diplomatic personnel.
Rex
W. Tillerson, who was then the
secretary of state, said the
embassy’s staff had been targeted
deliberately. But he refrained
from blaming Cuba, and federal
officials held out the possibility
that a third party may have been
responsible.
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In early
October, President Trump
expelled 15 Cuban diplomats,
producing a chill between the
nations. Administration critics
said the White House was using the
health issue as a pretext to
end President Barack Obama’s
reconciliation policy.
The day
after the expulsions, the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee held a
closed, top secret hearing on
the Cuba situation. Three State
Department officials testified, as
did an unnamed senior official of
the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Hypothesis
Image
Beatrice A. Golomb, a
medical doctor and professor of
medicine at the University of
California, San Diego, here in a
beachside office, argues that
microwave strikes can explain the
diplomatic ills.CreditTara Pixley for The New
York Times
Early
this year, in January, the spooky
impact of microwaves on the human
brain never came up during an
open Senate hearing on
the Cuba crisis.
But in a
scientific paper that same month, James C. Lin of
the University of Illinois, a
leading investigator of the Frey
effect, described the
diplomatic ills as plausibly
arising from microwave beams. Dr.
Lin is the editor-in-chief of Bio
Electro Magnetics, a peer-reviewed
journal that explores the
effects of radio waves and
electromagnetic fields on living
things.
In his
paper, he said high-intensity
beams of microwaves could have
caused the diplomats to experience
not just loud noises but nausea,
headaches and vertigo, as well as
possible brain-tissue injury. The
beams, he added, could be fired
covertly, hitting “only the
intended target.”
In
February, ProPublica in a lengthy
investigation mentioned that
federal investigators were
weighing the microwave theory.
Separately, it told of an
intriguing find. The wife of a
member of the embassy staff, it
reported, had looked outside her
home after hearing the disturbing
sounds and seen a van speeding
away.
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A dish
antenna could fit easily into a
small van.
The
medical team that studied the Cuba
diplomats ascribed the symptoms
in the March JAMA study to
“an unknown energy source” that
was highly directional. Some
personnel, it noted, had covered
their ears and heads but
experienced no sound reduction.
The team said the
diplomats appeared to have
developed signs of concussion
without having received any blows
to the head.
In May, reports emerged that
American diplomats in China had
suffered similar traumas.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the medical
details of the two groups
"very similar” and “entirely
consistent" with one another. By
late June, the State Department
had evacuated at least 11
Americans from China.
To date,
the most detailed medical case for
microwave strikes has been made
by Beatrice A. Golomb,
a medical doctor and professor of
medicine at the University of
California, San Diego. In a
forthcoming paper to be published
in October in Neural Computation,
a peer-reviewed journal of the
MIT Press, she lays out potential
medical evidence for Cuban
microwave strikes.
She
compared the symptoms of the
diplomats in Cuba to those
reported for individuals said to
be suffering
from radio-frequency sickness. The
health responses of the two
groups, Dr. Golomb wrote,
“conform closely.”
In
closing, she argued that “numerous
highly specific features” of the
diplomatic incidents “fit the
hypothesis” of a microwave attack,
including the Frey-type production
of disturbing sounds.
Scientists
still disagree over what hit the
diplomats. Last month, JAMA ran four letters critical
of the March study, some faulting
the report for ruling out mass
hysteria.
But
Mr. Zaid, the Washington lawyer,
who represents eight of the
diplomats and family members, said
microwave attacks may have injured
his clients.
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“It’s
sort of naïve to think this just
started now,” he said. Globally,
he added, covert strikes with the
potent beams appear to have been
going on for decades.
Francisco
Palmieri, a State Department
official, was asked during the open Senate hearing if
“attacks against U.S. personnel in
Cuba” had been raised with Moscow.
“That is
a very good question,” Mr.
Palmieri replied. But addressing
it, he added, would require “a
classified setting.”
For his
part, Mr. Frey says he doubts the
case will be solved anytime soon.
The novelty of the crisis, its
sporadic nature and the foreign
setting made it hard for federal
investigators to gather clues and
draw conclusions, he said, much
less file charges.
“Based
on what I know,” he remarked, “it
will remain a mystery.”
William J. Broad is a
science journalist and senior
writer. He joined The Times in
1983, and has shared two
Pulitzer Prizes with his
colleagues, as well as an Emmy
Award and a DuPont Award. @WilliamJBroad