WASHINGTON — The CIA doesn’t believe that a foreign adversary is engaged in a global campaign targeting U.S. personnel wielding a secret weapon, intelligence officials revealed this week. But the agency still cannot explain a core group of over two dozen cases — including those in Cuba that drove the phenomenon into the public consciousness over five years ago.
Several cases that occurred in the Cuban capital in 2016 that gave the series of anomalous health incidents its moniker, “Havana syndrome,” remain at the core of an intelligence analysis that national security officials say has zeroed in on a subset of unexplained events.
The cases still under examination — in an analysis that continues to be led by a senior CIA officer who previously led the hunt for Osama bin Laden — remain a mystery and include clusters in a handful of locations. Officials have not ruled out that these episodes are the result of targeted attacks by a foreign actor.
Intelligence officials who doubled down on their probe in the early months of the Biden administration thought from the outset that the prospect of a sophisticated, worldwide campaign, utilizing a weapon the United States neither knew of nor understood, was highly improbable, one official said.
But as the number of cases grew, leaders in the administration and intelligence community adapted their approach to encourage the re porting of all potential cases as quickly as possible.
U.S. officials — especially those overseas — who experienced the sudden onset of heat, pressure or a painful sound in the ears, were instructed to move away from their immediate area and report their symptoms immediately to newly established health offices and hot lines.
That encouragement of reporting resulted in a slew of newly reported cases — and the CIA found that most could be reasonably explained by other medical or environmental causes.
Throughout their search for answers, the intelligence community did not pick up any signals intelligence or other communications traffic that indicated a foreign power was coordinating attacks worldwide. Sources and defectors did not come forward with plausible explanations.
But the lack of an explanation for a core group of remaining cases continues to puzzle and concern government and intelligence officials. “We have not ruled out the involvement of a foreign actor in these cases,” one official said.
The Biden administration set up a panel of experts last spring to study what sort of device could possibly cause these symptoms to occur. That panel is finalizing its report, according to an official familiar with the matter.
“While we have reached some significant interim findings, we are not done,” CIA Director Bill Burns said in a statement. “We will continue the mission to investigate these incidents and provide access to world-class care for those who need it.
“While underlying causes may differ, our officers are suffering real symptoms,” he added.
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