Since late 2016, American spies and diplomats posted abroad have been suffering from a mysterious ailment called Havana Syndrome. The first outbreak was in Cuba, but it has since been diagnosed all over the world.
What is the cause? One school of thought argues that it is caused by directed microwave attacks made by a hostile foreign government (suspects include Cuba, Russia and China). Writing in Puck, Julia Ioffe strongly articulates that perspective, interviewing various intelligence sources who believe with “moderate confidence” that this is a Russian attack which warrants a response. Ioffe’s article concludes:
So far, civilian leaders feel the evidence is circumstantial and the product of a process of elimination, and therefore not enough to assign blame publicly. But some in the intelligence community are getting restless, eager to see the people who wounded so many of their comrades punished. Even if the intelligence is “medium confidence,” one member of the community told me, that should be enough to go on. “We got bin Laden with medium confidence.”
But the argument for “medium confidence” is hardly reassuring. Afterall, the fictitious notion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was granted the same degree of certitude, and used to justify a senseless war.
An alternative theory, offered by Robert Bartholomew and Robert Baloh, is that Havana Syndrome is in fact a mass sociogenic illness caused by stress and amplified by media attention.
To get a handle on the debate I turned to Natalie Shure, a Boston-based researcher who has in The New Republic persuasively criticized hyperbolic claims about Havana Syndrome made by the intelligence community and the mainstream press.
A skeptic of the mysterious secret weapon hypothesis, Natalie offers a very fair minded survey of the evidence and competing theories.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Podcast: A Disease of Empire