The US embassy in Havana, which was mostly evacuated in 2017.Emily Michot/Miami Herald/TNS via ZUMA
This is the damnedest story. You remember that business with the American diplomats in Havana all developing headaches and other cognitive difficulties? Nobody ever figured out what was really going on, but it was widely believed to be the result of some kind of attack using microwaves or some such. Apparently, the same thing has now happened in both China and Russia:
What began as strange sounds and symptoms among more than a dozen American officials and their family members in China in 2018 has turned into a diplomatic mystery spanning multiple countries and involving speculation about secret high-tech weapons and foreign attacks.
One of the biggest questions centers on whether Trump administration officials believe that Mr. Lenzi and other diplomats in China experienced the same mysterious affliction as dozens of diplomats and spies at the American Embassy in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, which came to be known as Havana Syndrome. American employees in the two countries reported hearing strange sounds, followed by headaches, dizziness, blurred vision and memory loss.
….Similar episodes have been reported by senior C.I.A. officers who visited the agency’s stations overseas, according to three current and former officials and others familiar with the events. That includes Moscow, where Marc Polymeropoulos, a C.I.A. officer who helped run clandestine operations in Russia and Europe, experienced what he believes was an attack in December 2017….Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims, see Russia as the most likely culprit given its history with weapons that cause brain injuries and its interest in fracturing Washington’s relations with Beijing and Havana.
Obviously I have nothing special to say about this. Opinion seems to be split between it being (a) some kind of genuine attack from the Russians or (b) sort of like chronic Lyme disease, which sufferers say is real but doctors say is just a bundle of symptoms with no connection to real Lyme disease. It’s just weird as hell.
