Despite clashes over reality of Havana Syndrome, CIA agents have been paid for injuries

A CIA officer stationed in Belgrade and her baby. Members of a U.S. intelligence tech team sent to Bogota. A female intelligence officer in Frankfurt.

These CIA agents, who are still active and whose details have not been previously reported, have been quietly receiving compensation for sustaining brain injuries associated with “anomalous health incidents” — the U.S. government’s term for what has come to be known as Havana Syndrome.

Intelligence agencies have said it is unlikely that a foreign adversary has been attacking American officers around the world. They publicly said Havana Syndrome could be explained away by environmental factors, previous conditions or stress. At the same time, the CIA and other federal agencies are paying compensation to these officers precisely because they had the kind of brain injury that cannot be explained by any of those circumstances.

And it all happened when they were working in very different places around the world.

Victims of Havana Syndrome incidents, first happening in Cuba and later in several other countries, have reported feeling a strange noise or pressure coming from a specific direction and developed symptoms similar to a traumatic brain injury.

One case of an officer recently receiving compensation seems to push the Havana Syndrome timeline back to 2014 — appearing first not in Cuba, but in Europe.

Sources familiar with the cases who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter told the Miami Herald the CIA officer received compensation for an “anomalous health incident” when she was working in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2014. The first recorded incident was previously believed to have happened in Havana in late 2016.

To receive the one-time payments, officers must comply with requirements in the Havana Act, a law passed by Congress in 2021, including providing medical records showing they sustained brain injuries while on duty.

One of the sources said there are several cases of CIA agents affected who were probably known to Russian intelligence because their work involved Russia or were stationed in places where Russian spies operate with relative ease, including Cuba, China and Europe.

That’s the case of a female officer stationed in Belgrade, Serbia, at the time of the incident in 2021 who previously worked on matters related to Russia. She and her months-old baby had to be evacuated, and both had brain injuries, the sources said. The Wall Street Journal reported the CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia for injuries in connection with the Havana Syndrome at the time but did not provide any details of the case.

Two CIA officers in a tech team who were sent to investigate reports of Havana Syndrome incidents in Bogota in 2021 and were themselves “hit” also received compensation, the sources said. They also won a long battle to obtain workers’ compensation from the Department of Labor. To obtain workers’ compensation, a program that covers medical treatments, the agency had to accept they suffered a traumatic brain injury at work.

Under the Havana Act, the CIA made one-time payments of up to $187,300 in 2022 or $195,00 in 2023 to officers injured in Havana, Moscow, Vienna and other places who demonstrated “an inability to work, sustain relationships, perform cognitively or physically, or other factors indicative of severe brain injury,” according to agency regulations. In 2024, compensation will be up to $204,000.

After this story was published online, a CIA spokesperson on Friday pointed to the Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment published earlier this month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the latest evaluation of anomalous health incidents.

According to the report, the intelligence community still assesses that the symptoms reported by the U.S. personnel in connection to these incidents “were the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary,” though “these findings do not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported.”

The report also said the intelligence community is still investigating these incidents, “particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis..”

“We continue to prioritize or work on such incidents, allocating resources and expertise across the government, pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and seeking information to fill the gaps we have identified,” the report adds.

More than seven years into the Havana Syndrome affair, the lack of timely diagnosis and study of the victims and the lack of information-sharing across U.S. government agencies have resulted in contradictory scientific research and government reports.

A team of University of Pennsylvania doctors who studied Havana Syndrome patients injured in Cuba and published the results in a 2019 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found significant brain anomalies in that group that were not a result of past traumatic brain injuries. But the authors of a recent National Institutes of Health study found no trace of brain injuries.

Intelligence officials first hinted in 2018 that they suspected Russia was a possible culprit. A study commissioned by the U.S. government found that commercially available technology using pulsed electromagnetic energy could cause the array of symptoms seen in Havana Syndrome victims. But in March 2023, analysts from seven U.S. spy agencies that put together an intelligence assessment said they could not attribute the incidents to a foreign adversary. However, they disagreed about how sure they were of the conclusions.

Despite that assessment, the U.S. Defense Department is still investigating the incidents, and the Defense Health Agency developed protocols to diagnose and treat Havana Syndrome in a way similar to how doctors treat concussions.

Tricare, a healthcare program managed by the Defense Health Agency for U.S. military personnel, regards anomalous health incidents as “counterintelligence incidents.”

“Your supporting counterintelligence office will contact you for a debrief on the incident,” its website advises those seeking care.

Though they appreciate their compensation, victims of the Havana Syndrome have told the Herald they can’t understand why the government seems to be holding two opposing positions at once.

“I point to Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, which suggests that opposites cannot be true at the same time,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired senior CIA official who was deputy chief for operations in Europe and Eurasia when he was injured in Moscow in one the incidents. He received compensation under the Havana Act for an injury in the line of duty.

“This compensation was based specifically on a formal traumatic brain injury diagnosis from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which included the statement from my doctors that I did not have a pre-existing condition,” he said. “Yet the U.S. government continues to insist, from the various reports including from the Director of National Intelligence and now the National Institutes of Health, that, in effect, nothing whatsoever happened to me. This simply makes no sense.”

Participants in the NIH study that found no traces of brain injuries in Havana Syndrome patients raised several complaints, including allegations of bias and mishandling of their medical data on the part of the NIH researchers. Dr. David Relman, a prominent Stanford University professor who led two other government-commissioned studies on Havana Syndrome, pointed out several limitations in the NIH research, including that some imaging and blood tests were after too much time had passed to show or measure the injuries.

A scientist involved in previous imaging studies of Havana Syndrome patients said the main problem with the NIH study is that it mixed groups of people who were injured in different countries at different times, and some even had already gone through rehabilitation.

“The NIH group mixes people from everywhere and finds nothing,” the scientist said. “It’s not scientific to do something like this.”

The NIH study, the scientist said, misrepresents itself as a study trying to replicate the results from the one conducted at Penn with victims injured in Cuba, but only 28% of the sample of people they used correspond to the patients studied by the Penn team, “and most of that 28% had received extensive therapy.”

“This one study doesn’t change anything,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said of the NIH study. “We must continue to fully understand what these Havana Syndrome victims experienced. I remain committed to ensuring these individuals have full access to the healthcare and compensation they deserve.”

The House Intelligence Committee recently launched a formal investigation into how U.S. spy agencies handled the investigation of the Havana Syndrome. The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been gathering testimonies in recent months.

“We need to determine why, how, who, or what is responsible for these possible directed energy attacks,” Rubio said.

On Sunday, CBS News’ 60 Minutes will air a segment on the Havana Syndrome. According to a press release, “For the first time, sources tell 60 Minutes they have evidence that a U.S. adversary may be involved.”