Cuba sonic weapons mystery grows: new details on what befell US diplomats
This is the land of poisoned cigars, exploding seashells and covert subterfuge by Washington and Havana, where the unimaginable in espionage has often been all too real
The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonising sound hit him again. It was as if he had walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room.
Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 US victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top US diplomat has called them “health attacks”. New details indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with pinpoint specificity, baffling US officials who say the facts and the physics do not add up.
“None of this has a reasonable explanation,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA official who served in Havana long before America reopened an embassy there. “It’s just mystery after mystery after mystery.”
Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the State Department and US intelligence agencies involved in the investigation.
Cuba has never, nor would it ever, allow that the Cuban territory be used for any action against accredited diplomatic agents or their families, without exception
Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the US government initially realised. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August – nine months after symptoms were first reported.