Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. We begin the show in Havana, Cuba in the fall of 2016.

Tony: I'm just laying on my bed with my laptop next to me, and I'm watching this show.

Micah Loewinger: Former CIA Officer going by the pseudonym, Tony.

Tony: Then all of the dogs in the neighborhood start barking, and then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom. It started very, very loud. Ear-piercingly loud. The pressure started in the head, and then the discomfort in the ear. Then the severe, severe ear pain started. I liken it to if you take a Q-tip and you bounce it off your ear, you get that jarring, ah. Imagine taking a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum.

Micah Loewinger: Tony says the sound seemed directional. He stopped hearing it when he moved out of his bedroom, but that was just the beginning.

Tony: I was at the top physical, psychological, emotional place I could have ever been in my life, then I was gang-hooded in my job, and within six months, I was a zombie and non-functional as a human being.

Micah Loewinger: He was one of the first patients for what we now call Havana Syndrome. A mysterious affliction that seem to spread among American diplomats in Cuba, and then across the globe.

Jen Munson: I felt paralyzed. I think it's just one of those, you're in a dream and you can't move. That's how it felt.

Micah Loewinger: These are the voices of American diplomats interviewed for a podcast series from Vice called Havana Syndrome. What was done to them? Were they being attacked? If so, by whom, with what kind of weapon? In this hour which first aired earlier this year, you'll hear about three audio mysteries, and about the people trying to make sense of sonic clues. Some audible, some not. Sounds that hum and buzz all through our natural and built environments. We'll start with Havana Syndrome, a seven-year-old mystery still driving headlines.

Reporter 2: A new assessment by US intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana Syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

Reporter 3: There's nothing in this latest report that disproves the possibility that this is from a foreign adversary which is what we're [crosstalk]--

Micah Loewinger: The Intercept reported in April that the Pentagon had requested $36 million to treat patients of Havana Syndrome and to continue studying its origins. That story came days after Fox News ran this prime-time segment.

Reporter 4: Do you feel confident that the government is covering this up?

News Interviewee: It sure sounds like it to me, because an attack on American embassy personnel is an attack on the United States. It's essentially an act of war.

Micah Loewinger: Which is to say, there are a range of theories about what happened. Which theory you go with comes down to who you put your faith in.

Jon Lee Anderson: The first victims of Havana Syndrome were aflicted by a similar range of symptoms, jarring paralyzing pain, a sound in their heads that apparently wasn't audible to others as far as they knew but was to them.

Micah Loewinger: This is Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer with the New Yorker who traveled to Havana with Adam Entous, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, to try to solve the mystery once and for all.

Adam Entous: It was the first time Jon Lee and I had been on the island together.

Jon Lee Anderson: Havana's my favorite city in the world and I hadn't been back in a long time.

Micah Loewinger: They laid out their findings in that podcast series from Vice. Adam and Jon Lee say the story really began in December 2014 before anyone got sick.

Barack Obama: Today, the United States of America is changing it's relationship with the people of Cuba. The most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.

Reporter 3: The president ordered the opening of an embassy, a US embassy in Havana for the first time in more than 50 years.

Micah Loewinger: Then in the Fall of 2016, almost two dozen US spies and diplomats reported experiencing a similar array of symptoms. The story went public at a State Department press briefing on August 9th, 2017.

Female Speaker 2: Some US government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba on official duties, they've reported some incidents. We don't have any definitive answers about the source or the cause of what we consider to be incidents.

Micah Loewinger: The words "attack and weapon" weren't used by the State Department, but within 48 hours, the media coverage had taken on a distinctly militarized tone.

Reporter 4: It reads like a Cold War spy novel.

Reporter 5: This was a terrorist attack against US Diplomats and their families in Cuba. They used a sonic weapon which is--

Reporter 6: Who's responsible for the acoustic attacks? Is it Cuba, is it Russia? Who's to blame for that?

Rex Tillerson: We've not been able to determine who is to blame. We do hold--

Micah Loewinger: That last voice was Donald Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was leading the administration's dismantling of the State Department.

Reporter 7: Just some absolutely stunning news out of the State Department in what's being described as the White House cleaning house.

Reporter 8: Latest plans from the administration call for a 37% cut to the agency's budget. 37%.

Micah Loewinger: Trump and his anti-communist surrogates seemed pretty happy to exploit the ambiguities of the Havana mystery.

Male Speaker 3: We can say that we don't know how it happened. We can even say we can't know for sure who did it, but two things we know for sure, people were hurt and the Cuban government knows who did it.

Reporter 9: The Trump administration announced Friday that is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana.

Jon Lee Anderson: Donald Trump is busily tearing down any aspect of Obama's legacy he can find-

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee Anderson.

Jon Lee Anderson: -including, of course, the [unintelligible 00:07:04] with Cuba. Then the reports of the Havana Syndrome, it's used publicly as the reason for which the embassy is finally closed down.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, the US government reached out to a group of physicians at the University of Pennsylvania to study the Havana patients.

Reporter 10: Doctors treating the victims have found abnormalities in the white matter of their brains. This is the most specific finding so far about about physical damage caused by those sonic attacks.

Adam Entous: Dr. Smith at the University of Pennsylvania is an expert in studying and helping people who suffer from concussions.

Micah Loewinger: Adam Entous.

Adam Entous: He sees similarities between this kind of damage and what he sees in the concussion cases involving professional sports players.

Micah Loewinger: Over the next couple of years, other diplomats and intelligence officers continue to report incidences, and not just in Havana.

Reporter 11: There are now more than 130 possible cases of Havana Syndrome including in China and Russia.

Micah Loewinger: In Vienna, even outside the White House. In their podcast, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson explore the popular explanations for these incidents, like the sonic weapon theory. A team of researchers in the UK and the US quickly identified this sound which was recorded by a patient in Havana as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.

Male Speaker 4: The Cubans brought me in to meet with their team of scientists that were trying to analyze it. In that meeting, they said that they believed that it was crickets.

Micah Loewinger: Many experts argued that sound can't cause brain damage, not without deafening everybody in the area. If not a sonic weapon, then what?

Reporter 12: 19 top experts from The National Academies of Scientists conclude, the most likely explanation, directed pulsed microwave energy.

Female Speaker 3: Microwave energy from some external source. They don't really know what that source is.

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee Anderson sees some Cold War precedent for this theory.

Jon Lee Anderson: There was this long history of the Russians barraging the US embassy in Moscow, going back to virtually the Stalin years

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee and Adam interviewed officials who had been stationed at the Moscow embassy in the '50s when microwave attacks occurred.

Jon Lee Anderson: The reason behind the KGB barraging the US embassy with microwaves wasn't apparently to necessarily harm the Americans, it was directed at some interference With CIA's own electronics, maybe eavesdropping equipment located inside the US embassy buildings.

Robert Bartholomew: If somebody dowses your room right now with microwaves, your Wi-Fi system would probably shut down. There's a good chance your computer would turn off. Microwaves would literally heat your brain.

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew is a journalist and a professor of medical sociology at the University of Auckland. He does not think it was a microwave weapon.

Robert Bartholomew: They asked those early victims to record their attacks, and they did. Microwaves cannot be recorded.

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew told me he was really frustrated by all the coverage of that University of Pennsylvania study, the one that found white matter changes in the brains of the early patients.

Robert Bartholomew: That study should never have been published. White matter tract changes are common in everything from migraine, to depression, to normal aging. Brain anomalies do not equate to brain damage.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to any of the foreign adversary theories, Bartholomew isn't convinced.

Robert Bartholomew: For six years, the US government went down a rabbit hole searching for secret weapons and foreign conspiracies. When they reached the bottom of that hole, all they found were rabbits.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, his analysis aligns with a report published last month from several intelligence agencies, which--

Reporter 13: Found it, "Very unlikely a foreign adversary was responsible, very unlikely a weapon or any device purposely or accidentally caused the symptoms, and there is not even a consistent set of physical injuries that could be characterized as Havana syndrome." Now, they're very--

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew says that in his opinion, the best explanation for the symptoms experienced by all those spies and diplomats is the one he wrote about in his 2020 book, Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness, and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.

Robert Bartholomew: It is a collective stress response that's based on a belief. We all have beliefs, therefore we are all potential victims.

Micah Loewinger: He points to the original Havana patients who lived incredibly stressful lives.

Robert Bartholomew: When American diplomats and spies have been in Cuba in the past, they had a long history of harassment. You'd wake up in the morning, come downstairs, and you'd find cigarette butts on your kitchen table, and you don't smoke. Or you'd see dog poo on your kitchen floor, and you don't have a pet. At the same time they were told, "You're being targeted with a sonic weapon, and don't stand or sleep near windows." That prolonged anxiety can trigger anomalies in the brain, and that's exactly what happened in the Cuban cohort.

Micah Loewinger: That's not to say he discounts their pain.

Robert Bartholomew: Their symptoms are as real as any medical condition out there and they are genuinely suffering, but if you've been told you have brain damage from some secret weapon, you're not going to get well as fast as you would if you believed that it was psychogenic in origin.

Micah Loewinger: You've described mass psychogenic illness as one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized conditions in medicine. In earlier decades, it was commonly called mass psychogenic hysteria, and that term "hysteria" is very loaded because historically, doctors had said it came from a sickness caused by a "wandering uterus" that affected primarily women. I'd love to hear you respond specifically to the idea that there is this fraught history of telling people, and especially female patients, that they are not experiencing what they say they're experiencing and that it's just stress.

Robert Bartholomew: Sure. Look, I have never claimed that the victims are crazy or are suffering from some type of mental disorder. Mass psychogenic illness is much more common than people realize. It affects normal healthy people. Adam Entous recently described Havana syndrome victims as serious people who had no incentive to make up a story. That shows me that he doesn't understand mass psychogenic illness. Mass psychogenic illness is not people who are crazy, or mentally ill, or weak minded. It is a collective stress response based on a belief.

Micah Loewinger: In the Vice podcast, Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of the UPenn study, told Adam and Jon Lee why he didn't buy the psychogenic theory.

Dr. Douglas Smith: Mass hysteria, you have to be essentially, contaminated or influenced by somebody else with the same symptoms. That doesn't work here because many of these patients had never met the other patients. They just independently had the same kind of history of some kind of exposure, and then they had these symptoms, but independently described the same type of story without ever seeing another patient.

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew says that mass psychogenic illness is not a conscious collusion between patients, but it's a moot point in this case because--

Robert Bartholomew: The majority of cases in Havana Syndrome, whether in Cuba or around the world, was not mass psychogenic illness. It was simply people being told they might be the targets, and then redefining an array of preexisting health conditions under a new label, Havana Syndrome. To be a part of this in history is one of the most exciting things.

Micah Loewinger: Some of the patients bristled at this theory on 60 Minutes last year, saying their suffering was sidelined by officials who didn't see evidence of a weapon.

Male Speaker 4: I'm tired of the gaslighting that keeps happening from the US government because I'm watching new colleagues and friends that I've trained with being sent to these countries and coming back a shell of their former selves. We need to help them and we need to stop this.

Adam Entous: The work of Dr. Bartholomew and others who have been pushing this psychogenic argument,-

Micah Loewinger: Adam Entous.

Adam Entous: -they're providing an armchair analysis without actually having done any hands-on research with these individuals.

Robert Bartholomew: It's actually even better to look at it from afar-

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew.

Robert Bartholomew: -because you've got people who got so close to these victims saying things like, "Oh, I've talked to these victims. They're really suffering." You want a degree of emotional separation. Wherever we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

Adam Entous: Seriously? The criticism here from Bartholomew is that we interviewed the patients? Would you want us to cover the earthquake in Turkey without interviewing the victims? You do really want to talk to the affected. That's the job of a journalist.

Micah Loewinger: I don't think it's simply interviewing the patients. Some of the patients seemed primed to believe that it was an attack.

Adam Entous: You're right that some of the patients, more than others, have strong opinions and beliefs about what they believe happened to them without evidence. They can describe the experience that they had, but they have no unique information about what caused it. That said, it could be psychogenic in some cases. I was agnostic when I started on this process, and frankly, I still remain agnostic today.

Micah Loewinger: Adam's reporting partner, Jon Lee, says on the podcast that he believes a contingent within the Cuban government could have conspired with the Russians in Havana to target American diplomats with a microwave weapon.

Jon Lee: If Russia had the technology and it had worked in Havana, why not take it on the road? Especially if your goal in life is to fuck with the US. It's about messing with our heads anywhere they can.

Adam Entous: I hear what you're saying, Jon Lee, but I really think we need to stick with the facts, and there's just not that many of them. What do we know? We know we have a bunch of people who say they've been hurt, but the CIA hasn't been able to find any communications intercepts in which officials in Russia or Cuba talk about what they did. I think it's very strange that they haven't been able to collect anything like that.

Micah Loewinger: Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jon Lee how he felt about ending up on the same side of the debate as Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, who he interviewed for their podcast.

John Bolton: Certainly, from all outward appearances, it was an attack on American personnel, first in Cuba, then in China. We can't tolerate that.

Micah Loewinger: This is a guy who has a reputation as a war mongerer. He seems like the exact kind of person who would be very invested in there being a secret Russian weapon behind all of this.

Jon Lee: I totally agree with you. He's almost a cartoonish anti-communist cold warrior. He didn't really make me feel more convinced of my hypothesis at all, although he echoed some of the same conclusions. The Russians are the most neurotically belligerent to the Americans and they're the only ones, again, who had something relatively similar in terms of experimenting with microwaves against Americans in the past. Two plus two equals four, basically, for me.

Micah Loewinger: For me, it just doesn't add up. After listening to their podcast and reporting this piece this past spring, I'm leaning towards the conclusion that reporter Jack Hitt came to when he investigated this story for Vanity Fair in 2019.

Jack Hitt: I think the most likely explanation,-

Micah Loewinger: Jack Hitt is speaking here on the New Republic podcast.

Jack Hitt: -the Occam's razor explanation, one that accounts for all of the facts as we know them in the simplest possible way, but for journalists the least satisfying, is what's known as mass psychogenic illness. Conversion disorder is the other phrase that is often used.

Micah Loewinger: Look, I don't know what it feels like to be a spy or diplomat living abroad, facing regular harassment, or what the symptoms of the Havana patients felt like. We can study the arguments for this and that theory, but we can't say with certainty what happened to them, but oddly enough, while I was working on this episode, I had a minor mental breakdown and I had to take time off from work. I think it's burnout, and I'm working on it. I know, [mimics whining child] woe me is me, another millennial journalist who feels bad for himself, but that's really how I felt.

The more I watched and heard interviews with the Havana syndrome patients, the more I came to see this as a story about the physical and mental toll of work. A toll we're taught to minimize, explain away and hide from one another.

Jack Hitt: It's called conversion disorder because intense stress under pressure is converted into real physical illness. Really, the key thing that all of these conversion disorder scientists and doctors that I talked to said, is that these are real symptoms. Conversion disorder makes you sick.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, how the police can use that buzzing sound from your fridge to help solve crimes. This is On the Media.