This report by the National Academies of Sciences has apparently been around for a few months but it wasn’t until last Friday that it was available to the public. It concludes that “Havana Syndrome” was likely caused by pulsed microwaves:

The committee found the unusual presentation of acute, directional or location-specific early phase signs, symptoms and observations reported by DOS employees to be consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy. Many of the chronic, nonspecific symptoms are also consistent with known RF effects such as dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive deficits and memory loss.

The report adds that, “Studies published in the open literature more than a half-century ago and over the subsequent decades by Western and Soviet sources provide circumstantial support for this possible mechanism.”

In October, GQ Magazine reported that government employees have continued to “get hit” by these attacks in the past year. In fact, the number of places where Americans have been hit has expanded beyond Havana, Moscow and China. More recent attacks have taken place in Australia, London and even Arlington, Virginia.

Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.

According to the source, this had happened to the staffer before. In August 2019, she had accompanied John Bolton, who was then the national security adviser, on a trip to London.

While the report is somewhat confident about what is happening, it does not reach any firm conclusions about who is responsible. However, the CIA did put together some possible evidence in that regard:

A source directly familiar with the matter told NBC News the CIA, using mobile phone location data, had determined that some Russian intelligence agents who had worked on microwave weapons programs were present in the same cities at the same time that CIA officers suffered mysterious symptoms. CIA officials consider that a promising lead but not conclusive evidence.

Today NBC News published a story about one of the people who experienced such an attack. Marc Polymeropoulos was a CIA agent for 26 years but in 2017 during a trip to Moscow he woke up and found himself unable to stand without falling over:

“I couldn’t stand up,” he said. “I was falling over. I had an incredible sense of nausea and ringing in my ears. I was, frankly, terrified.”

Polymeropoulos, who granted his first television interview to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell for the TODAY show Monday, never felt right again, and he came to believe he was among the American diplomats and spies who suffered from the so-called Havana Syndrome, the mysterious affliction that first cropped up among officers at the American embassy in Cuba in 2016…

Polymeropoulos was the CIA’s deputy chief of operations for the Europe/Eurasia Mission Center when he went to Moscow, a job that includes overseeing operations against Russia.

If what happened to him was in fact a Russian attack, it did its job. He cut short his CIA career at 50, and not a day goes by when he doesn’t experience a headache, he says…

The State Department appears to be downplaying this report, suggesting it’s not conclusive. I hope they are taking this more seriously in private than they are in public. It can’t be an accident that people experience the same sounds and symptoms, all happen to work for the CIA. And given that Putin’s Russia has no hesitation about trying to murder former Russian spies and opposition figures using nerve agents, there’s no reason to think they would balk at this kind of less than lethal attacks on CIA agents.

Here’s NBC News’ story on the new report: