FILE – Representative Jim Himes speaks in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 1, 2023.
The CIA also challenged the report’s conclusions while rejecting accusations that it sought to hinder lawmakers in their investigation.
“Any suggestion that we are withholding information that would shed new light on this complex and difficult issue could not be further from the truth,” a CIA official told VOA, agreeing to share details on the condition of anonymity.
“No one cares more about understanding this than we do,” the official said. “These are our friends and colleagues.”
“We applied the agency’s very best operational, analytic and technical tradecraft and our very best personnel to what is one of the largest and most intensive investigations in the agency’s history,” the official added.
Yet despite the insistence by U.S. intelligence officials that most cases of Havana Syndrome can be explained by a combination of preexisting medical conditions and environmental and technical factors, experts and outside investigations have raised persistent doubts.
A February 2022 report by a panel of experts warned that the core symptoms in a small number of cases were “distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature” and suggested some sort of device must be responsible.
“Pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics,” the 2022 report said.
And an investigation in April by CBS’ 60 Minutes, Germany’s Der Spiegel and The Insider also found there is reason to believe that the U.S. intelligence assessment came to the wrong conclusion.
The news organizations said a review of travel documents and mobile phone records, along with eyewitness testimony and interviews with multiple U.S. officials and victims, shows that Russia is likely to blame.
Specifically, the investigation tied numerous reports of Havana Syndrome with the presence of members of Unit 29155 of Russia’s military intelligence service, known for its role in sabotage and assassinations. It also found that members of GRU Unit 29155 had received awards and promotions for their work on sound or radio frequency-based directed energy weapons.
But the CIA official who spoke to VOA again rejected the notion that Russia was behind such attacks, despite the CIA director’s initial suspicions.
Director William Burns “had his own assumptions when he became director — so much so, that he even warned his Russian counterparts in late 2021,” the official said.
But the official said the CIA’s work “indicates that some of our assumptions about early AHI reports, including in and after Havana, were incorrect.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-06 05:45:00
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