On display in Moscow, the wreckage of pilot Francis Powers' U-2 reconnaissance plane for Muscovites and foreign newsmen to see, as the Soviet launches its most belligerent and American propaganda barrage in recent years. On May 1, 1960, a CIA U-2 spy plane dispatched to take clandestine photos of Soviet missile sites was shot down while flying over the Ural Mountains. The plane's pilot, Francis Gary Powers, ejected and parachuted to safety, only to be immediately captured by the KGB.
For Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, it was a PR bananza. Fresh proof that American imperialists would stop at nothing to spy on his country. The U-2 spy incident triggered a cold war crisis. Khrushchev pulled out of a plan summit in Paris with American president Dwight Eisenhower. But the U.S. was not without its means to fire back in the global PR wars. It fell to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, to do so.
And to make his case, Lodge brought along a surprise prop to demonstrate that when it came to spying, the Soviets didn't exactly have clean hands. At the United Nations, the Security Council debate on Soviet charges of American aggression ends with a sharp final clash between Gromiko and Lodge. And massive, large, covers repeated denials of Soviet spy activities with a concrete and dramatic example.
He tells how the Soviet planted a listening device in America's Moscow embassy concealed inside a wooden carving of the great seal presented as a gift by the Russians. And he and his team here is the plan best on listening device. You can see the antenna in the area and it's right under the beak of the eagle. I might add that it's really quite interesting to write. An interesting device indeed, probably much more so than anybody realized at the time.
In the heavy days after the end of World War II, a Soviet youth group had given the great seal as a gesture of friendship and goodwill to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Avril Harman, and it hung for several years inside the library at Spasohaus, the ambassador's residence. It wasn't until the early 1950s that U.S. officials made a startling discovery. The great seal was bugged and the Soviets were eavesdropping on every conversation the ambassador had.
Well, that particular seal has a had an unwelcome surprise, you know, the Trojan horse. That's John Fitzsimmons. He's a trained engineer who until last year was the deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security. He arranged to meet me and my producer Mark Seaman in his old government office in Northern Virginia, with a spectacular view overlooking the Potomac River, where the great seal itself can be found to this day hanging on the wall.
A real-life Cold War relic that Fitzsimmons informed us when we arrived had never before been seen by any members of the public or the media. At least not since Henry Cabot Lodge briefly displayed it at the United Nations 62 years ago. It had embedded in it a very small listening device. In this seal. Inside that seal. The listening device is actually sitting on the table right next to us here. So where would that listening device have been?
The listening device was installed and we've noticed that at the time that the seal did come apart. There is a milled-out cavity in the middle of the great seal where the listening device was installed. There's a small air hole that goes, I believe, it's from the beak of the great seal through to allow a room audio to enter in and to this very small listening device here. So through this listening device, the Soviets were able to eavesdrop on conversations that the US ambassador was having.
Right. Yeah. The ambassador from time to time would dictate telegrams and memos and so on in his residence. I believe there were multilateral conferences that occurred at that time. I believe the secret is that the secretary of state used that study as well. This is why we do what we do and we can never rest assured that it's not going to happen again. There was one question that hung over the controversy over the great seal. The secret listening device did not have its own power source.
So how exactly did it work? How were the batteries and the bug being activated? The issue was analyzed, studied and picked apart by the FBI, the CIA, and Naval Intelligence. And some officials came to a worrisome theory. The Soviets they argued were using beams of microwaves to control the bug. Microwaves that were being secretly targeted into Spasso House from a nearby transmitter across the street.
In subsequent years, as more Russian bugs were discovered inside the US Embassy itself, and more microwave signals detected, those views hardened into a belief with major national security consequences. That the Soviets were using microwaves, not just for ease-dropping, but also as a weapon to disrupt the work of US diplomats and possibly even control their minds.
So began the controversy over what came to be called the Moscow signal, a cold-walled debate that percolated for decades entirely concealed from the public. If the Soviets had come up with a secret microwave weapon, it was argued surely the United States needed one as well. After all, the country could not sit idly by and allow a microwave gap to develop hindering our national defenses.
This led to years of classified research that went off in some bizarre directions, which I'll tell you about in a moment. But in the meantime, the main point is this. The belief in a microwave super-weapon persisted for years, and even ramped up in the 1990s when a national security agency counterintelligence officer named Mike Beck was convinced he'd been whacked while on a super-secret mission in Russia. And the next morning I couldn't get out of that.
I had, it was fatigue like I've never had before. I felt like a bowl of jelly. All of this relatively obscure Cold War history unquestionably influenced how US officials reacted decades later, when the first reports came in about the strange and debilitating health effects being experienced by US diplomats and intelligence officers in Cuba. Effects that officials and members of Congress were quick to attribute to a hostile attack from a foreign power.
I'm Mike Lysikov and welcome back to this year's season of Conspiracy Land, the strange story of a Vannis Syndrome. This is Episode 2, The Mystery of the Moscow Signal. When you first heard about these reports out of Havana, what did you think? What I first thought was, wow, this sounds strikingly familiar in terms of the response to what was known as the Moscow Signal in the late 1950s and 1960s going all the way up I believe into the early 1970s.
Sharon Weinberger is a Washington journalist who has written extensively about the intersection of science and national security. The first thing that leapt out to her when she heard the initial stories about a Vannis Syndrome was how much they resembled the controversy about the Moscow Signal.
In both cases, there was intense speculation about the existence of some sort of super microwave weapon, and in both cases, the US government shrouded the evidence in secrecy, making it impossible for the public or most scientists to reach any sort of conclusion about what was really going on. In the case of Moscow Signal, US officials discovered that American diplomats in Moscow were being bombarded by microwave radiation by the then Soviet Union.
And initially, the CIA and the US government picked this up, but didn't tell the people who were actually working in the embassy. They wanted to keep it secret. And one of the working theories was that the Soviets were sending this microwave radiation to somehow influence the minds of the CIA spies and the US diplomats working in the embassy. How would microwave radiation influence the minds and behavior of American diplomats?
Well, let me take you back to the early 1960s and the time of the Moscow Signal. It's some explanation of why they jumped to this seemingly bizarre conclusion. There was a lot of research going on at the time, it was the beginnings of research on bio-effects of microwave radiation. We know everybody who has a microwave oven in their house knows that microwaves can be used to heat things up.
But one of the theories that was being studied at the time, both in the Soviet Union, the United States and elsewhere, was that perhaps low level microwave radiation at certain pulses, at certain frequencies could cause other effects. So, you know, not high enough level to hurt tissue to heat things up, but it might have effects on human beings. It might, for example, cause dizziness. But not just dizziness.
Some US intelligence officials, says Weinberger, were convinced the Soviets had developed a sophisticated means of mind control, disrupting the work of US diplomats, causing cryptographers, for example, to bunch their codes, but also to implant sounds and even words into their heads, the better to manipulate them.
In the 1960s, what happened was in response to the Soviet radiation of the US Embassy in Moscow, the Pentagon started a top secret project, initially called Project Pandora, that was looking at whether microwaves could affect the brain and could affect human behavior. From the guinea pigs for Project Pandora, Macock Monkeys.
In a classified laboratory at Walter Reed Medical Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, government scientists collected a handful of Macock Monkeys to test their theory that the Soviets were messing with the heads of US diplomats in spies. In her book, The Imagine Years of War, Weinberger dug into the story of Project Pandora in a chapter she called Monkey Business. So the actual program was run by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This is sort of the far out research, science and technology agency of the Pentagon. They ran the program. The actual work was done at Walter Reed, a special facility was bought with the necessary microwave chambers. They had monkeys and for a number of years, they zap those monkeys. As you would with other animal tests, monkeys are given a task to do and they would zap them of microwave to see, did it interrupt their task? Did the monkeys have problems concentrating? Could they not do things?
Were they not eating regularly? They tried to measure all of these things with controlled tests. And there was a potential military purpose to this, right? Oh, yeah, very much. So the initial purpose of Project Pandora was specifically to see whether the Moscow signal, whether that could indeed be used, was being used to influence the minds of US spies and diplomats in the embassy in Moscow. That was the initial image as the program.
Now the Pentagon official, the DARPA official in charge of the program, it was quite down. It wasn't his area of science, but it was a very ambitious guy. His initial interpretation of the results was absolutely yes, that microwaves were having an effect on the monkeys' behavior, on their minds. And so he advocated a couple of years into the program that we need to move into a weapons program. We need to move into human experimentation.
This is sort of a brain weapon arms race for the Soviet Union. If the Russians were doing it, we had to do it and we had to do it better. Absolutely. Yes, because the Soviets at the time, interestingly, they had much tougher standards, health standards for microwave radiation than the US did. And so one of the working theories was that they knew something we didn't know that they had uncovered some secret of maybe weaponizing microwaves that we didn't know.
So we had to catch up with them and we had to have our brain weapons. But things did not quite turn out the way the warriors at DARPA were hoping. When outside researchers were brought into review how the microwaved monkeys were responding, they had trouble finding much if any correlation between how the macaques responded to their appointed tasks when they were bombarded with microwaves, and how they responded when they weren't bombarded with anything.
The part of Project Pandora that I had anything to do with was a test using primates, macaque monkeys, that were trained to earn their keeps, so to speak. James McOwen was a US Army neuroscientist who was brought into review the performance of the monkeys in Project Pandora. They were to play computer games essentially on very complex behavioral tests that really pushed their cognitive capacities. Also they had to push buttons which would test their eye-hain coordination.
If they accomplished these tasks satisfactorily, they would be fed a little banana pellet that would come down to tube and land in front of them. And this became an issue later on because this banana pellet feeder sometimes would not function properly. So at first, the people running the study believe they've found a correlation between the zapping of microwaves and a deterioration in the monkeys' performance.
Well, the first place, the monkeys were going along pounding away on the keyboard and whatever they were doing, and everyone's in a while they would stop. So the question is, is there stopping a defect of the microwave should not? It was very easy to show that they would stop for a number of reasons. One is if the pellet feeder didn't work and they didn't get rewarded for their performance, they would stop.
If another monkey was moved into the room, I don't know why they would do that, but anyway, this was one of the things that would make them stop. Or if an air conditioner got noisy, this would make them stop. So there were a number of contaminating variables that would correlate sometimes with this work stoppage. So you get brought in and you start reviewing the data. And you actually, by the way, go to watch the monkeys yourself at the lab. My office was at the lab.
And what I found was that you couldn't really say that the effect was this work stoppage was caused by microwaves. But basically, I said this, the reason to doubt that this is an effect. And the notes in the minutes you sent me, I'm looking at the conclusions. There's no convincing evidence of an effect of the special signal on the performance of monkeys. I think that's a fair statement of what I thought at the end of my analysis. Yeah. And I'm glad they agreed with me.
In the end, Project Pandora was a bust. The monkeys did not provide the proof DARPA officials were looking forward to justify the Pentagon trying to develop its own microwave weapon. And remember, everything about these studies was highly classified. And not a word about them, or the US government's concern about Soviet microwave attacks was ever revealed to the public.
Until a few years later, May 1, 1972 to be exact, when famed investigative journalist Jack Anderson blew the cover off of Project Pandora in a piece that ran that day in the Washington Post. Brainwash attempt by Russians read the headline revealing what Anderson called the fantastic details of secret government research that attempted to corroborate that Soviet intelligence might be trying to brainwash American diplomats by bombarding them with microwaves.
To do so, Anderson exposed the Pandora experiments, writing, with an ifty turn of phrase, that the guinea pig monkeys were, quote, trained to perform tasks and then were rewarded with food, much as embassy employees might be rewarded with a dry martini at the end of the day. Anderson accurately reported that the results of Project Pandora were inconclusive. Yet, that did nothing to diminish the concern that top US intelligence officials had about what the Soviets were doing.
Indeed, as Anderson also reported, the subject even came up at a high level summit between US and Soviet leaders. Frank Holley-Busch in Glassboro, New Jersey, where East meets West. President Johnson with AIDS, Rusk, and McNamara awaits his first of two summit talks with Soviet premier, Kosegan.
In June 1967, while the Project Pandora monkey experiments were still underway at Walter Reed, President Lyndon Johnson met with Soviet premier, Alexei Kosegan, for five and a half hours of talks on topics that ranged from the Warren Vietnam conflict in the Middle East and nuclear arms control.
Anderson revealed that Johnson, or somebody else in the US delegation, it's not clear who, directly confronted Kosegan about microwave bombardments at the US Embassy in Moscow, and asked them to cut it out.
It was the clear sign yet that US officials at the highest levels were worried about the issue, and it was a concern that would persist for years as US officials desperately tried to figure out what the Russians were doing, especially after a classic spy versus spy incident that played out in the 1990s. So in 1996, I was sent to a hostile country to perform a survey, a security survey.
Mike Beck was a veteran counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, who, along with a colleague named Chuck, was sent overseas on a highly sensitive mission. To assess the security of a super secret agency listening device, then under construction. He's still not allowed to say the country in question, but it's been widely reported, and we've confirmed it was in fact Russia. When Beck and Chuck proceeded on their mission the day after they arrived, they made a major discovery.
The NSA base being built to snoop on the communications of the Russians was actually directly adjacent through an adjoining wall to a Russian listening post that had been set up to snoop on the NSA, noticing that the Russian facility was unoccupied, Beck took out a hand-carried video camera. And so I videowed the site in some of the interesting ways that the hostile country had built it, but it was definitely set up to attack the site that we were constructing.
That night, Beck and Chuck retired to their hotel room, checking into adjacent rooms. So we went to sleep without doing anything else that night. And the next morning I couldn't get out of bed. I had, it was fatigue like I've never had before. I felt like a bowl of jelly, and I just couldn't get moving. And I had my coffin. It still wasn't helping. So I was able to get out of bed and get moving at one point. How about your colleague? He was somewhat impacted, but he wasn't as bad as I was.
Beck returned to NSA headquarters and briefed his bosses on what had happened, emphasizing the existence of the next door Russian listening device rather than his own unpleasant experience the next morning. But all those unsettling memories of waking up feeling like a bowl of jelly would eventually come rushing back. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease 10 years later in 2006.
And my colleague that went on the trip with me Chuck, he was diagnosed with the same variant of Parkinson's as I had almost within weeks of each other. I consulted with all the most senior people in counterintelligence at my agency and the other agency and they all said that it was definitely not Parkinson's that well Chuck and I got sick at the same time after the trip.
Convince that his medical problems were related to what he experienced in Russia, Beck filed a workers compensation claim with the labor department. He also hired a well-known national security lawyer, Mark Zade, who was finally able to extract a revealing declassified document from the NSA.
It states, and I quote, NSA confirms there is intelligence information from 2012, associating the hostile country to which Mr. Beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill an enemy over time without leaving evidence. That didn't get much attention at the time, but some years later.
I was sitting at my computer at home, checking out the world news and information about the Savannah syndrome victims was posted in a news article and it made the assertion that US government employees that served in Savannah and China were hit with the high-power microwave and it caused them immediate injury incidents where they had problems with balance which I do with Parkinson's.
They had vision problems, they had fatigue problems and they have brain function problems like deficits in short-term memory, long-term memory, brain fog, basically everything that I got it mirrored what they had. So what went through your mind when you read that? I felt relieved that I was no longer one of one, I was one of many.
Next story seems at first blush a compelling one and it got some media attention in the wake of the reports at Acuba and other places around the globe where diplomats and intelligence offices reported being attacked. But it's not exactly the slam dunk confirmation of the presumed Savannah syndrome attacks that some have claimed.
For one thing the declassified NSA report makes a distinction between intelligence information about a microwave weapon of unknown reliability by the way and actual hard evidence of its existence much less what happened to Mike Beck. In the section immediately after the one I read before it states quote, the national security agency has no evidence that such a weapon if it existed and if it was associated with the hostile country in the late 1990s was or was not used against Mr. Beck. End quote.
Indeed when the Washington Post looked into his story in 2017 it quoted the NSA's general counsel as saying the agency has quote, tremendous sympathy for what Beck has gone through. But the general counsel added, we can't manufacture evidence that there's any linkage between his health problems and his service for the government.
The post story also noted that Chuck's family had a history of Parkinson's and when Beck finally got to see doctors last year at Walter Reed he didn't get a whole lot of support. A neurologist to examine him said in a report that any connection between whatever he was exposed to in Russia and the onset of Parkinson's a decade later was quote, only speculation.
As for Chuck's Parkinson's the neurologist wrote it was quote, much much more likely that the two colleagues getting Parkinson's at the same time was quote, only by chance. In short, a coincidence. One more footnote to the story worth mentioning. In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks and the onset of the global war and terror, Pentagon officials resumed their research into weaponizing microwaves. This time seeking to create what they referred to as a voice of God weapon.
Here's Sharon Weinberger again. So the voice of God weapon, which is a bit of, I don't know what to call it, it's an urban myth. It's an idea. And people in the Pentagon will actually use this term voice of God weapon. So it goes back all the way to this what came out of Project Pandora. So at some point over the years, the idea was forwarded that if you could create the sensation of sending words into people's heads, you could make them think they're crazy, that their mind is going crazy.
You could make them think that God is talking to them. You know, lay down your weapons. The ultimate gas lighting. The ultimate gas lighting. But it was all classified, of course. And then she got an intriguing tip. I was told by a Pentagon official who also had an interest in these exotic weaponaries. He's like, look, I can't tell you what they are exactly, but I'm going to give you three code words and go see what you can find out. And these code words were hello, goodbye, and good night.
Have you gotten any documents that even refer to the existence of these programs? So the documents that I have were the Freedom of Information Act request confirming that these programs existed and were classified. And did they use those code words? Hello, goodbye. Yes, they did. They said, hello, goodbye and good night are classified programs. They're properly classified. And you know, we're not going to release the information. But they're called hello, goodbye and good night.
And do they say anything about them at all about that they are involved microwaves? Well, the FOIA denial came from the division of the Air Force that was doing microwave research. So what to make of all this exotic Pentagon research into microwave weapons? To the brief burst of publicity of the 1970s, the controversy over the Moscow signal largely faded from the news.
And the Air Force efforts to develop a voice of God weapon remains highly classified to this day, with no evidence they ever succeeded. But in many quarters of the US intelligence community, the belief persisted that our leading Cold War adversary had developed some sort of microwave weapon. And those concerns came back with a vengeance when the first reports emerged at a Cuba about the strange sounds being heard by US diplomats and spies.
More than five years later, those reports are starting to look very different than they did at the time. Next on Conspiracy Land, media reports about Havana, syndrome, get ever more sensational, with claims of domestic attacks in the heart of the nation's capital. Americans have been reported in Europe, Asia and Latin America, but our reporting has found senior national security officials who say they were stricken in Washington and on the grounds of the White House.
It was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head. It was like I remember it was on the right side of my head and I got like vertigo. I was in study. I felt nauseous. It was like a paralyzing panic attack. But US officials investigating the issue become ever more skeptical about the whole narrative. I was initially very convinced that this was some type of offensive operation by a foreign military or intelligence organization.
In my mind, there were just too many people who were experiencing these symptoms. But as I began to read the data, read the intelligence, read the results of the investigations and the assessment work that was being done around the world, it just became harder and harder to explain these instances as an attack.
It was just, you know, I never saw anything that was clear cut that provided not even an identification of who was doing it, but a definitive description or a definitive source for what was causing these symptoms. An alluding congressman calls on the government to say what it knows. Maybe part of the problem is that people don't want to admit that they were got it wrong at the beginning. But we have to be honest, I mean, right?
And there's been so many conspiracy theories out there and all those conspiracy theories have been proven to be wrong. That's next on the third and final episode of Conspiracy Lands, the strange story of a vana syndrome. It's not what we thought it was. Conspiracy land is a podcast production of Yahoo News. A huge thanks to producer Mark Seaman, who accompanied me to Cuba, taped all the interviews, and then edited these episodes with his customary professionalism.
Hat tips also to Yahoo Editor Will Ron, who offered editorial guidance, to Jack Forbes, who designed this season's conspiracy land logo, and Yahoo Editor-in-Chief Dan Cliveman, who oversaw the entire project.