Havana Syndrome: Part One (with Jon Lee Anderson) - podcast episode cover

Havana Syndrome: Part One (with Jon Lee Anderson)

Mar 27, 202433 minSeason 1Ep. 9
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Episode description

Who has it? Where did they get it? Is it real?  (with Jon Lee Anderson)

Transcript

Speaker 1

They wanted my asshole smell.

Speaker 2

Everybody's smell is different, and the East Germans Stastasia. As you know, they had a program where they would try to get you sit on a certain chair with a cushion, and in this cushion it had special chemicals that collected your smell.

Speaker 3

I'm John Seipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the world.

Speaker 2

And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Speaker 3

Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies in our operations.

Speaker 1

We got people to believe things that weren't true.

Speaker 3

Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.

Speaker 2

Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.

Speaker 3

Welcome to Mission implausible.

Speaker 1

So Adam.

Speaker 2

In our former world, when we dealt with other hostile foreign intelligence services, the rule sort of is that they can't kill us, but they can't leave us alone either. But there's a gray area in between where just how much can they fuck with us?

Speaker 1

Right?

Speaker 2

Can they hurt us, damage us, discombobulate us. I don't know if you had the same thing as a journalist being manipulated, but I think it's the same sort of deal, right.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it's kind of like our relationship. You can't kill me, but you just.

Speaker 3

Well that's the problem. Everything's done on zoom now you can't kill anybody.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 4

I mean, obviously there are journalists who are killed.

Speaker 1

I don't want to.

Speaker 4

Belittle that, but I would say probably similar to you. Every interaction, we deal with a lot of flax, a lot of pr people, a lot of communications people, a lot of people who their job is to get a message out. And that doesn't mean it's an evil conspiracy theory, but it's you know, I want you to see this movie, or you know, we're really promoting this new initiative at the Department of State or whatever, and so there's you do develop real, really relationships with people who are paid

to manipulate you. Sometimes it does get to the hostile place. You know, I've had screaming fights, I've had people try and get me fired.

Speaker 1

Break your cameras. Yeah.

Speaker 4

Yeah, And obviously for many journalists in the world, it does cost them their lives or their safety. You know, I don't want to, but it is. I mean, I guess your job, my job, being a cop, like we're lied to right professionally, that is our job. And we need those liars. We need to get information from them, and we need to somehow assess what they're talking about and what is the truth underneath it, knowing we'll never know for sure.

Speaker 3

In our old world, there was something you know, I don't know better term honor among thieves or what have you, is that intelligence services wouldn't hurt each other. You know. The worst they could do is could kick you out of the country or something if you're called involved in espionage. All right, So I think today we're going to talk some about this thing that's been in the news. They often call the Havana syndrome, and it's now sort of known by a number of different names, and for those

people who haven't followed it. In twenty sixteen in Havana, Cuba, there were a number of US diplomats who complained about brain injuries, headaches, nausea, migraines, and believed that something was happening to this. Maybe it was some sort of directed

energy weapon. It was microwaves. It was something that they believe from the outside was being directed against US embassy diplomats, And largely there were people in the CIA station, that's our office in Havana, and there were a few Canadians as well who reported this, and it became sort of a big deal that Trump administration kicked out a number of Cubans. Marco Rubio and others were claiming that the Cubans had attacked Americans. But then shortly thereafter there was

a number of these similar incidents around the world. And what makes it interesting and maybe makes it a conspiracy theory is just recently the intelligence community came out with a report that said all the evidence points against involvement of any US adversary involved in causing these incidents. In other words, the assumption was that somebody and a lot of people were pointing to the Russians. In fact, I'm one of the ones who believes in this conspiracy theory

that the Russians may be involved in this. Most of the folks the intellis community it came out and said, we don't see that there's any evidence at all of a hostile power doing this. You know, I served in Moscow, and I've followed this type of issue for years and years, and I still tend to think that there's something there. So what's your take on.

Speaker 1

This, Jack, Well, there's just two things, John.

Speaker 2

One is the obvious absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that we haven't found it yet definitively doesn't mean it's not so. And then the other thing that strikes me is the term conspiracy theory. When we throw that out, generally we mean that it's something

far fetched and not likely. This is a theory about a conspiracy and the fact that the Russians or you know, name your bad guy would sit down and conspire about ways of attacking US intelligence officers operating inside places like Moscow or Havana. That's not far fetched at all. That is re reality.

Speaker 3

Let me give a little background and to those people who believe that there's still something there. And to be clear here, we're friends with Mark Paul Marpolis, the guy who was one of these people who yes, exactly one very public.

Speaker 1

Baths and some others. Yeah.

Speaker 3

So some of the things is there's clear patterns that suggest something's going on here, and there's a long history one of the patterns is that around the world, for largely, the people who seem to have been hit by this and have ended up at Walter Reed and other places were people who worked in the CI and often people who worked on Russia issues. They are in places where they tend to have more of a free run, in Belgrade and Hanoi and Cuba and Guangzhou, China and a

number of other places. And then the history is serious. I served in Moscow and there's decades of the Russians blasting radioactive microwaves against our embassy. A number of US presidents complained to Russian Soviet leaders saying you have to stop this or has increased cancer seem to be coming out from a number of our people. There are a number of US ambassadors eye of cancer. Eventually, even the State Department put it on sort of a health warning

anybody who serves in Moscow. And there's a number of other pieces around that that we'll talk about as we go forward.

Speaker 2

The State Department needs to look into, I believe, needs to look at cancer rates inside of people who served at the embassy in Moscow over the last twenty years. I strongly suspect that instances of cancer and anomalies is going to be higher in a place like that based on things that we do know about, let alone the

ones we don't. Putting carcinogenic spy dust on officers that's clearly known, Bombarding people with microwaves, maybe not as a weapon or maybe as a weapon, and a host of other things that we've encountered in our career.

Speaker 3

Well, that's a piece of this that's important. And those who were hit in this, supposedly by the Savannah syndrome great frustration with the State Department who runs our embassies overseas and CIA leadership that did not take these health risks seriously at first. And that fits another pattern if you look at the people over the nineteen fifty six sees and on from Moscow who are complaining about health problems from serving in Moscow, the State Department and subsequent

administrations seem to just ignore or dismiss their concerns. And eventually people in Congress press the administration, the new Bide administration to help these people, and there was a law essentially passed that gave them the support they need to go to Walter read in other places, And to add

one other piece of this, there's a contradiction here. If the intelligent community came out and said there's no evidence that this was an attack by a foreign power and said most of this seems to be just natural occurrences or pre existing conditions, there's a contradiction in the sense that Walter read. The place that has studied all of

these victims have said just the opposite. The doctors have said none of these people had pre existing conditions that fit with this brain injury, and all of them that they could find a specific marker in the brain that suggests there was a similarity between them all.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And I think to pay the State Department, it's due the agency. I think a lot of the doctors are not epidemiologists.

Speaker 3

And that's tough because the medical professionals in the bureaucracies they come and go, and so this studying of longer term issues is almost something just institutionally doesn't happen in these bureaucracies, right.

Speaker 2

I wonder if this was done and the outcomes were not good, would people still want to take your families to places like Moscow if you knew that statistically you have a higher instance of cancer. We do take our families to places that are just unhealthy on a basis. For example, I lived in Delhi and as judged by particulate matter, shit in the air quite literally because they burned cowdung during the wintertime. It is the highest rate

of pollution in the world. I remember when we first went to Zimbabwe, the guy who I took the house over from was telling me about the back garden and I've got three small girls, ten and seven and six, and he says, yeah, watch out for the cobras.

Speaker 1

I'm like, huh.

Speaker 3

I was in Moscow, if you remember when the tanks surrounded the Russian Parliament and started shooting at it in the nineteen ninety three, when there was a coup attempt, and I was there and there was people shooting out of buildings and these other kind of stuff, and I remember my mother and my family being all nervous, and not long after that they actually came to visit me and stay in my apartment. And I remember at the

end of the you know, my mother was there. I can't even remember a week or something, and she goes, you know, I was focusing what you see on TV and thinking about all these bigger issues. But now that I've been here, I realized, I'm much more scared of you dying in this awful traffic the way people drive me. I said, absolutely, it's crazy and dangerous.

Speaker 1

So not trying to what up you, but what upping you.

Speaker 2

In Manila, our house was just the other side of this highway. We had this like fifteen foot concrete fence and there was an explosion next door. The neighbor had the wall blown in, and it turned out there was a bus someone that Abusayaf had put an artillery shell and rigged it up with the timer and put it on a bus. It had exploded. It had killed seven or eight people when the bus blew up and the

artillery shell blew through our next door neighbor's wall. And for a while there there was a question like, oh my gosh, was this possibly an attack focused on me?

Speaker 1

And the Philippine police.

Speaker 2

Later came in and said, oh no, no, no, it wasn't focused on you. It was just a regular bombing, right, It wasn't a bombing focused on you. And the only reason that the fence was blown in was because they put the artillery shell in facing in the back of the bus, facing towards the front of the bus. So it would kill everybody. But somehow somebody had pushed the shell so that it went sideways and shot actually outwards and hit our neighbor's fence.

Speaker 3

We got to take a break now, and we'll be back in just a minute, and rebec right after it happened. In twenty sixteen, I wrote an article about this to try to put some of it in context, to show about how these kind of things that happened in the past. It's rare that we've seen in places where diplomats and CI officers live attacks that are meant just to harm diplomats and CIA officers. Rather, we've seen unhealthy and dangerous efforts to use technology that does hurt us, but it's

often for surveillance purposes or some other intelligence purpose. So when we talked about microwaves bashing against the US embassy for years, that was most likely an effort that they would use to turn on and turn off and trigger listening devices. Back in the fifties, they would even put radioactive little spikes in people's tires that would leave marks on the road so their surveillance cars could hold back

and still follow where American diplomats would go. Years ago, we sort of found out that the Russians are using this thing they called Metca, which was we called spy dust, which was an invisible electromagnetic powder that had a customized

chemical identifier. And the idea was they would smear it onto door handles or furniture of cars of people like me Americans that they suspected might be handling spies CIA officers, And what it was it was a tagging agent and it was used by the Russian security elements to covertly monitor their own community. Then what they would do is on the weekend they would go through the embassy and they had a means of looking for this chemical identifier

through people's offices. So they would go into Evan's office and they would see my chemical tag in Evan's office, and if Ivan had not reported that he'd been meeting me, he would come under Connor intelligence scrutiny as possibly a spy working with And we found out eventually this was carcinogenic and it was so unhealthy to those of us

who got it. And so I when I was in my first tour overseas in Helsinki, Finland, I was developing a relationship with a Russian KGB officer who eventually became one of Putin's closest advisors and then become a Minister of Defense in Russia. KGB officer, and he put this

chemical tag on me. And the reason we knew about it is we knew that they did this, and so we had a means of wiping and testing after a Russian had been at our house and then sending that to our science experts to test that to see if you had been spy dusted. And I had been and I was like, oh great, So I got this carcinogenic stuff all over my house. And that was sort of the notion that when we saw this Havana syndrome, is

this is odd and people are getting hurt. But is this to hurt people or is it for some other purpose.

Speaker 2

This reminds you of the story where the East Germans did get and I'm trying to think this is on the radio where I can even say this.

Speaker 3

This is not a radio Jerry, You're a little bit all.

Speaker 2

They wanted my asshole smell. Everybody's smell is different, and the East Germans Tastasia. As you know, they had a program where when you crossed over into East Germany. They would try to get you sit on a certain chair with a cushion, and in this cushion it had had

special chemicals that collected your smell. And after you left, they would go out and they would take this chemically treated chemical cushion and they would take a piece of it and they would put it in a jar, and then later, with specially trained dogs, they would go into rooms or to see whether or not you had been there or not. John, I did want to ask in

reading about Havana syndrome. One of the theories that I read was that perhaps that it wasn't meant so much as a weapon because it was mostly like in hotel rooms, but was a way to like disrupt sleep patterns. Because what people don't always know is so much of what we do in the n espionage world is you've got to be quick and awake and with it and able

to make hard decisions and remember things. And if they can disrupt your sleep patterns, and if they can make you not be on top of your game, if they can make you stupid, you're going to make mistakes. You know, you are an expert in SDRs, and maybe explain to what people is if you can't remember license plates well or people, you're going to make a mistake and you're going to get caught. That was one theory put forward that I thought was interesting and I'd like to get your take on that.

Speaker 1

That's a good point.

Speaker 3

So in our parlance and SDR is a surveillance detection run. So when we meet a source, a spy who's working for the United States, the goal is to keep that person safe, right, so that person providing potentially life saving information to the United States government in committing trees and against his or her own country. So if you're in Moscow and you're meeting a source, you have to know one hundred percent certainty that the bad guys did not see this. We have to be right one hundred percent

of the time. If they're right one time and they bring the dogs, like Jerry said, behind us to see where're going and they can figure out who was there, that Russian who were meeting, that person is going to be arrested at the very best or executed at the worst,

and perhaps even their family. So we go through, depending on the country you're in, a very sophisticated means of proving that you don't have surveillance, so you might go out, you might drive around places that you can manipulate to see if someone is following You're not from overhead traffic copters or planes of people walking or cars that are

following all those type of things. And so one of the things I think that might speak against this being done is to try to think about the practical operational difficulties in pulling this off. You'd have to have exquisite intelligence. You have to know exactly where these people are. You'd have to understand travel patterns, where they live, what where

their windows face. If this is a weapon that is like a directed energy weapon, you'd have to have a means to get this into the country set up, have a means to do this so that you do not get caught. We're really fortunate here because our next guest is John Lee Anderson. He's a biographer and author and investigative reporter, a staff writer for The New Yorker who's lived in war zones all around the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, spent lots of time in Cuba. He's written a number

of books and worked with our colleague Adam Davidson. So we're lucky to have him here, John Lee Anderson, Hey John John. I've read your reporting, and I've impressed with reporting on a lot of places in the world. But can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up reporting on this story.

Speaker 5

So I began reporting on the Havana syndrome when actually Adam Ntuz, who is a recent hire at The New Yorker, came to me and asked me for help. The editor had assigned him to do the story, but he didn't know Cuba. So we began working together and did a story on Havana syndrome together or Adam kept his ear to the ground and did a few follow ups, and then we did a podcast series that took place over a year, which was great fun, and we traveled together

to various places. Ultimately I think digging as deep as anybody did into this phenomenon. Prior to Adam coming to me on this, I had begun to do some investigation of my own with the Americans I knew who were dealing with the Cubans at the time, and was coming away with some interesting information that was inconclusive but suggested that there were patterns to it that led back to the intelligence agencies in both countries, so it was a really good fit for me to work with Adam on this.

Speaker 3

So Johnny, it's really great to have you on with us today. Your reporting on this has been spectacular. Obviously, you did a podcast with Animentus, and you've done several articles for The New Yorker and other things. I just wanted to start with sort of a big question, based on all of your research into what was once called the Havana syndrome and how the US government has responded to it and to the people who believe they were

hit and doctors and things. What are some big takeaways that you have, any surprises or anything that you could guess sort of going forward on this issue.

Speaker 5

In a way, I don't know that I've ever felt particularly surprised, because I mean, I've known Cuba over the years, going back to the very early nineties when I lived there, and then have returned over the years, sort of watching the political alchemy of the place evolve, and when the roll Castro Barack Obama opening happened, I was there a lot, and you need to be there to feel the street and know what the subtext is. Again La bola as they call it, the rumor mill, which is always more

than the rumor mil. It's where the actual intelligence flows on the island, because there is no official story other than the kind of orthodoxy of the Communist Party. Fast forward to later in twenty sixteen, when we now know that the first alleged attacks occurred. These attacks took place within a couple of weeks of Fidel dying, major historic event. For all the fact that he'd been off the main stage for a decade, this was huge in an island

where he had dominated everything for half a century. And when I pieced this together, I thought, well, it makes sense. I mean, I knew that in Washington, people who were part of the opening that had taken place, that there was a freeze after Obama's visit, but nobody wanted to talk about it publicly, because of course they were being deterministic. They wanted the policy to go forward. Those who'd helped open the door, Shure didn't want to close it or

leak that there were difficulties. But I knew privately that there were and there was a new era of hostilities. So I immediately assumed that these attacks, these events that had affected initially the officers on the island had to do with a homegrown attempt to shut down the station, you know, to affect America's intelligence gathering ability on the island. Now,

I didn't know how they would have done that. It was out of character for them to hurt physically, damage, cause pain and that kind of thing to spies on the island. It wasn't their modus operandi, and so I assumed it was some kind of untested listening device gone bad.

The more I talked with people that sort of know that world, the more I assumed it was something like a new technology that they had gotten from somebody, and the obvious partner in that regard would be the Russians, and that this might have been an easy way to go about getting rid of that enhanced American intelligence gathering presence on the is it. I also entertained that it possibly it was Chinese. I'd heard that there was a lot of Chinese electronics on the island in a particular

building under the purview of Cuban counter intelligence. But going back five years, she wasn't as hostile as he is today, and most people tended to dismiss it when I trotted that one out. So it kind of evolved into this idea that Russian technology in cahoots with a small group of Cuban counter intelligence, with probably a very senior person in charge of the operation, aimed at dismantling America's intelligence

gathering ability. And they did it. And then my reading has always been that once they did it, they took it on the road. No surprise about the idea that Cuban hardliners would have done something like that. Someone told me, I think that two million Americans visited the island within I think it was eighteen months, or maybe it was even a year of the opening of relations. That's a lot of Americans to suddenly be swarming around Cuba and knowing those guys unwomen the way I do. I would

say that that probably really freaked them out. And with Fidel's death coming right on the heels of a very unexpected outcome in the American election, counterintelligence would have been in a very paranoid state and wanting to reassert control of an island where they had all we known what was going on, and now they no longer did. They felt like their grip on knowledge of who was there and what they were up to, I think was slipping away.

Speaker 2

Let's take a breather and back in a moment, and we're back. Juddley, I share your instinct that there is a conspiracy and that there's a Russian Cuban link that we haven't come across yet. One thing that unsettles me, though, is that the gr you especially, they've generally been sloppy

by and large when get involved in these things. They get caught, and there's things like travel patterns, they talk out of school, there's you know, we sort of get a sense of what's going on in the Kremlin whispers. I'm not hearing those kind of things from people who follow it. So I'm just surprised that the Russians, if this is it, that they've gotten away with.

Speaker 1

It for so long.

Speaker 5

What haven't the Russians gotten away with however, thank you in the world.

Speaker 2

Well, I mean.

Speaker 1

They do it, they get caught, but they still just fucking do it.

Speaker 5

Yeah, I mean, well, you know, I say probably Russian technology, because I don't know that the Cubans have it. But you know, the Cubans have been pretty resourceful over the years in adapting to circumstances in they have a great science nucleus, and you know, they're into scientific research. I don't know what they've done in weapons research, but you know they have fifty years of investment in various sectors.

The only country prior to this that we know regularly use some form of microwave technology to bombard the Americans in Moscow without apparent harm, but nonetheless bombard the embassy in the hopes of either deflecting or towarding the CI station's you know, abilities to listen from the embassy. I gather it's true that we don't have a smoking gun. It's true that we haven't found a couple of characters who are going around poisoning people's tea or putting new

you know, radioactive toxins on door knobs and things. But if it's asymmetrical warfare, something Putin has done a lot of, maybe this was something they tried there and took it elsewhere. It's interesting to note, although the CI of course has never been it's always been mum on this as far

as I understand. The next big station was Vienna, which is an important station, and to my knowledge, it was virtually atomized in similar at texts, and there's been no whistleblower on that, you know, The CIA has of course been hermetic about that, you don't show weakness to the enemy, right.

I get that, and I'm not surprised either the fact that the intelligence community across the board decided to shelve this and did so differently than all the previous lawsuits brought by soldiers or whoever affected by you know, American weaponry, and whether it was Agent Orange or Gulf War syndrome. The US government always shelves these lawsuits. The people who make these lawsuits, whether they're State Department, other government personnel,

or soldiers former soldiers, always lose their lawsuits. I noted that in this case they didn't lose their lawsuit. Those who claimed to have had injuries were paid compensation, and then the agencies expressed themselves in a very solemnonic way of saying, we feel your pain, but this is over. It's also interesting to note that, as far as I know, all such alleged attacks or complaints of them, seem to

have stopped since the Ukrainian invasion occurred. Whether that's pure coincidence or not, I don't know.

Speaker 3

It seems to me that the early investigations by CIA, FBI, and State were really, really poorly done, And it wasn't even until at some point that doctors who are looking at these people were sort of trumping and going back to the agency and saying, oh, there's nothing here, it's all fake, And the doctors are coming back saying absolutely not.

We see markers, we see that concussion like symptoms when there wasn't a concussion, and all these type of things, which of course then led, as you mentioned, to the payouts and that kind of thing. So in your investigating, what sense did you get from that, because my understanding is now the Hill is taking this on, and the Defense Department now seems to be doing investigating that seems more serious than those of the FBI, the agency, and State Department.

Speaker 5

And talking to the medical professionals who investigated this, they were incensed, thinking of one in particular at the University of Pennsylvania was incensed at the idea that this was somehow adolescent schoolgirls getting hysterical together, which is essentially what the naysayers are suggesting.

Speaker 2

My personal sense was, in the beginning and at the beginning of the Trump administration, especially without a smoking gun, no one wanted to take bad news about the Russians to that Oval Office that was, in my view, thought well of Vladimir Putin and said so he came out and said he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies and without a smoking gun walking into the Oval Office and saying, you know, the Russians slashed the Cubans

are committing an act of war, arguably against the United States. And there was some reluctance to aggressively go after this without absolute proof, and of course, the absolute proof unless we get a walk in a defector who walks in and says, okay, here's what happened. You know, we're stuck with conjecture and assessments and gut feels and circumstantial evidence, and those can be pretty compelling, but are not decisive always.

Speaker 5

That was my sense of it too. The ball was effectively dropped during the Trump administration. It's notable that the first episodes begin during his period of president elect, and it becomes public knowledge in the summer of twenty seventeen, he's six eight months in office. It coincides with the Russian investigation and the various behavior we saw from Trump, and the episodes appear to have traveled on from Cuba

over the next couple of years to various places. Even if we dismissed some of them, there's no good explanation for Vienna Station and a few others around the world. I mean, if I was putin and I was doing it, I'd go to town because Trump isn't going to do anything about it. And then it was really the Biden administration where it's resuscitated and becomes a public thing.

Speaker 3

I think Bolton taking it seriously when he was his short tenure there.

Speaker 5

Yes, Bolton did. And we had a conversation with Bolton in which he basically said, well, I didn't really want to get the Boss mad by bringing up Russia. He didn't go so far as to say that he had deep sixth the topic. He continued to investigate, but that he didn't bring it to Trump.

Speaker 3

But you have an analytic cadre who's been burned over the years in Iraq and WMD and things that almost needs to have like absolute proof. And you have a White House, any white house, frankly, but this White House probably too, that says, if you're going to give me information that suggests that the Russians are at war with us, they're hurting American diplomats and that we have to respond you better be damn sure that it's one hundred percent sure,

And so you probably got internal baticles. I can imagine the analyst saying, yeah, you're coming at me with a lot of patterns, a lot of possible information, but until we know for sure, there's no way where we as an organization are going to the White House with this. And there's probably a lot of frustration inside on from our side of the house saying, for christ' sake, we're

the ones suffering this. We see Russians and grri Peopil in specific places, the places where it looks like this happened, where places like Havana, Vienna, Belgrade, Hanoi, China, places where the Russians can operate and sort of hide themselves pretty quickly afterwards.

Speaker 5

You know, one of the patterns that I found very interesting, and I guess it began with Vice President Kamala Harris's trip to Hanoi. There began to be a pattern in which people right next to a principal figure. Where's that that?

Speaker 3

To me?

Speaker 5

This idea of leaving a signature that to me has makes me think of only one leader in the world who likes to leave signatures.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 5

Again, I can't prove it, but you know, two days before she gets to Hanoi, two employees of the US Embassy are evacuated with apparent symptoms of havana syndrome. Director Burns goes to New Jelly. The person with him is affected. Bolton goes to London, two of his briefers are affected, and so on. Well, Blinkn goes to Bogatah, and a few days before he gets there, I think three days before, an unnamed number of people at the embassy are withdrawn or treated. It's a bit like once they went to town,

once they went on the road with this. It was this idea of we're just reminding you were doing this, and it's right next to you in each case, and that seems to me more than coincidental, because the number of senior officials who had people directly within their posse affected.

Speaker 1

Johnley, thank you very much for coming and talking with us today. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 4

Guys, how is John Lee Anderson Adam?

Speaker 3

Have you been hiding behind the scenes? Have you been here the whole time listening to this?

Speaker 4

No, I'm just showing up. But you talk to one of my favorite, literally one of my very favorite people in the world, Johnley Anderson.

Speaker 3

I think he's a fascinating guy. I know you worked with him some as a journalist, and you know he's the kind of guy that you sort of look up to. His journalist He's lived around the world, He's dug into deep places, He's personally courageous and been a lot of dangerous places.

Speaker 4

I think John Lee is the single most respected foreign correspondent in the US. He's saved my life, and I think there's a lot of journalists who can say the exact same thing. I mean, he goes to incredibly dangerous places, but he does it thoughtfully.

Speaker 3

Also, when you think about Cuba itself, there's very few people who have the expertise in Cuba that he has. He's lived there for a long time, he's got the contacts, and so if we're looking to talk to experts, hard to find a better one.

Speaker 2

So Churchill famously that Russia, right, it's a riddle rapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and I think we've only just started with the mystery and we need to get into the enigma part of it later.

Speaker 3

I think that's right. So today I think we've got a really good sense of the context, but there clearly is a lot more to this story. So in our next episode, we are going to continue looking at this with someone who is even more closely associated with as someone who is actually impacted by what we're now calling the Havana syndrome. So stay with us for the next episode of Mission Implausible.

Speaker 6

Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producers are Rachel Harner and David Solinger.

Speaker 1

This has been a

Speaker 6

Production of honorable, mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia.

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