And now, on to the main event…

Earlier this week, Sasha Ingber broke the news on her Substack that the U.S. government had acquired a weapon last year that is being tested as a possible cause of the mysterious ailment once known as Havana syndrome. CNN, citing four sources briefed on the matter, quickly matched Ingber’s reporting, adding that the U.S. purchased the device for “eight figures.” According to one of those sources, the device is small enough to fit in a backpack.

This would be a major, major development in the long, mysterious, and—for the victims—deeply frustrating quest to explain what have come to be called “anomalous health incidents,” or A.H.I.s. The condition presents as something similar to a traumatic brain injury: vertigo, vomiting and nausea, severe pain, vision and hearing loss, tinnitus, etcetera. Scores and scores of senior U.S. intelligence and foreign service officers working at home and abroad have reported suddenly hearing a loud buzzing and feeling a painful pressure in their heads, often leading to a loss of consciousness and symptoms that linger for years.

Adding to the mystery, none of the victims was struck by any tangible object, nor did they identify anyone nearby at the time they experienced their injuries. Many of them have been forced into retirement because the symptoms have been permanent and incapacitating. Children and pets have also been affected. Since the first instance was reported by a C.I.A. officer in Havana a decade ago, U.S. officials have reported being hit all over the world—in Tbilisi, Vienna, Warsaw, London, Australia, Taiwan, India—and even on U.S. soil, in Philadelphia and Arlington. Agency officers posted overseas became increasingly nervous about bringing their families with them, not wanting to put their loved ones at risk of permanent, debilitating brain damage.

The U.S. intelligence community has grappled with what could be causing the ailment and how the culprits were able to inflict such damage so stealthily. For years, reporting and scientific research suggested some kind of directed-energy weapon that can injure the brain, and pointed to Russia as the likely attacker. (Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and later Russia, spent decades researching such technology, including for crowd control.) But no one had ever seen a weapon that could cause exactly the described symptoms, nor one that could be made portable enough for people to have been attacked as they claimed, by a seemingly invisible enemy.

In 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report that said “most” intelligence agencies had concluded it was “highly unlikely” that A.H.I.s were caused by a foreign adversary wielding a weapon, instead attributing the phenomenon to “preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors.” The report infuriated survivors, many of them C.I.A. veterans who had seen the intelligence and accused the agency of a cover-up. (The Agency did not respond to a request for comment.) But the investigations, including on the Hill and inside the Pentagon, didn’t stop. And the report itself left the door open for the I.C. to change its assessment if such a weapon were ever collected.

Around this time last year, the chatter began. Rumor was, the U.S. had gotten its hands on a weapon capable of causing A.H.I.s, but no one could get confirmation. In January 2025, two weeks before Joe Biden left office, the National Intelligence Council released a revised intelligence assessment. Now, the assessment said, due to “new reporting,” two out of seven intelligence agencies had changed their conclusions. One found that “it is ‘likely’ a foreign actor has [radio-frequency] antipersonnel capability and that this capability can cause biological effects consistent with some of the symptoms reported as possible A.H.I.s.” The other said there was “a roughly even chance” that a foreign adversary had such a weapon.

“The public shouldn’t be surprised,” said Dr. David Relman, a Stanford physician and researcher who has helped the government investigate A.H.I.s. Relman, whom I’ve known since I first reported on the phenomenon six years ago, has become a fierce advocate for A.H.I. victims. He helped put together a panel of experts for the I.C., who concluded in a 2022 report that the existence of a concealable device capable of delivering targeted energy downrange might prove A.H.I.s resulted from a foreign attack. “We didn’t just say that because we imagined it,” Relman told me. “We had evidence. We were looking at technological developments, at what could be built, at what people were interested in building, at how far they’d gotten. We knew what kind of signals would be likely to get through the skull and cause the relevant biological effects.”

Now that the Pentagon is reportedly in possession of the directed-energy weapon, there are new questions. For one: Where did it come from? “It wasn’t acquired at the scene of the crime,” one source familiar with the I.C. investigation told me. “It was acquired through a network.” The weapon reportedly has Russian components, which seems to square with pretty much everyone’s working theory that it was Russian-made.

According to Christo Grozev, a legendary investigator with The Insider who helped identify the Russian G.R.U. unit that is allegedly responsible for the A.H.I. attacks, the Pentagon bought the device from Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, or H.U.R. That organization had been behind some of Ukraine’s most daring attacks on Russian forces, like Operation Spider Web, which attacked Russian military planes thousands of miles inside Russian territory. Grozev told me that a senior member of H.U.R. had bragged about buying the weapon from a Russian—which struck me as extremely plausible, given that, until the Kremlin cracked down on it, Russian siloviki made lots of cash on the side selling secret government data on the dark web.

The H.U.R., Grozev continued, was trying to trade the device to the U.S. in exchange for financial support for Ukraine’s war effort. “They were wondering whether they should hand it over to the Biden administration or wait until the Trump administration came in, depending on who would support them more,” Grozev recalled. “I had advised them to do it as soon as possible, that it was crazy to wait because Trump might bury it altogether. I don’t know if they took this advice.” (The Pentagon did not reply to a request for comment.)

When I asked Grozev why Ukrainian intelligence had reportedly extracted a substantial sum from the U.S. government despite an intelligence-sharing arrangement, Grozev pointed out that money from Congress had already dried up on account of Republican opposition. H.U.R. “needed cash for operations.” Given the atomization of the Ukrainian military, he added, it was possible they were “competing for cash from the [Ukrainian] government” against other units, and “not everybody had enough.”

Grozev also hadn’t been surprised by the reported confirmation of the weapon’s existence. “The feasibility was never a question in the scientific community,” he told me. The argument that no modern technology could penetrate a person’s skull from a distance, and if it could, that it wasn’t portable, Grozev said, “was the biggest lie that was spread to the public.”

Since late summer, the A.H.I. community (for lack of a better term) has been waiting for the release of a D.N.I. report that would validate their accounts and slam the Biden administration for downplaying the possibility of a foreign weapon. For months, I’ve been hearing that Tulsi Gabbard, the conspiracy-loving director of national intelligence, has embraced the cause. What better angle for Gabbard than blowing open a deep state, Biden-era cover-up? And what a strange, ironic twist that some of the most vocal A.H.I. advocates, like former senior C.I.A. officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who had become enemies of the Trump administration, would now be vindicated by it. (I wrote about Polymeropoulos’s own experience in 2020. Last year, on the first day of Trump’s second term, Polymeropoulos, who had signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter, was stripped of his security clearance.)

But the vindication hasn’t come. First, there was the shutdown. Then, in December, another bump in the road. The Pentagon, where some personnel had also been affected by A.H.I.s and where Pete Hegseth had, I’m told, also gotten on board with shaming the Biden administration for its past conclusions, suddenly changed course. Defense Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, one of Trump’s neglected “restrainers,” who is still extremely skeptical of A.H.I.s, relegated the building’s highly respected cross-functional team investigating the phenomenon, dooming them to bureaucratic irrelevance.

But some suspect that that’s not the real reason for the delay. “The D.N.I. had the report on her desk to release, and someone’s been withholding and delaying it,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney who has represented many A.H.I. victims as well as I.C. whistleblowers on the matter. Asked about the reported discovery of the weapon, a spokesperson for the D.N.I. said, “As D.N.I. Gabbard previously stated, the mistreatment and dismissal of Americans impacted by A.H.I.s is unacceptable. D.N.I. Gabbard remains committed to sharing findings from her investigation into Anomalous Health Incidents with the American people.”

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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