Doctors, scientists, intelligence agents and government officials have all been trying to find out what causes "Havana syndrome" - a mysterious illness that has struck American diplomats and spies. Some call it an act of war, others wonder if it is some new and secret form of surveillance - and some people believe it could even be all in the mind. So who or what is responsible?
It often started with a sound, one that people struggled to describe. "Buzzing", "grinding metal", "piercing squeals", was the best they could manage.
...Havana syndrome first emerged in Cuba in 2016. The first cases were CIA officers, which meant they were kept secret. But, eventually, word got out and anxiety spread...
Uncovering the truth has now become a top US national security priority -
one that an official has described as the most difficult intelligence
challenge they have ever faced. more history
You can say that the gun looks like a toy at best, especially with that ridiculous scope, but from the descriptions of the American senator Franck Church, the weapon is scary, to say the least, even to today’s standards.
The CIA needed a weapon to take care of the targets on their blacklist without living any sort of trace that would bring up suspicions in the media. One of the hot targets was Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976. Killing people from a distance was the go-to choice, but every bullet can be traced back. Getting too close to the target would risk the agent being compromised.
This is why the CIA gave the task of creating a new secret weapon to Mary Embree. Embree started working at the CIA as a secretary in the audio surveillance department. With time she got promoted to the technical services department where she was asked specifically to research a new poison that would induce a heart attack on its victim but undetectable in a post-mortem verification.
The technical team came up with a gun that would shoot poisoned projectiles that would dissolve inside the target and induce a heart attack which would be undetectable upon post-mortem. Embree wasn’t able to confirm if the gun was used to assassinate someone, but she did confirm that animals, as well as prisoners, were used to test the weapon.
To explain the strange scope on top of the weapon, besides being a pistol, the gun had had the ability to shot the poisoned projectile from 100 meters with good accuracy, hence the scope. more
A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.
"Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds. more
Placed in my Grain of Salt file until I can verify.
Antonio ProhÃas arrived in New York in May of 1960 with just $5 in his pocket, pressured to leave Cuba after Fidel Castro accused him of being a CIA agent.
It took a Cuban illustrator to really capture the essence of Cold War intelligence and counter-intelligence for the MAD-reading public. After penning one too many cartoons that were critical of Fidel Castro, ProhÃas — who was a prominent cartoonist and illustrator in his home country — headed for New York, writes Eric Grundhauser for Atlas Obscura. At the time, he didn’t speak a word of English.
“In New York, ProhÃas took work in a factory during the day, while working up his illustration portfolio at night,” Grundhauser writes. He changed the appearance of one of his characters from the strip he published in Cuba, El Hombre Siniestro, and gave him a counterpart: Spy vs. Spy was born.
“The sweetest revenge has been to turn Fidel’s accusation of me as a spy
into a moneymaking venture,” ProhÃas said in a 1983 interview with the
Miami Herald. “One of these days I am going to have to make a sign
saying, ‘Thank You, Fidel.’ ”
On the 100th anniversary of his birth last Sunday — the Cienfuegos native died in Miami in 1998 — ProhÃas is still spreading laughter with his Cold War spies,
who pummeled each other brutally with whatever sophisticated weapons
they could grab from the black humor bag of their creator. more & more
A source familiar with the symptoms told NBC News, which was the first to report on the findings from NAS, that the CIA had determined Russian operatives who had worked on microwave weapons were in the same cities as CIA agents at the time they began experiencing the neurological symptoms.
U.S. diplomats in Cuba began experiencing the symptoms in late 2016, reporting they were hearing strange sounds and experiencing odd physical sensations before becoming sick. Some of those symptoms disappeared, while others lingered.
Cuba has denied any knowledge of the illnesses. more
Researchers have long known that commercial speakers are also physically able to emit frequencies outside of audible range for humans. At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, one researcher is warning that this capability has the potential to be weaponized...
Fake news? You decide.
The mystery illness afflicting American diplomats in Cuba and China could be a side effect of bugging or surveillance rather than a sonic weapon attack, according to a US researcher.
A new theory.
Remember those 'sonic attacks' against the American and Canadian embassies last summer, making staff queasy and raising all kinds of questions as to what happened? There might have an answer. University of Michigan researchers have theorized that the incidents were really the result of ultrasonic signals from poorly functioning surveillance equipment. While individual ultrasonic signals can't harm people outside of extreme circumstances, multiple signals can clash with each other and produce a sound that's just low enough to be audible.
Members of the US diplomatic community in Havana began visiting the embassy’s medical unit in late December 2016 with symptoms, such as headache and ear pain, that they said began after they encountered strange sounds or sensations...
The project, known as SPYSCAPE, is set to open in New York City this December — but details are, fittingly, under wraps. Archimedia, the creative and investment company behind the project, has acquired a number of spy artifacts and archival materials, and will use immersive storytelling to explore history’s greatest spy affairs, from the Enigma code crackers to the teenage hacker behind a recent breach of the CIA website.
