https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks
The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion
He was a senior CIA official tasked with getting tough on Russia. Then, one night in Moscow, Marc Polymeropoulos's life changed forever. He says he was hit with a mysterious weapon, joining dozens of American diplomats and spies who believe they’ve been targeted with this secret device all over the world—and even at home, on U.S. soil. Now, as a CIA investigation points the blame at Russia, the victims are left wondering why so little is being done to help them.
BY JULIA IOFFE
The neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania found that some explanations for the Havana Syndrome, including mass hysteria and group psychosis, were highly unlikely. Many of the patients didn’t know each other, their performance on these tests could not have been faked, and they did not wallow in their pain. In fact, according to the study, they were desperately trying to get better and “were largely determined to continue to work or return to full duty, even when encouraged by health care professionals to take sick leave.” The study also concluded that these injuries were likely not caused by exposure to chemicals, since no organs other than the brain were involved. Nor were they likely to have been the product of a viral infection, the doctors said, because these patients did not display associated symptoms, like a spiking fever. Still, the University of Pennsylvania researchers couldn’t explain what actually had happened to these patients. Their brain scans were basically normal, and the doctors could not fathom what could have caused this kind of brain injury, one that refused to heal. “These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma,” the study’s authors concluded. Doctors and patients began referring to it as the “immaculate concussion"
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As the Cold War progressed, both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to find military uses for what came to be called directed energy weapons. American researchers had studied things like beaming words into subjects’ heads—great for psychological warfare—while also researching the thermal aspects of microwaves. Packaged in the right way, researchers theorized, a microwave weapon could be mounted on a truck, where it could cast a beam outward to create an invisible barrier anywhere, anytime, capable of immobilizing any person who got within its range. This research ultimately culminated in the development of a weapon the Pentagon calls an Active Denial System, or ADS. In a video touting its capabilities, the U.S. military boasts that this highly portable weapon can be attached to a military vehicle and used to direct precise beams of electromagnetic radiation at, say, an armed militant in a crowd or a suspicious person approaching a military checkpoint. The beam would instantaneously produce a sensation of heat on the skin, which would trigger a person’s reflex to flee. (This summer, a military official inquired about deploying the technology against American protesters who flooded into the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality.)
On the other side of the world, the Soviets focused on the non-thermal applications of microwave radiation. A 1976 report compiled by the Pentagon’s intelligence branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency, reviewed Soviet research on the topic. The report detailed Moscow’s investigation of the effects of microwaves on the nervous system. Soviet, and later Russian, scientists found that exposing an animal’s brain to microwaves changed the frequency at which neurons fired. Neurons also became suddenly out of sync with one another. Some brain cells in mice were found to have withered. Nerves became damaged. The radiation also showed the potential to disturb the sacrosanct blood-brain barrier and, according to the DIA, resulted in “the alterations of brain function.” The most common symptoms reported in humans who had been exposed to microwaves for long periods of time sounded familiar: headache, fatigue, perspiration, dizziness, insomnia, depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and lack of concentration.
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