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5-year Havana Syndrome investigation finds new evidence of who might be responsible
This week on 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley and a team of producers continued their five-year investigation into Havana Syndrome, the phenomenon of mysterious brain injuries to U.S. national security officials and diplomats, and their families, both abroad and at home, that in some cases have led to major health conditions, like blindness, memory loss, and vestibular damage.
This fourth installment brought major developments to the story: a suspected link between attacks in Tbilisi, Georgia and a top-secret Russian intelligence unit, and new evidence that a reliable source calls “a receipt” for acoustic weapons testing done by the same Russian intelligence unit.
A retired Army lieutenant colonel who led the Pentagon investigation into these incidents, Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, told 60 Minutes he is confident that Russia is behind these attacks, and that they are part of a worldwide campaign to neutralize U.S. officials.
“If my mother had seen what I saw, she would say, ‘It’s the Russians, stupid,'” Edgreen told 60 Minutes.
60 Minutes Overtime spoke to producers Oriana Zill de Granados and Michael Rey about the story’s evolution over the course of their investigation, as they pulled back layers of government secrecy to speak with victims, identify a potential technology used to attack them, and examine a Russian intelligence unit that may have been behind some of the Havana Syndrome incidents.
“In the first story we said, ‘Hmm. Is this Russia?’ Second round of stories we felt, ‘This is starting to look like Russia.’ And in this story, our sources are telling us that it’s Russia,” producer Michael Rey told 60 Minutes Overtime.
The investigation begins
In 2014, producer Oriana Zill de Granados worked on a 60 Minutes story about the opening of the U.S. embassy in Cuba under then-President Obama. After the embassy had opened in 2015, media outlets began reporting on a series of strange medical symptoms exhibited by U.S. embassy personnel working in Cuba: dizziness, fatigue, problems with memory, and impaired vision.
“And we very early on started approaching people within the intelligence community and the Department of State, to find out what these incidents were. That led us to China, which really expanded the story beyond Havana, Cuba,” Zill de Granados told 60 Minutes Overtime.
The first installment of their series of investigative reports, called “Targeting Americans,” focused on Commerce and State Department officials who reported hearing strange sounds in their homes while they were stationed overseas in China. The officials, and family members who lived with them, suffered from mysterious injuries afterward, with symptoms like headaches, nausea, memory problems and difficulty balancing.
Producers Zill de Granados and Rey interviewed Mark Lenzi, a State Department security officer who worked in the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China. He told 60 Minutes that both he and his wife began to suffer symptoms after hearing bizarre sounds in their apartment in 2017.
“He told us a lot of things when we first met him that we kind of couldn’t believe. And now, years later, we believe everything he told us,” Rey told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Lenzi described the sound as a “marble” circling down a “metal funnel.” He said he heard the sound four times, always in the same spot and at the same time of day: right above his son’s crib when he put him to bed at night. He said the sound was like nothing he’d ever heard before and “fairly loud.” Shortly after hearing the sounds, he and his wife began to feel ill.
“He suffered through migraines, dizziness, [and] memory issues. And his big concern was that nobody believed him. He had a very hard time convincing his superiors something was up and this needed to be addressed,” Rey explained.
Lenzi told 60 Minutes he believed he was targeted because of his work, using top-secret equipment to analyze electronic threats to diplomatic missions.
“This was a directed standoff attack against my apartment…it was a weapon,” he told Scott Pelley. “I believe it’s RF, radio frequency energy, in the microwave range.”
“Whether it was an intentional use of technology that could be adjusted to hurt people, or whether it was a device that was specifically designed to hurt people…we still don’t know,” Rey told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“We learned to kind of trust what he was saying, that, in his experience, the capabilities exist in the world.”
Domestic cases and microwave technology
In 2022, the second and third installment of the investigative series took a closer look at Havana Syndrome incidents that had happened on U.S. soil and had not been previously reported. It also examined microwave technology that could have been used as a potential weapon against these officials and their families.
One of these domestic incidents involved Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence, who said she was physically struck while descending the steps of the Eisenhower building, just a short distance away from the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C.
“It was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head…and I got like, vertigo. I was unsteady. I felt nauseous. I was somewhat disoriented,” she told Scott Pelley.
“I remember thinking like, ‘OK…don’t fall down the stairs. You’ve got to find your ground again and steady yourself,'” she told Pelley.
Another U.S. government official, Miles Taylor, who was deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security at the time, told 60 Minutes he woke up to a strange sound in his apartment near Capitol Hill in 2018.
“I went to the window, opened up my window, looked down at the street… I see a white van, and the van’s brake lights turned on. And it pulled off and it sped away.”
Taylor said he felt “off” and “sick” the next day. About five weeks later, it happened again. He said he felt “concussion-like symptoms,” like he’d been “knocked pretty hard in a sport.”
While reporting the story, producers Rey and Zill de Granados began hearing about other cases of U.S. officials who said they were attacked while overseas and then later attacked again after they had returned to the United States.
Robyn Garfield, a Commerce Department official, and his wife Britta Garfield told 60 Minutes that they had heard strange sounds in the night when they were living overseas in Shanghai, China. This was followed by symptoms of memory loss, impaired vision, and difficulty with balance, for both them and their two children.
In 2020, they spoke to 60 Minutes again, saying they had been attacked again, in the middle of the night, in Philadelphia, where they had been receiving treatment for the injuries they sustained in China.
Late one night, Britta Garfield awoke suddenly, saying she had heard a loud, painful sound. They gathered their kids and booked a room at a hotel. But whatever had “hit” them in their apartment before had followed them to their hotel.
“And we woke up, around, I believe, 2 a.m., with strange vibrations in our bodies, and a sound,” Garfield told Pelley.
Concerned, he ran to his children’s bedside to check on them and saw an eerie scene.
“Both were thrashing in their beds— asleep. But both kicking and moving aggressively. And I went over to my daughter, and I put my head down next to her head. And I heard a very distinct sound, just right there, sort of like water rushing,” Garfield said.
They reported the event to the FBI. The family continues to work on improving their balance, eyesight, and memory.
“This is the most difficult aspect of this whole issue for me are the children who’ve been impacted, both mine as well as many others. I personally know the parents of, I believe, eight other children. I can tell you I’ve personally seen balance issues in children that have never had that,” Garfield told Pelley.
“One of the arguments that came out from researchers around the Havana Syndrome issue was that this is psychosomatic, that people are hearing of these symptoms, they’re stressed, they’re nervous. It’s a normal reaction,” Rey told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“One of the things that dissuaded us of that was the fact that children were getting… bloody noses [and] bleeding from the ear. There were seizures happening in children. And then pets reacting to noises or pressures that people were feeling at the same time.”
60 Minutes Overtime examined the case of two Canadian diplomats, who were also interviewed for “Targeting Americans,” who said they were attacked in their homes while they were stationed in Havana, Cuba. They said their children suffered from symptoms like nosebleeds, fainting, vision problems, and dizziness afterward.
The 2022 installment of “Targeting Americans” also examined the possibility of microwave technology being used as a potential weapon against these officials and their families.
“We haven’t found the smoking gun, literally. But there is a lot of scientific research out there that is concrete on this type of technology,” Zill de Granados told 60 Minutes Overtime.
In 2022, 60 Minutes spoke with James Benford, a physicist and leading authority on microwaves. In an interview with Scott Pelley, he discussed the existence of portable microwave transmitters that could damage the tissues of the brain. He said these transmitters have been studied for over 50 years.
“There are many kinds, and they can go anywhere in size, from a suitcase all the way up to a large tractor trailer unit. And the bigger the device, the longer the range,” he explained.
He said the devices can transmit microwave energy through walls, glass, and brick. “Practically everything,” he told Pelley.
“It’s been developed widely in, perhaps, a dozen countries. The primary countries are the United States, Russia, and China.”
Unit 29155
The latest installment of “Targeting Americans” brought a major development to the story with the help of a renowned investigative journalist, Christo Grozev.
Grozev famously identified the men behind the August 2020 poisoning of the late Russian dissident Alexey Navalny. He also identified other men who attempted to poison Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, who later became a double agent for the United Kingdom, and his daughter Yulia.
In 2018, Grozev was the first to identify the existence of a top-secret Russian intelligence unit, Unit 29155. He told 60 Minutes that this elite unit consists of assassins and saboteurs who use countersurveillance, explosives, poison, and technologically advanced equipment on their targets.
Grozev believes he has found a document that can link the 29155 intelligence unit to an acoustic energy weapon.
Grozev worked with investigative partners, who collaborated with 60 Minutes on this report: a magazine called The Insider and German news publication Der Spiegel.
He tracked down an email that he says is for services provided to the Russian government by a member of Unit 29155 for “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
“Which told us that this particular unit had been engaged with somewhere, somehow, empirical tests of a directed energy unit,” he told Scott Pelley.
60 Minutes sources said that a suspected member of Russia’s 29155-unit, Albert Averyanov, who is also the son of the commander of the 29155 unit, is the subject of an investigation into Havana Syndrome incidents reported by Americans living in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Grozev found Albert Averyanov’s phone was turned off during the Tbilisi incidents. But 60 Minutes sources say there’s evidence someone in Tbilisi logged in to Averyanov’s personal email during the time these incidents occurred. Grozev believes it was Averyanov himself— placing him in the city at that time.
“We believe members of Unit 29155 were there in order to facilitate, supervise, or maybe even personally implement attacks on American diplomats, on American government officials, using an acoustic weapon,” Grozev told Pelley.
Questions remain
Producers Rey and Zill de Granados told 60 Minutes Overtime that much remains unknown. Despite their recent findings, there is no clear answer as to who, or what country, was behind these incidents. There is also no “smoking gun” that confirms the victims’ suspicions that the Havana Syndrome symptoms they experienced were the result of a deliberate attack.
In 2022, about a month before the second installment of their investigation aired on 60 Minutes, the CIA gave an interim assessment that said, “We assess it unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or a mechanism.”
Last year, in 2023, the Director of National Intelligence said that it’s “very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible,” but some intelligence agencies had only “low” or “moderate” confidence in that assessment.
“This has never, for us, been an adversarial process. Because who are we to tell the intelligence community of the United States, ‘We are right and you’re wrong’? That’s not our job,” Rey explained.
“Our job is to ask questions and share information that we’ve learned that may counter the narrative that’s out there…if you say there’s no evidence of a foreign adversary involved, then what are we looking at?”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer.
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With just a month to go before Election Day, Sabrina German sees herself as an essential worker for democracy. The director of voter registration in Chatham County, Ga., German has found herself in the spotlight as she works to comply with sweeping changes to state election rules in this critical battleground state.
“The first three words in the preamble, it says, ‘We, the people,’ meaning that we, as public servants, we are working for the people to make sure that they have a fair choice and a voice for the candidates that they’re choosing,” German said.
The overhaul in Georgia has many fronts, from the Republican majority on the state election board, to the Georgia legislature, which has made it possible for individuals to file a flurry of challenges to the voter rolls.
German said she had a thousand challenges to voter registrations in just one county.
Attorney Colin McRae, who chairs the non-partisan County Registration Board (on which he has served for two decades), said, “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the agenda behind some of the challenges,” he said. “In a recent set of names that were submitted to us, it included hundreds of college students. And it didn’t take a lot of research to figure out that all of the college students whose registrations were being challenged, all attended Savannah State University, [a] historically Black university.”
While these issues might seem local, they have a national political charge; and former President Trump has weighed in on the campaign trail, praising Republicans on Georgia’s election board. “They’re on fire,” he said. “They’re doing a great job. Three members. Three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
“Sunday Morning” reached out to the members of Georgia’s election board praised by Trump. They have long defended their work, and one member told us the controversy over their efforts is “manufactured to suit some other agenda.”
What’s happening in Georgia is just one example of how challenges to the vote are roiling the nation. And the question remains: Are recent changes to state election laws addressing real problems? Or, is it just politics?
David Becker, a CBS News contributor who directs the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C., said, “I’ve been looking and researching the quality of our voter lists for about 25 years now, and there’s no question that, right now, our voter lists are as accurate as they’ve ever been.”
So, what is fueling suspicion of voter rolls? “We see a lot of their claims about the elections driven just by outcomes,” said Becker. “They’re not about the actual process.
“The voter lists are public. They could have challenged these things in 2023 or 2021 or 2019. They’re waiting until right before the election, which tells you that they’re not actually interested in cleaning up the lists. What they’re really trying to do is to set the stage for claims that an election was stolen after, presumably, their candidate loses.”
The 2020 election still casts a long shadow. State officials like Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, are bracing themselves for another contsted election.
On January 2, 2021, Raffensperger got an infamous call from then-President Trump asking if he’d “find” votes so Trump could win. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have, because we won the state,” Trump said in a recorded conversation.
Raffensperger resisted pressure to not certify the 2020 election in Georgia. Asked if he would resist pressure again, he said, “I’ll do my job. I’ll follow the law, and I’ll follow the Constitution.”
Raffensperger will once again oversee and certify Georgia’s elections. Asked whether he believes any of the changes put forth by the election board are necessary, Raffensperger replied, “No. Not one.”
Raffensperger says voting is safe and secure in Georgia. Asked why the election board members keeps making changes to the rules, he said, “I think that many of them are living in the past, and they can’t accept what happened in 2020.”
Bloomsbury
Carol Anderson, an author and voting rights activist who teaches at Emory University, said, “One of the things about voter suppression is that it always looks innocuous, it always looks reasonable, except it’s not. What’s happening in Georgia with voting rights is that, you have a massive change of demography happening. So, you have a growing African-American population. You have a sizable Latino population. You have a sizable and engaged Asian-American population.
“And so, it is a power clash between a vision of a new Georgia and … the vision of the old Georgia, our old ways,” she said.
Chatham County’s Sabrina German said, because of the pressures on election workers, she thinks about leaving every day. German may be weary, but she and Colin McRae say their experience in 2020 has prepared them for whatever comes next.
McRae said he took it personally when Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,000 votes to put him over Joe Biden. “Of course, we took it personally; any criticism of the system is a criticism of the individuals who make up that system,” said McRae. “Again, the truth will come out. The truth will win out.”
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Carol Ross.
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Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
