Day: April 6, 2024
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New in SpyWeek
Smoke, No Fire: As we expected, a heralded joint investigation by 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel fingered Russia as the culprit behind the mysterious constellation of symptoms known as “Havana Syndrome.” We remain skeptical. The stories exposed undeniable, unexplained maladies and Russian intelligence operations around the globe but ultimately failed to provide direct proof of Moscow’s involvement.
60 Minutes interviewed the man who ran from 2020 to 2023 the Defense Intelligence Agency’s investigation into what the government calls “anomalous health incidents” or AHIs. Speaking publicly for the first time, Greg Edgreen, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, said he believes Russia is behind attacks that have “neutralized” some of America’s best intelligence officers and diplomats with traumatic brain injuries. Moscow was an early focus of Edgreen’s investigation, but the bar for proof of who was responsible was set impossibly high in the Trump and Biden administrations. “If I’m wrong about Russia being behind anomalous health incidents, I will come onto your show. And I will eat my tie,” Edgreen said.
The Insider, a website specializing in Russia-related investigations, linked some AHI’s to Unit 29155, a notorious Russian military intelligence (GRU) assassination squad. One of the unit’s operatives spotted at the scene of a reported AHI in Tbilisi, Georgia, was the son of Gen. Andrei Averyanov, Unit 29155’s founding commander. Senior members of Unit 29155 received awards for work related to developing “non-lethal acoustic weapons,” according to The Insider. A former deputy commander of the unit researched the “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons in combat activities in urban settings.”
Havana syndrome gets its name from the first case reported there in 2016, which coincided with the Obama administration’s resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Germany’s Der Spiegel found that the first AHIs may have occurred two years earlier in the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. Several U.S. government employees experienced AHIs there in November 2014. Five members of Unit 29155 were suspected in the attack, two of whom were spotted in the area a few weeks before the AHIs occurred.
