Fears that China is developing “brain-disrupting” weapons have again been raised despite the dismissal of claims a mysterious syndrome afflicting US diplomats resulted from a deliberate attack.
“Unknown to many, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have established themselves as world leaders in the development of neurostrike weapons,” claims a report by three analysts calling themselves The CCP Biothreats Initiative.
The Enumerating, Targeting and Collapsing the Chinese Communist Party’s Neurostrike Program document claims Beijing is developing methods to impair the thinking of military personnel and government officials.
The National University of Singapore East Asian Institute senior fellow, a former US Army microbiologist and a former US air force intelligence officer claim microwave and similar directed energy weapons can “attack, or even control, mammalian brains (including humans)”.
“However, the CCP’s weaponization of neuroscience extends well beyond the scope and understanding of classical microwave weapons,” they claim.
They assert such technology, combined with psychological warfare, is “a core component of (Beijing’s) asymmetric warfare strategy against the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.”
But while it speculates at length on the strategic and tactical power of such an assault, the 12-page report contains next to no detail about these weapons, or how they actually work.
And that’s the same reason why a two-year investigation into some 1500 “anomalous health incidents” reported by US diplomats since 2016 rejected the notion they were the victims of an attack.
An unexplained set of symptoms, including hearing loss, vertigo, nausea and “brain fog”, has been dubbed “Havana syndrome” as its epicentre was the US diplomatic mission in Cuba.
Seven US intelligence agencies issued a combined assessment of the syndrome in March this year.
Five judged that “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents”.
The sixth agency declared an attack to be “unlikely”. And the seventh declined to issue a conclusion.
The assessment also found no “foreign adversary” had a weapon capable of causing the described health effects.
“The intelligence community assessment released today by ODNI reflects more than two years of rigorous, painstaking collection, investigative work, and analysis by IC (Intelligence Community) agencies, including CIA,” CIA director Bill Burns said at the time.
“We applied the agency’s very best operational, analytic and technical tradecraft to what is one of the largest and most intensive investigations in the agency’s history.”
Deep thought
An early investigation into the initial outbreak of complaints at the US embassy in Cuba found the onset of symptoms reportedly followed sufferers “hearing something” coming from a specific direction.
Reports of the symptoms soon spread around the globe, including embassies in China, Russia and Germany and end even Washington offices.
The US State Department initially stated the symptoms resulted from a “sonic device”. It later retracted that claim.
But MRI scans of the victims reportedly found no anomalies. And an analysis of the symptoms and circumstances of the syndrome failed to find any consistent patterns.
That makes inferring a specific cause virtually impossible.
As a result, the combined agency report ruled that “there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing AHIs (Anomalous Health Incidents)”.
And it was highly critical of an earlier 2022 finding by a panel of experts assembled by the director of National Intelligence and the director of the CIA.
Their claims that pulsed electromagnetic energy and ultrasound could account for the reports of illness were not supported by subsequent analysis, the agency assessment found.
“In light of this and the evidence that points away from a foreign adversary, causal mechanism or unique syndrome linked to AHIs, IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as pre-existing conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors,” the report states.
But the Pentagon stated immediately after the report was released that it continues to pursue “the causation, attribution, mitigation, identification and treatment for such incidents”.
The scientific community is also divided over the potential for “directed energy” to influence the human mind without immediately revealing its presence.
University of New Mexico professor of electrical engineering Edl Schamiloglu states that the technology behind directed energy weapons was “well understood”.
“High-power microwave weapons are generally designed to disable electronic equipment. But as the Havana Syndrome reports show, these pulses of energy can harm people, as well,” he writes.
Human failings
The potential for high-power microwaves to affect human cognition is known. It’s called the Frey effect.
“The human head acts as a receiving antenna for microwaves in the low gigahertz frequency range. Pulses of microwaves in these frequencies can cause people to hear sounds, which is one of the symptoms reported by the affected US personnel,” argues Schamiloglu.
But none of the investigations revealed any incidence of associated disruption to sensitive electrical equipment, such as smartphones and computers, at the time of the alleged attacks.
University of California, Los Angeles professor of neurology Robert Baloh argues there is no scientific evidence an energy weapon could selectively damage the brain – and nothing else.
“Neurons in a person’s ear or brain are directly stimulated by microwaves, and the person may ‘hear’ a noise,” he writes.
“These effects, though, are nothing like the sounds the victims described, and the simple fact that the sounds were recorded by several victims eliminates microwaves as the source.”
Baloh says he regularly treats patients reporting similar symptoms at his dizziness clinic. “Most have psychosomatic symptoms – meaning the symptoms are real but arise from stress or emotional causes, not external ones. With a little reassurance and some treatments to lessen their symptoms, they get better,” he said.
He adds that Havana Syndrome fits the criteria for “mass psychogenic illness”, otherwise known as mass hysteria. It’s a fear response in a group of people who believe they have been exposed to something dangerous – even though they have not.
“A former CIA officer who was in Cuba at the time later noted that the first patient “was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and to connect the dots”, he writes. “This person had real symptoms, but blamed them on something mysterious – the strange sound he heard. He then told his colleagues at the embassy, and the idea spread.
“With the help of the media and medical community, the idea solidified and spread around the world. It checks all the boxes.”
