Washington, DC (WorkersCompensation.com) – Reports from CBS 60 minutes indicate the U.S. government secretly purchased a directed-energy weapon similar to the ones many believe are used in attacks on U.S. federal employees abroad.
Called the Havana Syndrome, the attacks on U.S. officials while they were serving in the U.S. and abroad leave victims with a bizarre mix of maladies from cognitive difficulties, headaches and nausea, vision impairment and balance issues. Since 2017, employees in the U.S. State Department and other federal agencies have reported strange humming noises that resulted in sickness and incapacitation.
Starting at the U.S. embassy in Havana, victims have described being hit by what feels like an invisible force that overwhelms their senses. Some of the victims believe they were targeted because of their job within the federal government. For years, their employer has debated whether the attacks are real, or an imagined illness, and whether to compensate the employees for their illnesses they say they got on the job.
On March 8, CBS 60 Minutes reported some believe that the federal government purchased a directed-energy device and has tested it on animals.
Reporter Scott Pelley talked to Chris, a retired lieutenant colonel who had worked on highly classified spy satellites. He told Pelley he had been attacked five times in the last five months – one time waking up in a full-body convulsion. His wife, Heidi, was nearby for two of the attacks and woke up with immense joint pain. A doctor later told her the bones in her shoulder were dissolving. Both asked that their last names not be used to protect their identities. Chris said he believes he and his wife were the victims of an attack and that others continue to be in danger.
“I think it’s time we as a country come to grips with the fact that the game has changed. Our adversaries are now able to reach out and touch us here in the United States, specifically at our homes,” he said.
Dr. David Relman, a Stanford University professor of medicine, said he was asked by government officials to lead two investigations that included panels of doctors, physicists, engineers and others who all proposed a theory around the purported attacks.
“That the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy,” he told Pellley.
In his research, one country had done more research on creating a pattern of microwaves that could damage the brain – Russia.
“We found the large majority of work to have been conducted in the former Soviet Union. And what they found was that effects could range from loss of consciousness to seizures to memory lapses, inability to concentrate, headaches, intense pressure, pain, disorientation, difficulty with balance, many of the things that we heard about from victims of Havana Syndrome,” he told Pelley.
60 Minutes reported confidential sources said the U.S. had acquired a directed-energy weapon through a Russian criminal network and had been testing it in a U.S. lab on animals for more than a year, and that the tests showed injuries consistent with those reported as stemming from Havana Syndrome.
In February, the Washington Post reported a scientist in Norway had built a machine capable of emitting microwave energy similar to the ones thought to be used in the attacks. His goal during his 2024 experiments was to prove that devices like those are harmless to humans. But when he tested it on himself, he suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana Syndrome.”
It was the latest twist to the quest to determine the causes, if any, of Havana syndrome, which the U.S. government calls Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs). While the experiments do not prove that a foreign adversary has attacked U.S. federal workers, it does give rise to the defense that “pulsed-energy devices” can affect humans and could be developed by hostile foreign entities.
“I think there’s compelling evidence that we should be concerned about the ability to build a directed-energy weapon that can cause a variety of risk to humans,” Paul Friedrichs, a retired military surgeon and Air Force general who oversaw biological threats on the White House National Security Council under President Joe Biden, said.
Late last year, reporting by CNN found that the federal government had purchased a similar directed-energy device and that it was conducting experiments with it. At about the same time, two spy agencies within the federal government changed their previous decisions on AHIs and admitted that some of the AHI incidents could have been the work of a foreign adversary. In January of 2025, the Biden administration released a new assessment from the two agencies, that said they had “to shift their assessments about whether a foreign actor has a capability that could cause biological effects consistent with some of the symptoms reported as possible AHIs.”
