'Havana Syndrome' Weapon Is A Cold War Tech That's Perfect For 'Hybrid War'
Against the disunited States of America
Animal experiments to study the effects of microwaves on living creatures first took place in the United States during the 1960s in a DARPA program called Project Pandora. Rabbits and a monkey were exposed to low levels of microwave radio energy focused on different portions of their bodies while their heart rates were monitored. American defense scientists were replicating a Soviet experiment to test its claims. While those scientists did not discover a ‘death ray’ in 1966, antipersonnel microwave weapons do exist now. In fact, they have been sold on the American arms market since 2004.
Known as the Active Denial System, and described as a “pain ray,” the ADS was described as “a revolutionary less-than-lethal directed energy application that employs millimeter wave technology to repel individuals or crowds without causing injury” some twenty years ago. Both the US Army and civilian law enforcement agencies in the US have hesitated to use this system, however, for the ethics were deemed too challenging.
China has their own version of the ADS, and who could doubt that the CCP finds the ethics of such a weapon far less challenging than the LAPD. So just imagine the ethics to be found at Unit 29155 of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, regarding the development and use of even more damaging microwave weapons. It may sound like science fiction, but it is really just a matter of engineering the radio electronics.
“There are two types of antipersonnel microwave weapons,” physicist Louis A. Del Monte writes in his 2021 book War at the Speed of Light : Directed-Energy Weapons and the Future of Twenty-First-Century Warfare. Neurological microwave weapons “attack the human nervous system, typically the brain.” While low-frequency microwaves are generally nonlethal, they “can result in permanent brain damage,” Del Monte writes. Biological microwave weapons “attack the body in various ways, such as causing skin irritation or the sensation of hearing loud sounds or voices.”
Del Monte has looked into the ADS, “both its frequency and wavelength, and it fits the definition of a microwave weapon.” He also cites some revealing numbers that suggest a much more noxious weapon could easily be devised from the basic plan of that system.
After conducting interviews with U.S. Marine colonel Tracy Taffola, the director of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, and Stephanie Miller, who measured the system’s radio frequency bioeffects at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Phys.org learned the following information: The system output frequency is 95,000,000,000 cycles per second (95 gigahertz) and is superficially absorbed by the skin, leading to the target’s immediate instinct to flee (hence its name, Area Denial System). Its reach, or range, is a thousand meters (0.6 miles). The U.S. military considers the system its safest nonlethal capability, having exposed 1,100 people and resulting in only 2 people suffering injuries that required medical attention to recover fully.
A household microwave oven operates on the same principle, exciting the water molecules in your bag of popcorn. Increasing the power increases the effect. Thus, the difference between a weapon that hurts 2 in 1000 people, and a weapon that hurts all 1000 of them, is just radio electronics engineering.
Weapon-makers have other options for harming people with high-powered microwaves. Randall W. Mai of Kansas State University describes another type of biological microwave weapon that works through something called the Frey Effect.
These microwave weapons cause people to perceive they hear a sound. In 2003 WaveBand Corporation received a contract from the U.S. Navy to design a microwave weapon for military crowd control. According to New Scientist, the project transitioned to Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2008. Its product MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) is a microwave ray gun that causes people to perceive they hear painfully loud booms.
MEDUSA also “may disrupt a person’s balance, cause fevers, and trigger epileptic-type seizures,” Mai says. “The inner ear has sections filled with air and fluid vulnerable to microwaves at specific frequencies.”
The human head acts as an antenna for microwaves. When the head receives those microwave signals, they slightly heat those inner-ear sections, causing them to expand and shift. The human body does not feel the heat or expansions, but the ear records the shifts. The ear’s design requires it to interpret the variations as sound, which is a function of the microwave frequency.
A 2008 New Scientist article quotes James Lin, a University of Chicago scientist, worrying that MEDUSA might cause “neural damage.” More distressing, however, is that turning up the power makes people hear phantom sounds, inviting all manner of unethical uses. We are focused on injurious uses, however. “Previous microwave audio tests involved very ‘quiet’ sounds that were hard to hear,” whereas “a high-power system would mean much more powerful — and potentially hazardous — shockwaves.” Engineering again.
Both the US Army and the Secret Service have developed microwave systems that make people hear sounds, Del Monte says, and the US Air Force obtained a classified patent for such a system in 1996. Put simply, people who dismiss the alarming number of ‘Havana Syndrome’ cases as entirely paranoia or delusion because they doubt the very existence of microwave weapons, are all terribly, utterly wrong. Those people could not possibly be more wrong.
Recently, the CBS news show 60 Minutes investigated ‘Havana Syndrome’ and made a convincing case that Russia has targeted Americans who are effective against covert Russian activities, such as organized crime, propaganda, and intelligence. I am embedding the entire segment here to let the reader make up their own mind about this reporting.
If 60 Minutes is correct, the United States government has denied the existence of Havana Syndrome (“Anomalous Health Incidents,” or AHIs) and thrown a thousand of its own best people under the proverbial bus for fear of raising strategic tensions with Russia.
It would be easier to dismiss the story if not for Der Spiegel and The Insider, which cooperatively published an extensive report about the aforementioned Unit 29155. It is long, but entirely worth reading.
Among this investigation’s core findings is the fact that senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to the development of “non-lethal acoustic weapons,” a term used in Russian military-scientific literature to describe both sound- and radiofrequency-based directed energy devices, as both would result in acoustic artifacts in the victim’s brain.
These and other operatives attached to Unit 29155, traveling undercover, have been geolocated to places around the world just before or at the time of reported anomalous health incidents — or AHIs, as the U.S. government formally refers to Havana Syndrome.
[…] Unit 29155, moreover, is infamous within the U.S. intelligence community. “Their scope is global for conducting lethal operations and acts of sabotage,” a former high-ranking CIA officer with subject matter expertise in Russia told The Insider. “Their mission is to find, fix, and finish, all in support of Vladimir Putin’s imperial dreams.”
What better way to make America do stupid things than zapping the brains of its most strategic people? This week, NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh told Congress that “at least eight employees of the National Security Agency suffer from the mysterious ailment known as ‘Havana Syndrome,’” according to Capitol Hill reporter Maggie Miller. Never mind recruiting the next Edward Snowden when you can just cook the skulls of his former colleages.
John Schindler, who has been writing about Havana Syndrome since the first headline and knows some victims, writes that the NSA was an early target of these attacks. Mike Beck, the “Patient Zero” who first encountered Havana Syndrome in 1996 and has since developed Parkinson’s disease, received a letter from the NSA in 2014 confirming that they had reports of “a high powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence.”
Schindler takes Biden DNI Avril Haines to task for trying to shove the truth under a White House rug. Set your politics aside, however, because both the current and previous presidents have had the same policy. This is our contemporary weakness as a country being exploited. Strategic drift has become paralysis. Nor should we limit the threat to Russia. America’s other enemies are watching, too. They see us doing nothing, and they wonder what they can get away with.
“Competition short of war — known variously as gray zone warfare, hybrid warfare, political warfare, and strategic competition among other labels — is intrinsically revisionist,” Jeannie Johnson writes in the Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture. Russia has a policy to unmake the post-Cold War order and redraw imperial boundaries. Pursuing that end, subversive, or sub rosa, attacks “seek to shift the status quo in ways that would harm US interests without triggering a direct confrontation with American military forces.” It is the strategy of weaker powers, state and non-state, against the United States.
Microwave weapons are perfect for a strategy of reducing American power without incurring retaliation. America is at present the perfect victim for such a campaign: self-gaslighting, internally and perpetually divided, unable and unwilling to deter further aggression. We are not a country that can deal with this form of attack, right now, perhaps anymore, and our enemies know it. They have no incentive to stop.