Pentagon Reportedly Studying Device Suspected to be Linked to Havana Syndrome

Safety at Work

Washington, DC (WorkersCompensation.com) - According to a report from CNN, the U.S. Defense Department has spent more than a year testing a device they think may be the cause of Havana Syndrome.

CNN said four sources confirmed that a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, purchased the device in the last days of 2024 using millions from the U.S. Department of Defense. Officials believe the device could be linked to dozens of cases of anomalous health incidents for U.S. federal employees around the world.

Havana Syndrome stems from unexplained illnesses in employees of the U.S. State Department who fell sick in Havana, Cuba. In 2016, officials working at the U.S. Embassy there reported feeling like they’d been hit by an invisible blast wave. The U.S. government refers to the incidents as “Anomalous Health Incidents,” that cover a range of conditions including dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive difficulties and memory loss of varying severity.

Since then, similar incidents have occurred in embassies all over the world, including China, Austria and Serbia. The majority of the reports of Havana Syndrome occur in employees in the CIA and U.S. State Department serving overseas, but the illnesses and injuries have affected personnel in other agencies, including the U.S. Departments of Defense and Commerce.

Federal officials have debated the real cause – or if there is a cause at all. The U.S. State Department has said the symptoms are “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed, radio frequency energy,” but also said there is no concrete information on who or what could be responsible for the attack. An expert committee from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that directed pulsed RF energy could be the cause, but that it could also have been caused by ultrasound, pesticides, or mass psychogenic illness.

In 2024, seven U.S. intelligence agencies told the Washington Post there was “no credible evidence” that any foreign adversary to the U.S. possessed a weapon capable of causing the syndrome, and that the illnesses and injuries were more probably caused by pre-existing conditions, conventional illnesses and environmental factors.

CNN reported that the device acquired by HIS produces pulsed radio waves, and that while it is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components. Additionally, the device is small enough to fit in a backpack, which some officials say could explain how the device could cause the kind of damage victims have reported, and yet still be portable.

While the federal government debated the existence of Havana Syndrome, legislation passed in 2021 to pay victims of the purported attacks. The payments were authorized by Congress last year in response to the outrage among federal employees who felt department heads and cabinet officials didn’t believe the victims’ accounts.

The Havana Act provided up to $187,300 in compensation to each victim. Tammy Kupperman Thorp, CIA director of public affairs at the time, said the bill gave the CIA the authority to provide payments to its employees, their family members and other individuals affiliated with the agency who have “a qualifying injury to the brain.”

“The guidelines put in place were developed in partnership with the interagency and permit payments regardless of where the incident occurred,” Thorp said in 2022. “As we have previously said, these authorities are an important part of the agency’s commitment to support its work force.”

The payments were in response to the outrage among federal employees who felt their superiors and cabinet officials didn’t believe their accounts of illnesses.

In all, the federal government has received nearly 1,500 reports of Anomalous Health Incidents in 96 countries. New reports dropped significantly in 2021 and 2022, with only a few reported in 2023, 2024 and 2025, reports indicate.

If reports that HHS acquired the device are true, victims view its acquisition as potential vindication.

“If the [US government] has indeed uncovered such devices, then the CIA owes all the victims a f**king major and public apology for how we have been treated as pariahs,” Marc Polymeropoulos, one of the first CIA officers to go public with injuries he says he sustained in an attack in Moscow in 2017, said in a statement to CNN.

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