For years, hundreds of American intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel were being attacked by what investigators now believe is a sophisticated directed-energy weapon, likely wielded by a foreign adversary. And for years, the Biden administration knew far more than it was telling them, privately acknowledging what its own official intelligence assessments publicly denied, drafting a statement vindicating the victims, and then suppressing it, leaving brave Americans to suffer in silence while their government told the world their injuries were probably in their heads.
The full scope of the Biden administration’s cover-up of what is officially called Anomalous Health Incidents, and commonly known as Havana Syndrome, is finally coming to light, and the picture it reveals is one of institutional cowardice, bureaucratic self-protection, and a deliberate decision to shield America’s adversaries from accountability rather than protect America’s own people. The Trump administration is now cleaning up the mess, revoking the fraudulent Biden-era intelligence assessments, bringing accountability to the agencies that failed these patriots, and pursuing the truth that should have been told years ago.
The incidents began in late 2016 when American diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, began reporting debilitating symptoms with no known medical cause: blinding headaches, severe vertigo, sudden hearing loss, cognitive impairment, and a disturbing sensation of directed pressure on the skull that victims uniformly described as a targeted assault. Over the following years the attacks spread, striking American personnel in Vienna, Moscow, Tbilisi, Beijing, and dozens of other locations across the globe, eventually affecting hundreds of CIA officers, State Department personnel, FBI agents, military personnel, and their family members.
Rather than treat this as what the evidence increasingly suggests it is, a systematic foreign attack on American government personnel using a sophisticated directed-energy weapon, the Biden administration’s intelligence apparatus produced one cover story after another. A 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment declared it could not link cases to a foreign adversary and found it unlikely the illnesses resulted from enemy attacks. In the final days of the Biden presidency in January 2025, the broader intelligence community went further, declaring it “very unlikely” that a foreign actor was responsible. Victims who had been left with career-ending neurological damage were effectively told: we think you imagined it.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner and CIA Subcommittee Chairman Rick Crawford saw through the cover-up immediately. “This updated assessment by ODNI concerning new intelligence on Anomalous Health Incidents continues the Biden Administration’s cover-up,” Chairman Turner said bluntly. “This new intelligence, I believe, should completely change the assessment of our adversaries’ capabilities and the risks to our personnel. This will not age well for the Biden Administration.” Crawford’s office accused the administration of doubling down on misleading the American people. They were right on every count.
The evidence the Biden administration was burying is extraordinary. In January 2026, CNN reported that in the final weeks of the Biden administration, a Homeland Security Investigations division had purchased, through an undercover operation, an actual device that investigators believe is the weapon being used against American personnel. The government spent eight figures of taxpayer money to acquire it. The device is portable, backpack-sized, contains components of Russian origin, and emits pulsed radio frequencies. Pentagon scientists have been testing it for over a year on rats and sheep, and the injuries it produces are consistent with those seen in American Havana Syndrome victims. The Biden administration acquired this evidence of a Russian weapon and said nothing.
A March 2026 investigation by 60 Minutes on CBS added devastating detail. The weapon is programmable, can be operated by remote control, has a range of several hundred feet, can penetrate windows and drywall, is silent and generates no heat signature. And there is video. Classified security camera footage, described by sources who have seen it, shows the weapon being deployed against Americans in real time. In Istanbul, a video from a restaurant shows two FBI agents on vacation with their families when a man with a backpack walks in and everyone at the table simultaneously grabs their heads in pain. In a stairwell at the U.S. embassy in Vienna, two people suddenly collapse. These videos exist, they are classified, and the Biden administration sat on them while its official assessments told the world that nothing was happening.
Perhaps the most damning revelation came from a meeting the Biden White House held in its final days with Havana Syndrome victims including Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who says he was attacked in Moscow in 2017 and has spent years fighting for official recognition. Members of the Biden National Security Council told Polymeropoulos and five other victims directly: “We believe you.” The message was unmistakable. New intelligence had come in. The Biden administration privately knew its public “very unlikely” assessment was wrong. And then, after drafting a public statement backing the victims that would have officially acknowledged the truth, the Biden White House chose to kill the statement and say nothing. They protected their official narrative over the American patriots who were being attacked by a foreign power on their watch.
A former CIA officer who worked directly on the agency’s internal Havana Syndrome investigation told CBS News that the CIA’s investigation effectively ended in 2022, that his superiors appeared determined to drive toward a psychosomatic or environmental conclusion, and that agency leadership openly made fun of the victims internally. These are CIA officers, FBI agents, and military personnel who were experiencing symptoms consistent with traumatic brain injury, and the Biden CIA was mocking them in internal meetings. The institutional rot that produced that response is exactly what the current administration has been tasked with cleaning out.
A congressional interim report in 2024 concluded that it was “increasingly likely” that a foreign adversary was behind at least some of the incidents, with Russia and China as the prime suspects. Russia’s history with directed-energy weapon research is extensive, including the Cold War-era “Moscow Signal” that targeted the U.S. embassy in Moscow for years. The National Security Agency had a 2014 classified report identifying a hostile nation that had developed a microwave weapon capable of being aimed at a person’s living quarters to cause nervous system damage. The dots were there to be connected. The Biden administration chose not to connect them.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, appointed by President Trump, took decisive action in June 2026, formally revoking both Biden-era Intelligence Community Assessments on Havana Syndrome. Her office described the reports as Biden-era assessments rescinded because of faulty tradecraft. Gabbard had promised accountability when she took office, and she delivered it. She called the AHIs a top priority and stated her commitment to ensuring the mistreatment and dismissal of those impacted by the incidents would never be tolerated again under her watch.
The Fiscal Year 2026 Defense Authorization Act signed by President Trump in December 2025 required Gabbard and other intelligence leaders to produce new standardized guidelines for reporting and investigating AHIs going forward. This is exactly the kind of structural accountability measure that should have been implemented years ago but was blocked by an Obama-Biden intelligence bureaucracy more interested in protecting its institutional conclusions than protecting American personnel. The Trump administration is building the framework that should exist.
Michael Beck, the very first person to report Havana Syndrome symptoms, died on January 29, 2026. He was 65 years old and had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 45. He spent years fighting for official recognition of what had been done to him. His 2014 workers’ compensation claim was denied. He never lived to hear his government officially acknowledge the truth. His death stands as a memorial to what the Biden cover-up cost in human terms. It was not an abstraction. It was a man’s life.
The Trump administration has briefed senior members of the congressional intelligence committees and shown them a classified image of the newly purchased device. Pentagon personnel who investigated the incidents for DOD have been moved to a unit that develops countermeasures and new weapons, signaling a shift from investigation to response. America is finally moving from asking what happened to making sure it cannot happen again with impunity.
