Intel community bats down main theory behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents

The intelligence community has determined that unexplained health incidents referred to as “Havana Syndrome” that have afflicted hundreds of government officials in recent years were not caused by a foreign adversary, knocking down a main theory among victims and experts.

The assessment, compiled by the CIA and six intelligence agencies, also said the U.S. found no evidence that the symptoms experienced by American intelligence officers, diplomats and other government employees were the result of an intentional weaponized attack, according to two U.S. intelligence officials.

The finding undercuts a years-long narrative, propped up by more than a thousand reports from government employees, that a foreign adversary used pulsed electro-magnetic energy waves to sicken Americans.

“We cannot tie a foreign adversary to any incident,” said one of the U.S. intelligence officials, who, like the other, was granted anonymity to speak more freely about the assessment.

Investigators studied more than 1,500 reports from across the U.S. government that detailed symptoms ranging from headaches to dizziness, the intelligence officials said.

“There is no one explanation for any of this,” the second U.S. intelligence official said. “We believe that what these officers are reporting is real.”

The officials said most agencies involved in the assessment determined it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was involved. Of the seven agencies, two had moderate-to-high confidence in that assertion, three had moderate confidence, and two said it is “unlikely” an adversary was involved but did so with low confidence, the officials said. The officials did not provide the names of those agencies.

The assessment is based not just on a lack of evidence but also existing evidence that actually “points against” a foreign actor being involved, the second official said.

The assessment also found that no foreign adversary has a weapon or collection device that is causing the incidents. Two agencies said they had high confidence in that determination, three had moderate confidence, and two had low confidence because they believe radio-frequency energy is a “plausible cause.”

“The intelligence community assessment released today by ODNI reflects more than two years of rigorous, painstaking collection, investigative work, and analysis by IC agencies including CIA,” CIA Director Bill Burns said in a statement. “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.”

Initial reports about the mysterious syndrome first emerged in 2016 among U.S. and Canadian diplomatic staff in Havana, Cuba. The diplomats complained of hearing piercing sounds coming from one direction and acute nausea and vertigo. In the years that followed, hundreds of additional U.S. government workers reported symptoms that aligned with those initial health reports.

The buildup of reporting prompted lawmakers and various agencies throughout the U.S. government to investigate potential reasons for the unexplained health incidents.

The intelligence assessment briefed to reporters Wednesday contradicts previous findings from various government groups.

In 2020, the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine said it found that the most probable cause of the syndrome was “directed, pulsed-radio frequency energy.” A year later, administration officials told Congress they were increasingly worried about the reporting and that there was a chance a foreign adversary — potentially Russia — was using a weapon to target Americans. And a panel of experts put together by the intelligence community also found that an external energy source could have caused the symptoms and that a foreign power could have been involved.

When the reports initially emerged, intelligence officials said medical studies suggested that the incidents represented a new medical syndrome that looked similar to a traumatic brain injury. Now, they said, that medical thinking has evolved and the intelligence community found that the symptoms did not fall into any discernible patterns.

The two intelligence officials said the seven agencies looked at reports spanning 96 countries. Some of the reports took place on different continents on the same day.

When the intelligence community initially launched its investigation two years ago, analysts approached the probe with the assumption that a foreign actor was targeting Americans intentionally with portable technology. But as they examined the data more closely, those assumptions did not hold, the officials said.

Analysts and officials contacted other governments to understand the extent to which their employees were experiencing similar symptoms. Those governments did not indicate that they had received an “upswell” in those kinds of reports.

“I want to be absolutely clear: These findings do not call into question the experiences and real health issues that U.S. government personnel and their family members — including CIA’s own officers — have reported while serving our country,” Burns said.

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Supreme Court appears ready to let New Jersey exit mob watchdog

The Supreme Court appears willing to let New Jersey unilaterally exit the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a bistate police agency created to crack down on corruption immortalized in the Marlon Brando movie “On The Waterfront.”

All nine justices had tough questions for New York over the course of more than an hour of oral arguments on Wednesday. New York is trying to save the commission from New Jersey’s exit, a move that would effectively kill it. For New Jersey and the federal government, which is supporting New Jersey's position, the justices seemed to mostly wonder how they could side with New Jersey without causing chaos and uncertainty for other multistate deals, like the one that created the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The two states created the Waterfront Commission in 1953 to go after mobs and corrupt labor practices at the New York-New Jersey container port. The agreement between the two states, known as a compact, lacks language on what happens when either side wants to leave the commission, which New Jersey now wants to do. Disputes between states head straight to the high court.

The shipping industry, the powerful union that represents dock workers and nearly every New Jersey politician — including current Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy — all argue the commission has outlived its useful life by choking off harbor business and causing labor shortages. They argue the commission does more to keep alive old and outdated stereotypes of violent thuggery than it does to actually clean up the port.

New York has warned New Jersey is heading down a path that would invite violence and enable corruption by threatening to return the waterfront to the dark ways of the past and would worsen conditions at the port, creating yet another crisis in the American supply chain.

Lawyers for each state faced robust questioning from the court Wednesday.

At times, though, the justices answered their own questions. Chief Justice John Roberts told New York’s deputy solicitor general Judith Vale that it’s harder to “unscramble the eggs” at the Port Authority — which is tasked with overseeing bridges, tunnels, trains, docks and airports in both states — than it is to unwind the relatively small Waterfront Commission, an agency of about 70 people that licenses dock workers.

At another point, the chief justice seemed to reverse course and asked how easy it would truly be to divide up the Waterfront Commission’s buildings, bank accounts and investigations. Roberts wondered if it made sense to let New Jersey “just walk away."

But the chief justice’s question was one of the few skeptical questions the justices had for New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum or assistant to federal solicitor general Austin Raynor.

What the justices asked

In other questions Wednesday, the justices mostly seemed to be checking to see how they could side with New Jersey without affecting multistate deals setting boundary lines or dividing up water rights.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said water rights were like property rights — you can't sell a house then take it back — and those disputes could be distinguished from New Jersey and New York's dispute, which involves continuing performance by each state of certain tasks, like licensing workers.

She and other justices kept turning back to basics of contract law: Unless an agreement says how it will end, one party can end it.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor kept saying she wanted to find the “simplest rule” for dealing with such disputes and said it “doesn’t make any sense” to assume one state should be able to hold another to an agreement like this forever.

Justice Samuel Alito likewise wondered what an “extraordinary thing” it would be to allow one state to lock another into an agreement like this against the other state’s will.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also wondered if simple rules of basic contract law would allow the court to side with New Jersey without creating complications in other cases that reach the court — especially water rights cases, some of which have consumed the court’s attention for decades.

New York's Vale said the commission remains vital and the states even modified the agreement in 2006, an indication they believed the problems it was meant to solve — creating a fair way to license workers and keep crime off the waterfront — remained a problem.

The case reached the court last spring, just as New Jersey was finalizing long-awaited plans to exit the commission thanks to a law former Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed on his last day in office after having vetoed a previous version of it. Under the 2018 law, the state would quit the commission and put the New Jersey State Police in charge of policing the waterfront.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul surprised Murphy when she decided to sue to save the commission. Not only that, but New York began a bitter fight that drew on history — some would say stereotypes — of organized crime in New Jersey.

However, the mob was barely mentioned Wednesday and debates about how much crime there is doesn't seem likely to play into the justices’ ultimate decision. Unlike other cases, where facts are in dispute, the court didn’t appoint a special master to try to get to the bottom of that argument. Instead, the justices are expected to decide by interpreting the decades-old agreement that formed the commission.

This isn’t the first time the high court has been asked to consider the issue. A previous case in lower courts held up New Jersey’s exit for several years.

In late 2021, the court handed New Jersey a victory by declining to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that sided with New Jersey’s argument that the commission didn’t have standing to sue the state to save itself. At the time, New York was still on the sidelines but everyone agreed New York would have standing if it wanted to take New Jersey to court. So the court’s decision not to hear the previous case intensified the standoff between New York and New Jersey that led to the case justices now must decide.

A ruling is expected by the end of the court's term in June.

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Kinzinger the ‘homeless Republican’ launches ad campaign against extremism

Adam Kinzinger is gone from Congress and the Jan. 6 committee, but he’s still raging against what he sees as dangerous political extremism.

The Illinois Republican’s political organization is launching a nationwide campaign urging voters to reject extreme candidates on both sides of the aisle ahead of the 2024 election. The centerpiece of the campaign is a nearly six-minute-long short film titled “Break Free,” inspired by Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad about escaping the conformity of non-Apple computers.

In the political ad’s twist, people are forced to wear blue- and red-tinted goggles showing them divisive images and broadcasts from a “Big Brother”-type character until they take them off and escape. A monologue from Kinzinger urges Americans to reject political extremes.

“What we’re showing, by the video, is we’ve been programmed so much to believe that there’s only two choices to everything, that the other side is our enemy, that each event in the world should be seen through blue or red glasses,” Kinzinger said in an interview. “And we’re saying there’s a completely different way.”

He said the nationwide campaign’s rollout, which will include TV, digital, billboard and guerilla marketing, will involve spending as close to “a quarter million [dollars] or more.” Shorter versions of the video will be displayed too.

And as an example of what Kinzinger described as “performance art,” people have been spotted around Capitol Hill wearing the all-white costumes from the video. The former congressman said the display was also meant to draw attention to how many lawmakers on Capitol Hill were just “looking for that next social media opportunity, and not actually trying to do what their constituents need.”

“It’s just another way to put that in perspective,” he added. “And it’s a little creepy too.”

Kinzinger broke with his party after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, eventually serving as one of two Republicans on the select panel investigating the insurrection. He now identifies as a “homeless Republican.”

Asked about the select panel’s unfinished business, he said his “working assumption” was that the Department of Justice and Senate Democrats might be able to carry on the investigative mantle from the select panel, which sunsetted at the end of the last Congress.

“The Senate needs to pick up that slack,” he said.

There were still investigative leads to pursue with the Secret Service, Kinzinger said, and with former President Donald Trump’s social media manager Dan Scavino, who had resisted the select panel’s subpoena and was eventually held in contempt of Congress. He did agree, however, that the Jan. 6 select committee had acted correctly in not further pushing former Vice President Mike Pence’s testimony, saying it would have taken up “a ton of energy for probably, as far as we were concerned, probably not a ton of information that’s useful.”

“There’s a lot of those kinds of loose ends that, while I’m impressed at the committee’s ability to put together what we were able to do ... if we had more time or infinite time, I think we could have done a lot more,” Kinzinger said.

Kinzinger didn’t close the door to running for office again, though he said it wouldn’t be in the near future.

“There’s a good chance I run for something again someday,” he said. “But I definitely need to take a good breather and a reset and focus on my wife and kid right now.”

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Western firms say they’re quitting Russia. Where’s the proof?

Company statements and databases are flawed measures of what is going on in Russia’s murky business world — and academics are clashing over how to use these methodologies.

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France aims to protect kids from parents oversharing pics online

"The message to parents is that their job is to protect their children's privacy," lawmaker says.

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Hungary's Orbán plays spoilsport on NATO accession for Finland, Sweden

The Hungarian parliament is set to open debate on Nordic countries' bid to join military alliance.

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House GOP quickly sinks intel community’s hope for easy surveillance green light

Congress and the Biden administration have started down a collision course as a controversial surveillance program is set to sunset this year, with lawmakers immediately indicating they would not accept the executive branch’s opening offer.

The Justice Department and the intelligence community formally launched its reauthorization effort on Tuesday by floating to congressional leadership that the surveillance authority, known as Section 702, should be extended largely as is. Lawmakers all too happily shot down that trial balloon, previewing what will be a months-long fight that could run right up to the Dec. 31 deadline with no clear path to compromise.

There’s no shortage of potential pitfalls. The administration won’t just have to contend with their usual antagonists in congressional Republicans, but also fellow Democrats who worry that the program doesn’t have sufficient guardrails. The authority is designed to gather electronic communications of foreigners abroad, but also has the potential to sweep up the communications of Americans.

To add to the political headache, the Justice Department will need to win over a Republican House, where many of the lawmakers with oversight of the program are the very same who are leading a sweeping investigation into alleged political motivations within the DOJ and the FBI. The party’s relationship with the law enforcement apparatus soured sharply during former President Donald Trump’s tenure, amid GOP accusations that the Feds improperly targeted Trump and his allies.

A group of House Republicans are already discussing letting the surveillance authority sunset entirely, according to a GOP aide. And in a significant red flag for supporters of the currently written program, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, one of the four congressional panels that will lead the Section 702 discussions — said he won’t support extending the program without changes.

In fact, he isn’t convinced yet that it needs to be continued at all.

“We’re working on the kind of reforms we think need to happen, but frankly I think you should have to go get a warrant,” Jordan said in a brief interview.

The Ohio Republican didn’t support reauthorizing the program in January 2018, so his skepticism is hardly surprising. But his influence has grown significantly since then: He is now wielding a gavel and has transitioned from leadership foe to ally. And his panel is now stacked with several members who not only oppose the specific surveillance authority set to sunset this year, but also have concerns about the broader Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those calls are being fueled, in part, by a recently declassified report on the use of Section 702 between December 2019 and May 2020. In a sign of the odd political bedfellows who are likely to push reforms, conservative Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), both members of Jordan’s panel, vented publicly over a detail tucked into a footnote of the report: An FBI intelligence analyst queried surveillance databases using only the name of a U.S. House member.

The administration is aware that they are facing a heavy lift and aren’t ruling out changes to the program. Officials have stressed in interviews and in the Tuesday letter to congressional leadership that it is open to potential improvements.

And they’re taking initial steps to try to quell a fight on the front end. Biden administration officials’ opening pitch is coming much earlier than it did in past years — they estimated they waited until September to begin discussions last time — and they’ve dropped their pitch for a permanent extension, which lawmakers balked at in 2018. They’re also offering to give lawmakers classified briefings to make their case for reauthorization.

But the Biden Administration is drawing a red line on an overhaul that would change the essential function of the authority. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a letter to congressional leadership, wrote that they needed to “fully preserve its efficacy.”

In a second prong of the administration’s opening salvo, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen made his pitch for continuing the program during a Brookings Institution event on Tuesday using stark terms.

“What keeps me up at night is thinking about what will happen if we fail to renew Section 702 of FISA,” he said.

And Biden administration officials are preemptively pushing back on likely proposals from privacy advocates who want to change the program. One area that is already coming under early reform chatter is so-called “backdoor” searches, when government agencies sift through already acquired data for information that was “incidentally” collected on Americans. A senior administration official argued that banning or trying to restrict searches involving U.S. persons "would either ban or restrict the government from accessing in a timely way potentially critical information."

The administration does have its congressional allies, particularly among Senate leadership and members of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as well as the Intelligence panel’s bipartisan leaders, all voted to reauthorize the program in 2018. Of the 65 lawmakers who previously voted to reauthorize 702, roughly 20 have left the Senate — meaning supporters will need to pick up new allies.

And in a nod to the difficult debate ahead, Reps. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Chris Stewart (R-Utah) have been quietly working on the reauthorization effort since last year. The three Republicans, each on their chamber’s Intelligence Committee, want to reauthorize the program, though they are expected to pair that with broader FISA reforms — including in how judges are assigned to surveillance applications.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and who tapped the trio to take the lead, echoed their general direction, saying FISA is a “critical tool in our national security arsenal” and that he supports extending it but "with reforms that will protect American’s civil liberties.”

But privacy advocates believe they are at a point of maximum leverage. Unlike in 2020 when a congressional stalemate — and mixed signals between then-President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr — led to three unrelated surveillance powers lapsing, critics of Section 702 believe the administration views the program as so critical that they will agree to sweeping changes that might have once been off the table.

The administration is urging lawmakers to stay narrowly focused on Section 702, but officials admit that’s unlikely. That’s in part because of a high-profile series of reports from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz that found “widespread” non-compliance by the department when it came to a key step in FBI procedure that was designed as a guardrail for ensuring accuracy in surveillance applications.

We are “aware that there are those who want to talk about reforms or changes,” said a senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “And in the months to come, of course, we anticipate hearing what it is that others who want to have those conversations have in mind.”

John Sakellariadis and Alexander Ward contributed to this report. 

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