Havana Syndrome Update
by: Dana Reyes

Havana Syndrome Update: What the Rescinded Spy Assessments Said

At least six people with suspected Havana Syndrome symptoms have been getting treatment at Walter Reed since the summer, according to an Oct. 26 NewsNation report by the investigative journalist Catherine Herridge. Some of them reportedly work for federal agencies around Washington, and some worked on directed-energy projects. Officials haven’t confirmed the cluster, and no investigator has publicly said what caused it.

The story landed on familiar ground. One camp says Havana Syndrome was debunked years ago. The other says the government has long known Russia was behind it. Both camps tend to cite the same official record, which is two declassified intelligence assessments, and neither describes them accurately.

Those assessments no longer stand.

In June, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rescinded both of them. Nothing has replaced them that we could find. So we went back and read what the two documents said.

What the 2023 assessment found

The first document is ICA 2023-02286-B, dated March 1, 2023, and drafted by the National Intelligence Council under its counterintelligence officer. It asked one question: whether a foreign actor was responsible for the anomalous health incidents, or AHIs, reported by U.S. officials since Havana in 2016.

Its headline judgment was that most agencies found it “very unlikely” a foreign adversary was responsible. That was never a unanimous verdict, and the document says so. Two agencies held that view with moderate-to-high confidence and three with moderate confidence. Two others judged it only “unlikely,” with low confidence, citing collection gaps.

The split was sharper on weapons. Two agencies said radiofrequency energy was “a plausible cause for AHIs,” based in part on an IC expert panel and research at some U.S. laboratories. A 2022 panel summary, described in a later White House statement, had found that “pulsed electromagnetic or acoustic energy remains a plausible explanation in certain cases.” Every agency agreed further research on adversary RF capabilities was worth doing, because the science was still unsettled.

The medical section did the most to sink the attack theory. Early studies had described a pattern of injuries resembling traumatic brain injury. The 2023 assessment said later work, including a JASON panel’s look at preliminary National Institutes of Health data, did not show “a consistent set of physical injuries.” One agency had only low confidence in that judgment because the NIH findings hadn’t been published yet.

Two passages tend to get dropped when people summarize the 2023 assessment. First, all agencies agreed that officers “sincerely and honestly reported their experiences.” Second, the document set its own test for changing its mind. One such trigger would be the identification of “a specific device that both caused the harmful effects described in AHI reports and was fielded by an adversary during the timeframe of the incidents.”

Two agencies moved in 2025

The update, ICA 2025-00008-B, was approved for public release on Jan. 9, 2025, the last month of the Biden administration. It’s dated the following day and called “Updated Assessment of Anomalous Health Incidents, as of December 2024.” Five components stayed at “very unlikely,” with the same confidence levels as before.

Two did not.

One judged there was a “roughly even chance” a foreign actor had used a novel weapon or prototype device to harm “a small, undetermined subset” of personnel. The other gave a “roughly even chance” that a foreign actor had developed such a device. It still thought deployment unlikely. Both held their views with low confidence, citing reporting that foreign directed-energy research was “making progress.”

On capability alone, the language went further. One component assessed it “likely” that a foreign actor has an RF antipersonnel capability that can cause effects consistent with some reported symptoms. The document doesn’t name either agency, and the White House statement that day said only that some components had shifted their key judgments.

The update also revealed some government lab testing. The intelligence community was supporting research at government-affiliated labs on whether RF signals cause these bioeffects. Most results had historically shown no harm, it said, but “more recent, limited studies have produced mixed preliminary results.” The assessment chose to evaluate only published findings and said it would fold in the labs’ work once they published.

The 2025 document also kept the 2023 medical judgment, citing NIH research published in 2024 that found no consistent pattern of injuries. Like the 2023 version, it stated that no component questioned the suffering of the people who reported incidents.

Gabbard’s memo didn’t name a culprit

Gabbard’s rescission came in a memo to the intelligence community around June 11, 2026, in what CNN called one of her final acts before leaving office. The journalist Sasha Ingber reported that Gabbard ordered the National Intelligence Council to withdraw both assessments, according to a letter sent to members of Congress. We haven’t found the memo posted on ODNI’s site, so its wording here comes from those two reports.

According to CNN, the office said the assessments selectively excluded relevant intelligence, suppressed alternative analysis and relied on “an ethically flawed medical study.” Ingber listed similar shortfalls, including mischaracterized sources, omitted information and limited collection. The reports don’t say which study the memo meant. The best-known problem belongs to the NIH research. In August 2024 the NIH ended that work after an internal review found participants had been coerced into joining, though not by NIH staff, CNN reported at the time. The CIA said it had cooperated with the review.

Neither report says the memo found that a foreign weapon exists or named Russia. It withdrew the old conclusions without issuing new ones. Rep. Rick Crawford, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, praised the move, calling the assessments “flawed, fraudulent, and manufactured,” CNN reported. CNN also noted it wasn’t clear whether the rescission would lead to a new investigation. Gabbard left office that summer, and Jay Clayton was sworn in as DNI on Aug. 3, according to ODNI’s newsroom.

The device test the 2023 assessment set

CNN has reported that in the final days of the Biden administration, the government spent more than $10 million to secretly buy a device that emits pulsed radio waves. CNN said it contains Russian components, though it isn’t entirely Russian in origin, and that some officials came to believe it could be an example of the technology behind some injuries. We found no public technical findings on it.

Read against the 2023 document, that purchase meets only part of its own reopening test. A device would have to be shown to cause the reported harm and to have been fielded by an adversary when the incidents happened. Nothing public yet shows either. The 2025 update anticipated this, saying lab results would be added once published.

The NewsNation report doesn’t establish a cause either. Herridge said she expects to learn more about government findings before the end of the year, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. For now, the U.S. government has no standing official assessment of what caused Havana Syndrome.

Read them yourself. The 2023 assessment runs two pages, and the 2025 update runs three. If ODNI’s server refuses the link, archived copies of both are on the Wayback Machine.

Primary source: ODNI, “Updated Assessment of Anomalous Health Incidents, as of December 2024,” ICA 2025-00008-B (Jan. 10, 2025). Full context: ODNI, “Updated Assessment of Anomalous Health Incidents,” ICA 2023-02286-B (March 1, 2023).

Sources

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