Some of the cases of the mystery ailment that has afflicted U.S. embassy staff and CIA officers off and on since 2016 in Cuba, China, Russia and other countries most likely were caused by pulsed electromagnetic energy, according to a report by a panel of experts convened by national intelligence agencies.
The report’s findings are similar to those of another report released by the National Academies in 2020. In that report, a committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields concluded that directed, pulsed radio-frequency energy is the “most plausible mechanism” to explain the illness, dubbed “Havana syndrome.”
Neither report is definitive, and their authors don’t address who targeted the embassies or why they were targeted. But the technology behind the suspected weapons is well understood and dates back to the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. High-power microwave weapons are generally designed to disable electronic equipment. But as the Havana syndrome reports show, these pulses of energy can harm people, as well.
As an electrical and computer engineer who designs and builds sources of high-power microwaves, I have spent decades studying the physics of these sources, including work with the U.S. Department of Defense. Directed energy microwave weapons convert energy from a power source – a wall plug in a lab or the engine on a military vehicle – into radiated electromagnetic energy and focus it on a target. The directed high-power microwaves damage equipment, particularly electronics, without killing nearby people.
Two good examples are Boeing’s Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), which is a high-power microwave source mounted in a missile, and Tactical High-power Operational Responder (THOR), which was recently developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory to knock out swarms of drones.