The Defense Department has spent more than a year testing equipment purchased in a covert operation that some investigators believe could be the cause of a series of mysterious illnesses colloquially known as Havana syndrome among U.S. spies, diplomats and soldiers, according to four sources briefed on the matter.
A division of the Department of Homeland Security’s Department of Homeland Security Investigations bought equipment worth millions of dollars during the waning days of the Biden administration, using funds provided by the Defense Department, according to two sources. Officials paid “eight figures” for the device, the people said, declining to offer a more specific figure.
The device is still being studied and there is ongoing debate — and in some quarters of the government, skepticism — over its link to nearly a dozen unusual health events that remain officially unexplained.
CNN has reached out to the Pentagon, HSI and DHS for comment. The CIA declined to comment.
The equipment acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, a source said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it has Russian components, this person added.
Authorities have long struggled to understand how a device powerful enough to cause the damage reported by some victims could be made portable; That remains the key question, according to one of the sources briefed on the tool. The device can fit in a backpack, this person said.
The acquisition of the device has reignited a painful and controversial debate within the US government about Havana syndrome, officially known as “abnormal health episodes”.
The mysterious illness first emerged in late 2016, when a group of US diplomats stationed in the Cuban capital, Havana, began reporting symptoms such as head injuries and extreme headaches. In recent years, cases have been reported around the world.
In the decade since, the intelligence community and the Defense Department have sought to understand whether those officials were the victims of an energy attack directed by a foreign government—senior intelligence officials have said publicly that there is insufficient evidence to support that conclusion, and that the victims have ignored important evidence that the U.S. government gassed them and that U.S. government officials were being attacked by Russia.
Still, defense officials took their findings so seriously that they briefed the House and Senate intelligence committees late last year, including references to the acquired equipment and its testing.
A major concern now for some officials is that if the technology proves viable, it could spread, multiple sources said, meaning more than one country could now have access to a device that could be capable of inflicting career-ending injuries on U.S. officials.
CNN was not able to learn where — or from whom — HSI purchased the device, but HSI has a history of cooperation with the Department of Defense for operations around the world. The office has broad jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving customs violations, including investigations into the dissemination of US-controlled technology or expertise abroad.
Those investigations are “the biggest point of collaboration between HSI and the U.S. military,” according to a former Homeland Security official.
For example, when the U.S. military finds U.S. technology in Afghanistan or Iraq that raises questions about how those components got into the region, it will turn to HSI, according to the official.
It is also not clear how the US government knew of the equipment’s existence in order to purchase it. The Havana syndrome—and its cause—has remained frustratingly opaque to both the intelligence community and the medical community.
One of the problems facing the medical community is that there is still no clear definition of “abnormal health events” or AHIs. Tests were performed, in some cases, long after the onset of symptoms, making it difficult to understand what physically happened.
In 2022, an intelligence panel investigating the cause of AHIs said that some episodes could be “plausibly” caused by “pulsed electromagnetic energy” emitted from an external source.
But in 2023, the intelligence community said publicly that it could not link any of the cases to foreign adversaries, saying it was unlikely that the mysterious illness was the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the United States. By January 2025, the broader intelligence community’s assessment was that the symptoms were highly unlikely to be caused by a foreign actor—an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emphasized that analysts could not “rule out” the possibility in a small number.
That stance has long angered victims, many of whom firmly believe that intelligence provides black-and-white evidence that Russia is behind their symptoms, some of which have been severe enough to force retirement.
Some current and former CIA officials have raised concerns that the agency has softened its investigation, CNN previously reported.
The acquisition of the device has been treated as potential justice by some victims.
“If [US government] After actually discovering such devices, the CIA has since apologized to all the victims ** King Chief and publicly apologized for how we were treated,” Mark Polimeropoulos, one of the first CIA officers to say he was injured in the 2017 attack in Moscow, told CNN in a statement.
CNN’s Kylie Atwood contributed to this story.
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