This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Doctors and scientists increasingly suspect attacks with microwave weapons are the cause of the mysterious ailments that have stricken more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China, the New York Times reported.



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The victims reported hearing intense high-pitched sounds in their hotel rooms or homes, followed by symptoms that included nausea, severe headaches, fatigue, dizziness, sleep problems and hearing loss.

In a study published in March in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a medical team that examined 21 of those affected in Cuba did not mention microwave weapons.

But the lead author, Douglas Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times microwave weapons are now considered a main suspect and the team is increasingly sure the diplomats suffered brain injuries.

“Everybody was relatively skeptical at first,” he was quoted as saying, “and everyone now agrees there’s something there”.

Neither the state department nor the FBI has publicly pointed to microwave weapons. The Times said there were many unanswered questions as to who might have carried out the attacks and why.

Cuba has denied any role in or knowledge of the incidents but in September 2017 the US recalled more than half of its staff from the embassy and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington. In June 2018, the state department announced it had sent home US personnel from China after they reported similar incidents.

According to the Times, an American scientist, Allan Frey, discovered in 1960 that the brain can perceive microwaves as sound. The discovery opened a new field of weapons research in the US and the Soviet Union.

The Russians called the envisioned weapons “psychophysical” or “psychotronic”, according to the Times, which said the US Defense Intelligence Agency warned in 1976 that Soviet research showed potential for “disrupting the behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel”.

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A National Security Agency statement obtained by Washington lawyer Mark Zaid on behalf of a client described how a foreign power built a weapon “designed to bathe a target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system”, the Times said.

The US military also researched weapons applications of microwaves, the air force winning a patent on an invention shown to beam comprehensible speech into an adversary’s head, according to the Times. Navy researchers explored the use of the Frey effect to induce sounds powerful enough to cause pain and even immobilisation, the newspaper said.

It is not known if the US deploys such weapons, the Times said.