A classified US operation used undercover agents to obtain a previously unknown microwave weapon that could explain mysterious brain injuries known as Havana Syndrome.

The revelation of the US operation marks a dramatic turn in a perplexing case that has divided US intelligence agencies for years, according to a new report by CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The secret operation used undercover Homeland Security agents to purchase the miniaturized microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network for about $15 million in 2024.

The weapon was described by CBS sources as a small, portable, concealable and unlike a traditional gun.

The mystery device is silent, does not generate heat like a microwave oven, can be programmed for different scenarios, operated remotely, and has a beam range of several hundred feet. It can reportedly penetrate windows and drywall.

The ‘Havana Syndrome’ phenomenon began in 2016 when American diplomats, CIA spies and military personnel reported sudden, crippling symptoms. 

US officials, from Havana to Vienna to northern Virginia, suffered sudden and often life-altering symptoms after what many believed were covert attacks by a foreign adversary.

The Pentagon purchased a weapon in 2026 believed to be the cause of the mysterious ‘Havana Syndrome’, insiders say. The device is believed to be a much smaller version of this high-power microwave generator

Symptoms of Havana Syndrome include loud noise, ear pain, intense head pressure or vibration, dizziness, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties

Havana syndrome received its name after multiple government personnel stationed at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, reported symptoms. The above photo shows the US Embassy in Havana, in January 2023

The concerns were dismissed by US intelligence agencies, which publicly declared it was ‘very unlikely’ a foreign adversary was responsible for the malady.  

Some officials even likened the mysterious illness to ‘mass hysteria.’ 

The victims vividly described being hit by something invisible but overwhelming – a force that ravaged their hearing, balance, vision and cognition in an instant.

Among them was Chris, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked on highly classified spy satellites and, along with his wife Heidi, asked that their last name not be used. 

Chris told 60 Minutes he was struck repeatedly in his own home in northern Virginia in 2020.

‘The very first incident occurred in August of 2020,’ he said. ‘And what it felt like was that someone punched me in the throat, and my left ear was clogged. And I started to get sharp shooting pains going down my left arm.’

What followed, he said, was even worse.

‘I was standing in my kitchen looking out at the back woods and it felt like an immediate vice on my head,’ Chris said. ‘Immediately disoriented, confused and dizzy.’

Between 2016 and 2018, over 200 US government employees and diplomats reported experiencing similar symptoms, with the majority of cases linked to staff stationed at the US Embassy in Havana. Pictured are flags in front of the US Embassy

‘The second attack, I was standing in my kitchen looking out at the back woods and it felt like an immediate vice on my head,’ Chris said. ‘Immediately disoriented, confused and dizzy.’

By the third episode, he said, ‘all of the muscles within my spine immediately cramped much like a Charley horse, and my spine felt like it was on fire.’

Then came what he called the worst attack of all.

‘I woke up with a full-body convulsion, the worst pain I have ever felt,’ he said. ‘It felt like a vice gripping my brainstem was there.’

His wife said she too suffered mysterious injuries. Heidi told 60 Minutes that in January she awoke with ‘immense joint pain everywhere,’ including left shoulder pain with no apparent trauma. 

According to the report, bones in her shoulder were dissolving in a condition called osteolysis, and she ultimately needed surgery.

Chris said the effects have never fully faded and that there had been ‘significant’ lasting damage. 

The condition has now been reported at embassies all over the world, leading to symptoms including headaches, dizziness, nausea, cognitive impairment, memory lapses, balance issues and insomnia

‘So I’m on two neurological drugs every day,’ he said. ‘And without them, I have very severe symptoms. I had sustained significant damage to multiple organ systems.’

Chris made clear that he believed he had been attacked by ‘a foreign adversary’ while ‘in the line of duty.’ 

The 60 Minutes report drew together similar accounts from officials and family members who never met one another, but often described eerily similar sensations. 

One FBI agent said it felt ‘like a dentist drilling on steroids’ inside her ear. 

A Commerce Department official in China described ‘intense pressure on both of my temples.’ 

Another early victim from Cuba likened it to a sharp object jabbing her eardrum. 

A Justice Department official’s wife in Europe said the sensation ‘pierced’ her ears and seemed to come through a window.

The government has long acknowledged that many of those people were injured and in some cases has paid for their health care but it has repeatedly disputed the cause. 

Victims were told their symptoms might be caused by environmental factors, viruses, preexisting conditions or, in the words of an early FBI theory, mass hysteria.

Catherine Werner, 31 at the time, developed symptoms of mysterious Havana syndrome in 2017 while she was working in foreign security in China. Werner is pictured above

When Werner adopted these two dogs the pets soon began vomiting blood and shivering 

The official intelligence judgment published in 2023 says it is ‘very unlikely’ the devastating illnesses were caused by a foreign adversary.

But that conclusion has been fiercely challenged by outside experts and by some former officials inside the system.

Dr. David Relman, a Stanford professor of medicine who led two government-requested investigations, told 60 Minutes he has no doubt that at least some of the victims are real.

Relman said the panels he led in 2020 and 2022, which included doctors, physicists and engineers, reached strikingly similar conclusions.

‘The two panels, the investigations that I know well, both concluded much the same, which was that the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy,’ he said.

Relman said his investigations found extensive prior work in the former Soviet Union on precisely the kind of pulsed microwave effects that might explain the injuries.

‘In both of our investigations we found the large majority of work to have been conducted in the former Soviet Union,’ he said. 

‘What they found was that effects could range from loss of consciousness to seizures to memory lapses, inability to concentrate, headaches, intense pressure, pain, disorientation, difficulty with balance, many of the things that we heard about from victims of Havana Syndrome.’

 US officials reportedly shelled out an eight figure sum and acquired the device as part of a covert operation

Chris, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked on highly classified spy satellites, along with his wife Heidi, both suffered excruciating pain from what they believe is a previously unknown microwave weapon

He added that Russian research in this area stretched back decades.

Years earlier, 60 Minutes uncovered a 2014 National Security Agency reference to ‘a high-powered microwave system weapon’ linked to a ‘hostile country.’ 

But the CIA had long leaned on the view that such a device would require enormous power and be ‘as big as a truck,’ making it implausible as a covert weapon.

In 2024, Homeland Security agents purchased a microwave weapon in a classified mission that cost about $15 million and was funded by the Pentagon.

CBS News said it did not see the weapon itself, but sources described it as small, portable, concealable and unlike a traditional gun. 

The ‘key,’ sources told the program, is not just the hardware but the software – code that shapes ‘a unique, electromagnetic wave that rises and falls abruptly and pulses rapidly.’

That description, 60 Minutes said, aligned with what Relman’s work had predicted.

‘And what the Russians spoke about was the importance of the energy being pulsed in order to have biological effects on humans,’ Relman said. 

‘When you produce pulses like this, you can actually stimulate electrically active tissue like brain tissue and the heart, for that matter, mimicking what the brain normally does, but now you’re driving it with your pulses from the outside.’

‘[It’s an ideal stealth weapon] because literally the person feels as if this is in my head,’ Relman explained.

According to CBS, that weapon has now been tested for more than a year in a US military laboratory. 

Heidi found that bones in her shoulder began to dissolve as a result of the microwave weapon

The wife of a Justice Department official experienced intense ear pain

She was left with injuries to her bones in her inner ear and skull

Sources told the network that tests on rats and sheep showed injuries consistent with those seen in human victims.

Investigators also obtained classified security camera videos that appear to show Americans being struck by the weapon. 

In one, taken in a restaurant in Istanbul, two FBI agents sitting with their families suddenly grab their heads in pain after a man with a backpack enters. 

In another, from a stairwell in the US embassy in Vienna, two people abruptly collapse.

If true, the evidence would mark a dramatic shift in a case that many victims say was mishandled, minimized and in some instances effectively buried.

One former CIA officer, speaking publicly for the first time but anonymously, told 60 Minutes he volunteered in 2021 to work on the agency’s Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI) unit because he had seen colleagues and their families devastated. 

Instead, he said, he found an effort focused not on determining what happened but on tamping the issue down.

‘One of the very first things that I heard when I arrived at the AHI Unit was, ‘Our job is to bring down the temperature on AHI at headquarters,’ he said.

He said that meant steering the issue away from the possibility of a state actor.

‘It basically was saying, “Hey, we’re gonna work towards this being an atmospheric and environmental issue, verses it being a state actor,” he said.

The former officer described what he called contempt toward victims inside the unit, including one episode in which, he said a senior official mocked them by joking about holding a happy hour where staff would have ‘simulated AHIs.’

‘To me, that was deplorable. It was disgusting,’ he said and he ultimately resigned.

‘I left because I saw the personal impact of this issue,’ he said. ‘And for me, it became a moral issue because they kept saying, “Our people are our highest priority.” But when it came down to it, that wasn’t the case from what I saw.’

Marc Polymeropoulos, pictured above in 2003, developed severe migraines and vision problems while working in Russia. He shared that it ‘simply doesn’t make sense’

Polymeropoulos, pictured in Moscow in 2017, shared with investigators that he thinks he and the others were targeted by Russian intelligence services

US official Marc Polymeropoulos said in 2024 he didn’t feel it was being taken seriously after he was hit with the random illness in Moscow

Retired CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, one of the best-known victims, told 60 Minutes he still feels betrayed by the agency he served for 26 years. 

Polymeropoulos said he was hit in a Moscow hotel room in 2017 and later suffered vertigo, blinding headaches, tinnitus, vision problems, memory trouble and concentration issues severe enough to end his career.

‘There’s a part of this that has to do with moral injury,’ he said. ‘And that’s the idea of– betrayal.’

He said the CIA, rather than backing him, effectively turned its back.

‘I just needed to get medical care when I came back, and they wouldn’t even do that,’ Polymeropoulos said. ‘So this moral injury, this sense of betrayal is so acute with me. That’s something that I can never forgive them for.

‘This is a massive CIA cover-up,’ he said, adding that he spoke ‘with great regret’ because he loved the organization and believed in its mission.

Relman also believed there had been a cover-up, even if not necessarily a single preplanned conspiracy.

‘Through a variety of purposes and means, not necessarily as a preplanned, strategic operation, but in essence, it arrives at the same result.’

He suggested one reason may have been institutional unwillingness to revisit early assumptions and that officials had already made up their minds

‘It almost seems as though consistency was more important than objectivity,’ Relman said.

According to the report, that position may have begun shifting late in the Biden administration, when victims were summoned to the White House with roughly two months left in President Joe Biden’s term. 

One FBI agent compared the pain in her ear to a dentist drilling on steroids

One official who worked in Cuba said the pain was like stabbing a pencil into your ear

A Commerce Department official complained of intense pressure in her head on both her temples

Relman said he helped organize the meeting and that officials there believed the victims and did not accept the CIA’s explanation that known medical or environmental factors accounted for the injuries.

Polymeropoulos said retired Major General Dr. Paul Friedrichs delivered a striking apology at the meeting.

‘He said very clearly, “I’m sorry. I want to apologize to you. I’ve never seen in 30-plus years of practicing military medicine victims treated in such a terrible manner. And I just wanna offer my apologies to you,”‘ Polymeropoulos recalled.

For the victims, it was a rare moment of official validation. But the report said a public White House statement supporting them was drafted and never released.

So far, the Trump administration has not changed the 2023 intelligence assessment stating it is ‘very unlikely’ that a foreign adversary was behind the attacks. 

At the same time, CBS reported that the administration has briefed senior intelligence officials in Congress and shown them a classified image of the weapon. 

The network also said Pentagon personnel who had investigated the attacks have been moved into a unit that develops new weapons.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence told 60 Minutes that its review of anomalous health incidents would be ‘comprehensive and complete’ and that ‘we remain committed to delivering the truth that the American people deserve.’

One former CIA officer suggested there may also be a need for the US to suppress evidence if a hostile foreign power was behind the attacks.

‘If we acknowledge that this was a state actor that was doing this, it is essentially a declaration of war against the United States, which has to have a response from the United States government,’ he said. 

‘I don’t know that the appetite was there to respond to the Russians at that time.’

Sources who contributed to Sunday night’s broadcast have suggested ‘there are likely many of these devices’ and that if undercover agents could buy one from gangsters, ‘then the Russians have lost control of a stealth weapon that could be used by anyone, anywhere.’