Sonic/electronic weapons used against U.S. personnel at Cuban Embassy in 2016

ETK Introduction: As a “targeted individual,” I have been subject to these same kinds of attacks, probably via infrasound, while in my own home(s) in 2006 in Turlock, California, and in 2016 in Crestone/Baca, Colorado. My symptoms matched those reported by many of the diplomats in Cuba. Clearly, these same weapons are now being deployed against American civilians and civilians throughout the world on a wide scale. Herein, I refer to this system as “GOG’S NeW GESTAPO” (Global Organized Gang Stalking Neuro-Warfare Goups’ Electronic Surveillance, Slavery, Tracking, Torture, and PsyOps Operations).

The following brief youtube clips and articles provide some of the relevant information regarding the Cuban incidents. Of course, American diplomats in the Soviet Union were also subject to directed energy attacks between the early 1950s and the late 1980s.

Two probable criminal perpetrators of the attacks not discussed below include:

1) U.S. military-intelligence personnel (and/or their corporate cutouts)
2) the RKM (Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (aka “the Jews”, “the syndicate”) that controls the U.S. government.

These two groups seem to be indistinguishable, since the RKM controls the US government. Indeed, these are probably the principle culprits secretly and criminally executing GOG’S NeW GESTAPO. This scenario is abundantly supported by research presented on this website.

1)
US spies in Cuba were among first victims of mysterious sonic ‘attacks’

The incidents, which have caused hearing loss and brain injury, began within days of Donald Trump’s election but the motives and culprits remain obscure

Associated Press in Havana

Mon 2 Oct 2017 16.23 BST
Last modified on Mon 2 Oct 2017 19.19 BST

This article is 3 months old
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The Hotel Capri in Havana is one of the sites of apparent sonic ‘attacks’ on US diplomatic personnel.

US intelligence operatives in Cuba were among the first and most severely affected victims of a string of baffling sonic attacks which has prompted Washington to pull out more than half of its diplomatic staff from Havana, the Associated Press has learned.
US warns Americans to avoid Cuba and slashes embassy staff after sonic attacks
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It was not until US spies, posted to the embassy under diplomatic cover, reported hearing bizarre sounds and experiencing even stranger physical effects that the United States realized something was wrong, individuals familiar with the situation said.

The attacks started within days of Donald Trump’s surprise election win in November, but the precise timeline remains unclear, including whether intelligence officers were the first victims hit or merely the first victims to report it. The US has called the situation “ongoing”.
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To date, the Trump administration has largely described the 21 victims as US embassy personnel or “members of the diplomatic community”. That description suggested only bona fide diplomats and their family members were struck, with no logical motivation beyond disrupting US-Cuban relations.

Behind the scenes, though, investigators immediately started searching for explanations in the darker, rougher world of spycraft and counterespionage, given that so many of the first reported cases involved intelligence workers posted to the US embassy. That revelation, confirmed to the AP by a half-dozen officials, adds yet another element of mystery to a year-long saga that the Trump administration says may not be over.

The state department and the CIA declined to comment for this story.

The first disturbing reports of piercing, high-pitched noises and inexplicable ailments pointed to someone deliberately targeting the US government’s intelligence network on the communist-run island, in what seemed like a bone-chilling escalation of the tit-for-tat spy games that Washington and Havana have waged over the last half century.

But the US soon discovered that actual diplomats at the embassy had also been hit by similar attacks, officials said, further confounding the search for a culprit and a motive.

Of the 21 confirmed cases, American spies suffered some of the most acute damage, including brain injury and hearing loss that has not healed, said several US officials who were not authorized to speak publicly on the investigation and demanded anonymity. They heard an unsettling sound inside and in some cases outside their Havana homes, described as similar to loud crickets. Then they fell ill.

Over time, the attacks seemed to evolve.

In many of the more recent cases, victims did not hear noises and were not aware an attack was occurring, identifying the symptoms only later. That has raised concerns among investigators that the attacks may be getting more sophisticated and harder to detect, individuals briefed on the investigation said.
Mystery of sonic weapon attacks at US embassy in Cuba deepens
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Though the state department has called all the cases “medically confirmed”, several US officials said it was unclear whether all of the victims’ symptoms can be conclusively tied to attacks. Considering the deep sense of alarm among Americans working in the embassy, it is possible some workers attributed unrelated illnesses to attacks.

Almost nothing about what has transpired in Havana is perfectly clear. But this is Cuba.

For decades, Washington and Havana pushed their rivalry to unprecedented levels of covert action. The former enemies tracked each other’s personnel, turned each other’s agents and, in the case of the CIA, even mounted a failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban government in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

There were hopes, though, that the two countries were starting to put that bitter history behind them after renewing diplomatic relations in 2015. When the attacks first occurred, the US and Cuban governments were hard at work on clinching new commercial and immigration agreements. No new spat among intelligence services was publicly known.
The US ordered the withdrawal of all its non-essential personnel at its embassy in Cuba in response to the mysterious attacks.
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The US ordered the withdrawal of all its non-essential personnel at its embassy in Cuba in response to the mysterious attacks. Photograph: Alejandro Ernesto/EPA

Eleven months on, the US cannot guarantee the threat is over. Last week, the state department warned Americans to stay away from Cuba and ordered more than half the embassy staff to leave indefinitely. The US had previously given all embassy staff the option to come home, but even most of those struck by the mysterious attacks had opted to stay, individuals familiar with the situation said.

For those staying and new arrivals, the US has been giving instructions about what to watch and listen for to identify an attack in progress. They’re also learning steps to take if an attack occurs that could mitigate the risk, officials said.

But the US has not identified whatever device is responsible for the harm. FBI sweeps have turned up nothing.

To better identify patterns, investigators have created a map detailing specific areas of Cuba’s capital where attacks have occurred, several individuals familiar with the matter said. Three “zones”, or geographic clusters of attacks, cover the homes where US diplomats live and several hotels where attacks occurred, including the historic Hotel Capri.

Since first disclosing the situation in August, the United States had generally avoided the word “attacks”. It called them “incidents” instead until last Friday. Now, the state department deems them “specific attacks” targeting Americans posted in Havana, without saying what new information, if any, prompted the newfound confidence they were indeed deliberate.

The most obvious motive for attacking Americans in Havana would be to drive a wedge between the US and Cuba. If that is the case, the strategy appears to be succeeding.

Last week’s embassy drawdown added to the growing friction between the countries. And an accompanying new travel warning deemed Havana’s hotels unsafe for visitors, threatening to drive down tourism, a backbone of Cuba’s economy.

Cuba has vehemently denied involvement or knowledge of the attacks. Some in the US government believe the Cubans may be telling the truth, officials said.
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2) Were US Diplomats in Cuba Victims of a Sonic Attack—or Something Else?

The US Embassy in Havana, Cuba, after the US pulled out more than half of its diplomatic personnel, who suffered health problems due to an alleged sonic attack.
Ernesto Mastrascusa/Getty Images

The 007-meets-the-X-Files adventures in Cuba continue. Last week the US Department of State recalled non-emergency personnel and families home from the embassy in Havana, citing injuries and illness among 21 people—“hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues, and difficulty sleeping” according to a statement from secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Those 21 people weren’t just cultural attachés. Some of the hardest-hit victims were US intelligence operatives, according to an AP story on Monday. Which is to say: Someone in Cuba has been remotely doing something mysterious to US spies’ ears and brains. Call it spook action, at a distance.

Most of the reporting on this story so far has talked about some kind of a “sonic weapon” or “sonic attack,” maybe a side effect of a surveillance technology. The problem is, physicists and acousticians don’t know how ultrasound (high frequency) or infrasound (low frequency) could do what the State Department says happened to its people. That leaves two possibilities: a new sci-fi sound gun or something else.

Here’s a hypothesis for the something else: poison.

Just to rewind a little bit: The reported injuries vary, from hearing loss (potentially permanent) and dizziness to confusion, headache, and even mild brain trauma. To audiologists and otolaryngologists, that suggests damage or injury in both the inner ear, which converts sound waves into neural impulses and regulates balance, and along neural pathways reaching into the brain. Some of the affected people reported hearing weird noises, sometimes only in specific parts of specific rooms—but others didn’t.

It may be that this was a test case, and they wanted to see how useful it was, whoever unleashed it on us.

Edward Boyer, Harvard Medical School

Immediately that suggests some kind of focused acoustic attack. But nobody will admit to knowing about any technologies that can do all that. “Nothing about this story makes any sense to us,” says Robert Putnam, senior marketing director at LRAD, which makes the long-range acoustic device that a cruise ship deployed against pirates in 2005. But the LRAD uses audible—very, very audible—sound. Most of the Cuban attacks seem to have been inaudible. “If it’s infrasound, they’re not really hearing it, and you’d have to pump a tremendous amount of energy into the ground,” Putnam says. “If it’s ultrasound, it attenuates very quickly, and if you pumped a lot of energy into it, it’d heat the skin.”

And technologies that focus a beam of audible sound at a single spot don’t have the kind of range our nominal magic sci-fi sound gun would need—as of 2010 “you had to be within five or 10 feet of the emitter for it to have an effect,” Putnam says. Of course, maybe the magical sci-fi sound gun has made significant technological progress since then.

But sound isn’t the only thing that affects hearing and the brain. Chemicals do, too. It’s called ototoxicity—toxicity to the ear—and it’s a known side effect of, for example, some chemotherapeutics and antibiotics. The widely used cancer drug cisplatin can cause hearing loss, as can the category of antibiotics called aminoglycosides, which includes streptomycin and neomycin. Basically, those drugs get into the fluid-filled ductwork of the inner ear and damage the hair cells, which talk to the nerves that lead to the brain.

Chemotherapeutics and antibiotics need to be administered intravenously to have an effect, though, so they don’t fit the facts. Heavy metals like lead and mercury can be ototoxic, but they also stay in the blood for a long time; the State Department hasn’t released specific test results for its people—maybe it won’t—but it’s safe to assume they got blood tests.

Another class of ototoxins: solvents, like the cleaning product xylene or styrene, used to make glass-reinforced polyesters. Some linger in the blood, but others have a shorter half life. They off-gas from new carpet, paint, and furniture—it’s why some new homes aren’t immediately ready for occupation. “Some of these are going to be obvious. You’re going to smell it,” says Kathleen Campbell, an expert in ototoxicity at Southern Illinois University’s School of Medicine. “But when we study this, it’s usually through industrial exposure. We’re not looking at the possibility that it could be weaponized and have the aroma taken away.”

Finally, though, is an ototoxin that kind of fits the bill. Carbon monoxide causes hearing loss because of its action as an asphyxiant. It kills by displacing oxygen from hemoglobin, the stuff in red blood cells that ferries oxygen around the body. It’s odorless, a gas, and acts centrally—which is to say, it acts on the brain, not just parts of the ear. True, to suffer hearing loss from it, you’d probably have to inhale enough to pass out. But: “It greatly increases the risk of noise-induced hearing loss. It’s synergistic,” Campbell says. “If your oxygen levels go down in the ear and then you have noise exposure, you get a great increase in free radicals, and that attacks the hair cells.”

Synergistic effects are worth looking at here. Hearing loss doesn’t begin or end at the cochlea, the organ in the ear that mechanically turns sound into nerve impulses. Something that affects the central nervous system—like a solvent or carbon monoxide—could also affect the vestibular system, the trio of fluid-filled, semicircular canals that govern balance. And it could affect other parts of the brain as well.

Possibly—though this isn’t well-tested in humans, for good reasons—inaudible infra- and ultrasound could be synergistic with an ototoxin just as industrial factory noise can be. Maybe microwave beams are, too.

The thing is, the Cubans have denied any involvement in whatever these attacks are, if indeed they are attacks. In a briefing, a senior State Department official said the investigation is ongoing.

US officials have reportedly said they’re looking into whether some other country’s operatives were responsible. Like maybe even Russia, which has already been involved in attacks on US news media and voting systems. And Russian security services have long employed poison as a weapon, from the 1978 murder of Bulgarian playwright Georgi Markov with a pellet filled with ricin fired from a trick umbrella to the 2006 killing of the spy Alexander Litvinenko with tea laced with polonium-210.

The Russians have also used microwaves as a surveillance tool. Soviet intelligence beamed microwaves at the US embassy in Moscow for decades, at least for part of that time to send power to passive microphones embedded in a carved Seal of the United States.

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Synergistic effects aren’t limited to ototoxins, either. Infrasound—anything below 20 hertz—can be more damaging if it’s accompanied by audible noise. That might not explain the cognitive symptoms that the US personnel experienced, but an audible noise like that reported by some Americans could have provided cover for the infrasound delivery. “Is it plausible that low-frequency sounds could injure the inner ear or create a vestibular phantom, a sense of nausea or motion sickness?” says Robert Jackler, an otolaryngologist at Stanford Medical School. “Yes, absolutely.”

Ultrasound really needs a fluid medium to conduct; that’s why pregnant women get that gel on their abdomens before an ultrasound imaging test. Infrasound delivers through the air, but anyone who’s ever been to a dance club or ridden a helicopter has felt the “vibrotactile” aspect of infrasound—the whomp-whomp feeling in your guts.

It could work as a weapon on people, too. Jackler pointed me to a 2007 study in which researchers exposed chinchillas to infrasound and an audible noise, showing that the two together caused increased damage to the cochlea, specifically by letting cochlear fluids mix together via a rupture. If you really want to get conspiratorial, a team of Russian researchers replicated that work in 2011 in humans, studying soldiers who were working with heavy ground vehicles, helicopters, and hovercraft. The ones exposed to the most infrasound all had more hearing loss, digestive and nervous-system problems, and eye diseases. (The same team in 2017 found that infrasound had a mutagenic effect on mice, so, you know, oy gevalt.)

I emailed one of the researchers who worked on both of those papers, asking if she thought her work might have any relevance to what happened in Cuba. “We do not know anything about such weapons, and we consider this unacceptable,” writes Irina Vasilieva, a biologist at the NN Petrov National Medical Center of Oncology.

How will anyone figure out if any of this is true? Tests, of course. Hearing loss due to medical ototoxicity generally affects higher frequencies first; solvents attack the midrange. Hearing loss from loud noises yields a “noise notch” between 2 and 6 kilohertz. Hair cells give off wee little whistles when functioning normally—otoacoustic emissions—that can test if they’re functioning normally. And then there’s auditory brain-stem testing to see if the damage is central instead of peripheral. “I’ve worked with the Department of Defense on auditory research for a couple decades, and I’ve been very impressed with their capabilities. I’m sure they’re already looking at everything I’ve talked about,” Campbell says. “More and more I suspect there’s some combination rather than one pure effect.”

That combination might not have been intentional. Presumably a magic sound gun could have synergistically combined with environmental noise, or some unknown ototoxin, and caused injuries when it was only supposed to pick up secret conversations. Maybe this isn’t James Bond or The X-Files; maybe it’s Coen Brothers. Perhaps nobody, as hapless bad guys are wont to say, was supposed to get hurt.

The thing is, poisoning people at a distance is really hard to do. “You’ve got to have a consistent dose and a consistent delivery mechanism,” says Edward Boyer, a medical toxicologist at Harvard Medical School. Anything ototoxic enough to cause the range of symptoms in the diplomats would have been toxic in other ways, too, he says. And even the symptoms that the State Department has already made public “imply highly variable pharmacokinetics, which to me says that it wouldn’t be that useful as a toxin. If you can’t incapacitate everybody, what’s the point of using it at all?”

But don’t let that shake your paranoia just yet. “It may be that this was a test case, and they wanted to see how useful it was, whoever unleashed it on us,” Boyer says.

For now, whatever happened to the diplomats and spies in Cuba remains a mystery without enough clues. The experts I talked to emphasized that to do anything more than speculate they’d have to see lab results, neuropsychiatric workups, neuroimaging, environmental history … all results that the State Department hasn’t made public, if indeed the tests happened. And even if State does determine what affected their people in Cuba, it might not say. Sometimes the truth isn’t out there.
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3) The US is slashing its staff in Cuba after diplomats reported brain injuries and hearing loss, perhaps from mysterious sonic weapons

Kevin Loria

http://www.businessinsider.com/sonic-weapons-used-diplomats-cuba-brain-damage-2017-9

Sep. 29, 2017, 10:47 AM 23,097

FILE PHOTO: An exterior view of the U.S. Embassy is seen in Havana, Cuba, June 19, 2017. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini Thomson Reuters

Mysterious sonic weapons have been blamed for symptoms affecting American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba.
Victims reported hearing loss, mild traumatic brain injury, nervous-system damage, and balance issues.
Sound-based weapons exist, but experts aren’t sure whether any were used in this case.
Regardless, officials are slashing the US Embassy staff by 60% and warning Americans against visiting Cuba.

No one knows exactly what happened to the growing number of Americans and Canadians who returned from diplomatic missions in Cuba with mysterious and disturbing symptoms.

Some can no longer remember words, while others have hearing loss, speech problems, balance issues, nervous-system damage, headaches, ringing in the ears, and nausea. Some have shown signs of brain swelling or concussions — mild traumatic brain injuries.

Some of the victims remember strange occurrences before the symptoms appeared, though others didn’t hear or feel anything. One diplomat reported a “blaring, grinding noise” that woke him from his bed in a Havana hotel, according to the Associated Press. The AP also reported that some heard a “loud ringing or a high-pitch chirping similar to crickets or cicadas” in short bursts at night, while others said they could walk “in” and “out” of blaring noises that were audible only in certain spots.

Almost a year after the reports began, the AP reported on Friday that the US State Department had determined that the incidents were “specific attacks” on diplomats and had moved to cut its Cuban embassy staff by 60%. The State Department is expected to warn Americans against visiting Cuba, noting that the attacks have occurred in hotels — even though no American tourists seem to have been affected.

The AP said the US government had stayed away from blaming Cuba for the incidents, but the move is nevertheless a serious setback to improving diplomatic relations between the countries.

The vibrations, piercing sounds, balance issues, and hearing loss have led some to surmise that some kind of never-before-seen acoustic or sonic weapon was used against the diplomats.

But numerous experts aren’t sure whether such a device exists.
What really happened in Cuba?

cubaChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Many diplomats and their family members started seeking medical attention for mysterious nausea, hearing problems, and balance issues in late 2016. The US government first acknowledged these cases in August. The incidents seemed to cease for a while, but they started again as recently as late August, according to the AP.

The number of victims has grown to at least 21 Americans connected to diplomatic missions and fewer than 10 Canadian households, but the US has said the number of Americans affected could still rise.

The cause of the symptoms and a motive for any attack are still unknown. The FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched the homes, hotels, and other places where personnel seem to have been exposed to whatever triggered the symptoms but didn’t find any clues. Security footage hasn’t revealed anything, and the FBI has not been able to duplicate the effects in a lab, according to The New York Times.

Cuban officials denied involvement in the incident and said they would never permit another country’s security forces to carry out a covert attack.

“Cuba has never, nor would it ever, allow that the Cuban territory be used for any action against accredited diplomatic agents or their families, without exception,” the Cuban government previously said in a statement.

The US hasn’t accused Cuba of anything specific — instead, the decision to cut its embassy staff is being described as the result of concerns that Cuban officials cannot adequately protect US employees from these apparent attacks.

Since the US formally restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015, diplomats have experienced other forms of harassment, like break-ins and surveillance, but this type of physical attack is unprecedented.
No such device

“There isn’t an acoustic phenomenon in the world that would cause those type of symptoms,” Seth Horowitz, a neuroscientist who wrote the book “The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind,” told Business Insider via email.

Horowitz explained that no known inaudible — and seemingly undetectable — device could have the properties attributed to these suspected sonic weapons. The fact that victims didn’t all report hearing a certain noise and that symptoms varied from person to person makes the case even more confusing.

“Brain damage and concussions, it’s not possible,” Joseph Pompei, a former MIT researcher and psychoacoustics expert, told the AP. “Somebody would have to submerge their head into a pool lined with very powerful ultrasound transducers.”

Sonic weapons exist, but for the most part they are “highly visible and easy to avoid,” according to Horowitz. No publicly known sonic weapon or malfunctioning covert listening device could be used in a covert way.

Toby Heys, the leader of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Future Technologies research center told New Scientist it was possible for something emitting infrasound — vibrations at a frequency below what humans can hear — to cause hearing loss. But Heys said that would require large subwoofers, making covert deployment unlikely.

Ultrasound devices, which operate above the range of human hearing, exist and could damage the ears, Heys said. But these would need to be directly targeted into the ear.

“Overall, I would be pretty circumspect about the claims to be honest — it is all very Philip K. Dick territory,” Heys said. “That said, we are living in a fairly surreal world right now.”

Horowitz previously said via email that without more evidence of these weapons this incident should be considered a nonstory and that other possible explanations for these medical problems should be considered. The State Department has clearly decided otherwise, though the mystery continues to grow.
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4) New sonic attack against American diplomat suggests Russian involvement
November 28, 2017

U.S. State Department

http://theweek.com/speedreads/748893/gop-pushes-stopgap-spending-measure-shutdown-looms

A USAID officer working out of the American embassy in Uzbekistan may have been targeted, along with his wife, by an acoustic attack similar to the ones that have affected U.S. diplomats in Cuba, CBS News reported Tuesday. A spokesperson for the State Department, however, insisted to CBS “that no personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan have been diagnosed with the conditions that have been observed in Cuba.”

The strange sonic attacks in Cuba began in November 2016, when several U.S. government officials in Havana began experiencing symptoms that included hearing loss, balance problems, dizziness, and brain injuries. These symptoms were apparently induced by high-frequency sounds. The Cuban government tried to claim last month that the attacks may have simply been the work of cicadas and insects whose high-pitched noises can cause hearing loss at a loud volume.

The Trump administration has withdrawn a significant amount of its staff from the U.S. embassy in Havana in response to the attacks, despite doubt within the White House that Cuba is responsible. A U.S. official told the Miami Herald in October that “it may have been Russia working with rogue elements of the Cuban government.” The sources who spoke to CBS seem to believe that the incident in Uzbekistan adds credence to the idea of Russian involvement in Cuban attacks, as the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan remains close with Russia. Uzbekistan recently held joint military drills with Russia for the first time in 12 years as part of renewed ties between the two countries. Kelly O’Meara Morales