You should probably blame Congress rather than the agencies for this. Remember that it is not simply
"the credulous gov't agencies that are doling out money to people who claim to have been injured." It was an act of
Congress, S.1828 - HAVANA Act of 2021:
This Act may be cited as the ``Helping American Victims Afflicted by
Neurological Attacks Act of 2021'' or the ``HAVANA Act of 2021''.
SEC. 2. <> AUTHORITY TO PAY PERSONNEL
OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOR CERTAIN
INJURIES TO THE BRAIN.
Sponsored by none other than
credulous "Sen. Collins, Susan M. [R-ME] (Introduced 05/25/2021)". (See
post 1494)
The 'Targeted Individuals'
can claim to have been injured. They just weren't injured by microwave weapons but by the government's and their own agencies'
stories about such weapons and about the schemes of nefarious hostile enemies. Those stories landed in the general atmosphere of paranoia and gave it a direction, which played an important role in the emerging 'syndrome'.
This is the only point in Robert Bartholomew's analysis of the origin story of the 'Havana Syndrome' where I wish he would be clearer: He mentions the
history of harassment that U.S. agents were exposed to in Cuba and he goes into some detail, but he doesn't make it entirely clear to what extent that history is just a collection of ghost stories akin to urban myths but in a much more tight-knit group.
It is something that is very difficult to investigate because we are dealing with espionage and counter espionage and PSYOP. The American agents are in Cuba to spy on the country, to recruit Cubans to work for them collecting information and instigating discontent and, if possible, subversion. Recruiting agents is made fairly easy by the relative poverty in the country, but it probably also makes such Cuban undercover agents a lot less reliable than somebody who is motivated solely by
conviction. Examples of the latter:
Ana Montes,
Kendall Myers (Wikipedia)
There have been many examples of Cuban 'dissidents' who at one point blew their cover and revealed what they had discovered about USA's attempts to recruit Cubans to try to subvert the government. A recent example, Dr. Carlos, outed himself and was celebrated as a hero by Cuban media in the context of the failed attempt to sabotage Cuba's celebration of its successful struggle against the virus in November 2021:
Dr. Carlos Vázquez González, functioning for more than 25 years as State Security agent Fernando, reveals Yunior García Aguilera’s history as a long-time U.S. operator
Agent Fernando exposes U.S. trained counterrevolutionary (Granma.cu, Nov. 5, 2021)
So you have agents, counter agents, some of them double agents, some of them have infiltrated your operations when you thought they were working for you. You cannot really trust anybody. That in itself would make most people paranoid. But in addition to this, you have the alleged history of Cuban harassment of U.S. agents, and I have a hard time believing much of that history. I think most of it is just stories, but a few of those stories may be true.
1) We don't have to know anything about the actual business of intelligence operators to know that tailing enemy agents is an important part of it, so I can believe the story about CIA agents in Cuba getting back to their cars only to discover that they have been blocked in by other cars. It would put an effective end to the car chase before it had begun. You can't use your car to tail somebody when you can't get your car out of the parking lot, obviously.
But then there are the other stories about harassment of U.S. agents in or near their own homes:
2) Their tires have been punctured, they say. It might accomplish the same thing as preventing somebody using their car in other ways, but it might also be innocuous. I have had tires punctuated, and I'm not a spy. Sometimes, I think it was done deliberately, but I don't suspect foreign agents to be the perpetrators because I'm not in the spy business.
3) They get up in the morning and discover that all their windows have been opened. Or there are cigarette butts in the ashtray even though they don't smoke. And there shall in that time be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friends hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock.
Yes, I've strayed away from Havana and into Monty Python country now, and I think that the U.S. government agents in Cuba did, too. I see no reason whatsoever why Cuban
Dirección de Inteligencia agents would sneak into houses and open all the windows (Bartholomew mentions mosquito bites, but still ...). Why would they leave cigarette butts in ashtrays (apparently, there were ashtrays!) or animal excrements on the floor? They are professional
agents, not Amber Heard! Why make it obvious that they had free access to the homes of foreign agents, to snoop around or install listening devices (or sonic attack gadgets)?
Bartholomew recommends thinking horses instead of zebras or unicorns when you hear hoofbeats in the night. Isn't it much more likely that a janitor or a cleaner left that cigarette in an ashtray the day before, but the residents just didn't notice till the next morning or forgot about it? That they themselves left windows open and forgot? Or that a dog or a cat got into the house and took a **** on the floor? I find it more likely that an animal could do that without disturbing the sleeping residents than a team of Cuban state security agents.
What I am getting at is that the credulity of those U.S. secret agents and diplomats has been drilled into them. In part, by their own colleagues, but in the case of the 'syndrome' victims, people going to Cuba were even told to be on the lookout for symptoms and to stay away from windows if they felt or heard anything. So when they
"claim to have been injured," they are probably right, in a way.
And let's not forget that they would probably have recovered by now if it weren't for biased researchers like David Relman who have backed up their stories with 'scientific' documentation - and still do. Bartholomew talks about the E word: E for the
embarrassment that prevents people from realizing or admitting that they were wrong. And then there are the guys from the media, like
60 Minutes' Scott Pelley, who let Mr. Burns, John Bolton and the alleged victims present their stories and never questioned any of it, didn't interview dissenting voices, actual experts.
Alien Attack? Mass Hysteria? Conspiracy? Alien attack, not so much, obviously, but definitely mass hysteria and conspiracy.
