The Norwegian Government told the CIA about the results, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials. Photo / Supplied
Working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy.
And, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 he tested it on himself.
He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana syndrome,” the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of United States spies and diplomats around the world.
The bizarre story, described by four people familiar with the events, is the latest wrinkle in the decade-long quest to find the causes of Havana syndrome, whose sufferers experience long-lasting effects including cognitive challenges, dizziness and nausea. The US Government calls the events Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs).
The secret test in Norway has not been previously reported. The Norwegian Government told the CIA about the results, two of the people said, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials.
Those aware of the test say it does not prove AHIs are the work of a foreign adversary wielding a secret weapon similar to the prototype tested in Norway.
One of them noted that the effects suffered by the Norwegian researcher, whose identity was not disclosed by the sources, were not the same as in a “classic” AHI case. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.
But the events bolstered the case of those who argue that “pulsed-energy devices” - machines that deliver powerful beams of electromagnetic energy such as microwaves in short bursts - can affect human biology and are probably being developed by US adversaries.
“I think there’s compelling evidence that we should be concerned about the ability to build a directed-energy weapon that can cause a variety of risk to humans,” said Paul Friedrichs, a retired military surgeon and US Air Force general who oversaw biological threats on the White House National Security Council under President Joe Biden. Friedrichs declined to comment on the Norway experiment.
The Trump Administration took office promising to pursue the AHI issue aggressively. But there has been little apparent movement.
A review ordered by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is expected to focus mostly on the Biden administration’s handling of the issue, and its release has been delayed, people familiar with the issue said.
In a separate development that has become public in recent weeks, the US Government covertly purchased at the end of the Biden administration a different foreign-made device that produces pulsed radio waves and which some experts suspect could be linked to AHI incidents, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The device is being tested by the US Defence Department. It has some Russian-origin components, but the US Government still has not determined conclusively who built it, said one of the people.
US acquisition of the device was first reported last month by independent journalist Sasha Ingber and CNN, which said it had been purchased for millions of dollars by Homeland Security Investigations, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The device that the scientist constructed in Norway was not identical to the one that the US Government covertly acquired, one of the people familiar with the events said.
It was built based on “classified information”, suggesting it was derived from blueprints or other materials stolen from a foreign government, this person said.
At about the same time that the US became aware of the two pulsed-energy machines, two spy agencies altered their previous judgment and concluded that some of the incidents involving AHIs could be the work of a foreign adversary, delivering that verdict in an updated US intelligence assessment issued in January 2025 during the Biden administration’s final weeks.
“New reporting,” the assessment said, led the two agencies “to shift their assessments about whether a foreign actor has a capability that could cause biological effects consistent with some of the symptoms reported as possible AHIs”.
One was the National Security Agency, which intercepts and decodes foreign electronic communications, several people familiar with the issue said.
The other, said two of those people, was the National Ground Intelligence Centre, a US Army intelligence agency in Charlottesville that produces intelligence on foreign adversaries’ scientific, technical and military capabilities.
The majority of US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and four others, said they continued to judge it “very unlikely” that the attacks were the result of a foreign adversary or that a foreign actor had developed a novel weapon.
In conversations intercepted by US spy agencies, American adversaries were heard expressing their own surprise at the AHI incidents and denying involvement, US officials have said.
The CIA declined to comment on the Norwegian test or how it impacted on the agency’s analysis. Norway’s embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Some former officials and AHI victims have pointed to Russia as the prime suspect in the AHI incidents because of its decades of work in directed-energy devices. So far, no conclusive proof has publicly emerged, and Moscow has denied involvement.
Taken together, the two known directed-energy devices along with other research appear to have prompted a reconsideration by some of the causes of Havana syndrome, so named because of the mysterious 2016 outbreak of symptoms reported by personnel at the US Embassy in Havana.
In subsequent years, US personnel reported hundreds of cases globally, in China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. A top aide to then-CIA director William Burns reported symptoms while travelling in India in 2021.
At a conference in Philadelphia this month, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Chris Schlagheck, his voice at times breaking, said he was hit five times in 2020 in his home in Northern Virginia, where a Russian family lived across the street.
It was not until last year that a doctor told him his symptoms were the same as those reported from Havana a decade earlier.
Much about the Norway test remains obscured by its highly classified nature. People familiar with the events declined to identify the scientist or the Norwegian government agency he worked for.
The results were all the more shocking because the Norwegian researcher had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the theory that directed-energy weapons can cause the type of symptoms associated with AHIs, those familiar with the events said.
Trying to dramatically prove his point, with himself as a human guinea pig, he achieved the opposite.
“I don’t know what possessed him to go and do this,” one of the people said. “He was a bit of an eccentric.”
A delegation of Pentagon officials travelled to Norway in 2024 to examine the device. In December of that year, a group of intelligence and White House officials also went to Norway to discuss the issue, those familiar with the events said.
In January 2022, the CIA produced an interim assessment that concluded a foreign country was probably not behind Havana syndrome.
It emerged weeks before a major panel of government and nongovernment experts produced a report commissioned by the director of national intelligence and deputy CIA director that came to a markedly different conclusion.
That panel concluded in February 2022 that pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radio-frequency range, “plausibly explains the core characteristics of reported AHIs”, although it acknowledged many unknowns.
“Information gaps exist,” it reported.
The conclusion marked the first time a report issued publicly by the US Government acknowledged that the symptoms could be caused by man-made, external events.
The IC Experts Panel, as it was known, interviewed several people who had suffered accidental exposure to electromagnetic energy, said David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who chaired the panel.
The CIA interim assessment overshadowed the expert panel’s report. Then, in March 2023, the full intelligence community issued an assessment that unanimously concluded that it was unlikely that a foreign adversary was behind the incidents.
“There is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or [intelligence] collection device that is causing AHIs,” the unclassified version of their report said, citing secret intelligence data and open-source information about foreign weapons and research programmes.
US intelligence agencies “essentially ignored” the experts panel’s work, Relman told the conference in Philadelphia. The agencies, particularly the CIA, “had developed a very firm set of conclusions, world view that caused them I think to become dug in”, he said.
By late 2024, senior White House officials in the Biden administration had come to question the absolutist position taken by US intelligence agencies in their 2023 assessment.
There were some officials, including within the intelligence community, who insisted that “there was nothing here” - that every reported case could be explained by some environmental or medical factor, said one person familiar with the administration’s views.
The more “responsible” view, the person said, was to admit “we don’t know the answers” and that it was “plausible that pulsed electromagnetic energy could account for some subset of cases”.
After the November 2024 election, White House officials who were working on an AHI brief for the incoming Trump administration invited several victims to a meeting to offer their input.
The officials also wanted to reassure the victims that they realised the intelligence community assessment called into question the very real health issues they experienced and what caused them.
At one point, an official turned to the victims who were gathered in the Situation Room and said, “We believe you”. The White House wasn’t yet certain it was a foreign actor but believed it was plausible that the symptoms had been caused by external factors, said the person familiar with the administration’s views.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer and AHI victim who attended the unclassified meeting, said: “It was clear to the victims, but also unsaid, that new information had come into the NSC that had caused them to make such a statement”.
- Dan Lamothe and Greg Miller contributed to this report.
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