Front Burner - Why Did Canadian Diplomats Get 'Phantom Concussions' in Cuba?

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Nausea, debilitating headaches, loss of balance. Those are just a few of the symptoms that a group of Canadian and American diplomats became ill with last year in Cuba, even though none of them were physically hurt. Now, Canadian diplomats afflicted by the "Havana Syndrome" are calling on the federal government to get to the bottom of the mystery. Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders explains.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Pussum. It's 2017.

A diplomat in Cuba is returning home after a long day at the office. She's preparing dinner or tidying up when suddenly she hears a sound. It's high-pitched, like crickets chirping or grinding machinery. This noise, it gets louder, almost unbearable. And soon, she just doesn't feel well. She's nauseous and dizzy. It's like she's had a concussion. And she has no idea why she feels this way.

It turns out she's not alone. A dozen Canadians and two dozen Americans have become ill in Cuba in the last year. Most are diplomats or families of diplomats. Some experience what I just described. For others, these symptoms, they developed over time and none of them know how it happened to them. Now, Canadian diplomats are wondering, what is the Canadian government doing to get to the bottom of this? And to take care of them now that they're sick? Who wants to do something bad to a wide range of diplomatic people from Canada and the United States? That's a very different question from who wants to hit the United States.

That's today on FrontBurner. My name is Doug Saunders. I'm the international affairs writer for The Globe and Mail. Hi, Doug. Good to be with you. You recently published this great story where you spoke to a bunch of Canadian diplomats who have been affected by this. And I want to get to what they said, but I'd like to start at the beginning of 2017 in the Canadian embassy. What's it like there? It was pretty good times in the spring of 2017 in the Havana mission.

It's a small embassy by international standards that had fewer than 20 full-time Canadian staff, plus quite a large number of local hires of Cubans working there. And it had been an upbeat time. The staff had just organized in late 2016 a visit by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which had gone well. I'm pleased to say that Canada will continue to stand by as a friend. Diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba were decent then. There was a reconciliation with the United States under the Obama administration that hadn't yet completely faded.

I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. So generally speaking, it was good times at the embassy. And I know you mentioned this reconciliation between Obama and the Cuban government. There had been all these overtures and the U.S. opened up its embassy in 2015. It had been closed for decades. The beginning of 2017, so two years after the U.S. opens its embassy, American diplomats, they start getting sick. What's happening to them? The Americans starting in maybe the very end of 2016, but really at the beginning of 2017,

they had sudden moments where they felt like suddenly there was a ringing in their ear and they felt dizzy and symptoms like something had hit them. And that drew a lot of alarm to Washington authorities, to the embassy there. It was pretty clear that this was an unusual phenomenon. And I think it got noticed a lot because a lot of the US embassy staff who were getting these sudden attacks, at least four of them were CIA agents. So there was an immediate mood that something's being done to our people. And they sent in investigators and the investigators would go to get off an airplane and check into hotels and walk into a hotel room and suddenly get hit with this whatever feeling it was. The Americans got very quickly to work trying to figure out what that was. They set up special medical teams, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania started developing a way to measure brains. Regular CAT scans can't measure brain damage and so on.

But the Americans were pretty quick to determine that some of these people had brain injuries. If all of this is starting around the beginning of 2017 for the Americans, when did the Canadians start experiencing some kind of symptoms? And how are they different from the Americans? Well, that's the thing. None of the Canadians, with perhaps one major exception, had this thing that the Americans had where suddenly it was bam and they heard that. And the initial theory from the U.S. authorities and the U.S. authorities were speaking to the Canadians, both sort of at a high level, ambassador to ambassador, but also there was a lot of informal back and forth

between the staffs of the two embassies. Right, because they're all there. They probably live close to each other. Some of them live close to each other. Some of them don't. But some of the ones who did had started to hear things. And what the Americans were saying was that this must be some kind of acoustic attack, sound waves.

The Americans knew this because there had been some research into riot control weapons that involved sound waves, none of which worked all that well, but it was known to be a thing. So the initial thought was this would be a sudden noise in your ear, and then you have symptoms. And the Canadians really hadn't had that. And the Canadians really hadn't had that. Shortly after that, there was one family in Canada that had really extreme versions of those symptoms that were probably in their manifestation were closer to what the Americans had felt. And the Canadian embassy evacuated that family. And interestingly, it wasn't the embassy staffer, but it was the spouse and children who had been hit most. And they were evacuated to, first to Miami for some testing, and then back to Canada because they'd been essentially,

they were the first to have been determined to have had brain injuries. A whole bunch of the Canadians realized, oh my goodness, this is what we have. And some of them by that point were quite debilitated. Some of the Canadians were unable to drive vehicles, couldn't sit at their desk at work. Some alarming instances, a couple of them found that their children had had quite violent nosebleeds at exactly the same time on the same nights and things like this. And what do we know about what these tests found? Eventually, and it took more than a year for all of the 12 affected Canadians to be fully tested, it was determined both by Canadian neurologists

and by brain scientists in the United States who tested them that they had the symptoms of a fairly serious concussion without any of the physical trauma that would cause a concussion. They weren't in a car accident or they didn't injure themselves playing sports. If you performed a regular CAT scan on their brains, it didn't show anything. There was no physical damage. If you did a different sort of highly specialized CAT scan that shows brain energy levels, it showed what looks like a concussion. And what do we know about what could have conceivably caused this?

That's where things became very interesting. It appears some officials were exposed to a sonic device. It appears some officials were exposed to a sonic device. Explanations ranged from a high-tech attack by a nefarious government to psychosomatic mass hysteria. Starting in the summer of 2017, various groups in the United States of researchers, probably some of them the CIA and intelligence agencies like that, began to test theories about what this could have been. The idea of it being an ultrasonic sound weapon, at least of the sort that they knew well,

it didn't seem to fit that in terms of the nature of the injuries. So then speculation turned to what they called an energy weapon, something using microwaves, directed beams. Certainly people who work in certain high power broadcast industries have had injuries when they accidentally stepped in front of a really big high powered transmitter that are somewhat consistent with this. You can have those type of brain injuries, although you usually have a bunch of other things like bad inner ear injuries and maybe your eyes popping and things like that, right? So it didn't completely fit with that. None of the theories

really work that well. We're just talking about the theories of what kind of technology might have caused it. We know that trauma to the brain can be, and injury to the brain can be caused by, for instance, radiation. We know that it can be caused by blast waves from bombs. Like there's different ways the brain can have trauma or injury. It might be some technology that's beyond what we know about, or at least that is non-secret now. But there's also some speculation that it might be some very primitive technology, either directed or gone wrong. The Cubans have a lot of Cold War era, very high powered electric stuff.

I mean, the Cubans have a very sophisticated spy apparatus. high-powered electric stuff. I mean, the Cubans have a very sophisticated spy apparatus. But there's some theories that it might be really low-tech stuff from the 60s, maybe designed to eavesdrop on people, to listen to vibrating walls and windows, that accidentally blasting people's brains was a side effect of that that was unintended, or something like that, or some form of old technology gone wrong. You've given us a sense of what it possibly could be. What do we know about who might be responsible for this? That's where the Canadians become very inconvenient because a lot of the American

theories had fallen into the sort of Cold War picture of Cuba that had arisen right around the beginning of 2017. The regime led by Raul Castro that had been making a, I wouldn't say a democratic opening, but a diplomatic opening with the Western countries that had been enemies in the past. That started to fall apart a bit. Raul Castro was sort of being shunted out by more hardline people in the regime. And the opening of trade and things like that that had been expected wasn't quite playing out. The other side of the coin, of course, was Donald Trump. Who was elected in the fall of 2016.

And he was inaugurated in January 2017 and almost immediately turned against this opening with Cuba. He saw that as yet another soft-touch Obama thing that he could denounce. We do not want U.S. dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exploits and abuses the citizens of Cuba. Immediate talk of reimposing sanctions and punishing Cuba. And this idea that their embassy staff were under attack played into that. It became a thing they could say, OK, this is Cubans attacking our people, some form

of axis of evil or something like that. And therefore, we should go after them. I do believe Cuba is responsible. It's a very unusual attack, as you know, but I do believe Cuba is responsible. It's a very unusual attack, as you know, but I do believe Cuba is responsible, yes. It is also a well-known fact that in a small country like Cuba that has the type of regime and government it does, they tend to know things that are going on within its own borders.

Canada confounded that whole thing. Why would they attack? Canada has had cordial diplomatic relations with Cuba all along, even during its very dark years. Canada has complex economic and trade relations. Canadians go to Cuba as tourists. Tons of tourists. And always have, partly because there's no Americans there.

It's a whole different thing. It's hard to imagine anybody in Cuba wanting to attack the Canadians. And also the idea that the Canadians were just collateral damage, accidental scatterfire doesn't fit because most of these diplomats were, and their families, were hit not at work, but at home. A lot of the ones who were diagnosed with brain damage lived nowhere near Americans. And also they weren't involved in high security areas of the embassy. People from all over the different departments of the embassy were hit. It was basically just Canadian and U.S. staff who were hit by whatever this was. There's lots of other countries with big diplomatic presences in Cuba that none of them were hit.

Any other theories floating around that could explain this? Maybe the Russians, right? Okay, the Russians, they have animosity toward both Canada and the United States. Russia had been sending lots of spy ships to Cuba in recent years. There's been a real warming of relations between Russia and Cuba. Certainly, there's been some technology transfer between Russia. So it's not really easy to understand why Russia might want to do something like that. But Putin likes dirty tricks. It's one theory. There was briefly a theory that China might have been involved in part because there was a few days when it seemed like some U.S. embassy consulate staff in southern China had some symptoms like this.

Then they were tested in Philadelphia and those symptoms turned out to be not really the same thing as the so-called Cuba syndrome. Look, all of the theories have some huge hole in them. What is the official line from the Cuban government? It's we have nothing to do with any of this. We're cooperating fully in trying to find out what's happened. You know, Canada has officials working with the Cuban government to investigate this. So everybody's officially cooperating, but they're not really sharing information, which is adding to the mood of paranoia. Can we talk a little bit about what Canada did with these diplomats? Are they still there? Where are they now? As of now, in the autumn of 2018, none of the 12 people who are affected,

the eight adults and four children, are in Cuba anymore. And it took till the summer of 2018 for them to diagnose everybody who had it and get them out of Cuba. There was a big change about a year after all this started. April of 2018, suddenly Global Affairs Canada changed its approach to this. This was partly because the diplomats had become very indignant and had realized that they weren't being helped,

had started to really raise some noise saying, OK, you're sending us to 14 different provincial authorities and to our local doctor for things that are induced brain damage. What's going on here? So Global Affairs, after a lot of angry back and forth within the organization. April of 2018 said, okay, first of all, we will not post anyone to the Havana mission

who has a family. It will be unaccompanied posts only, much like, say, Afghanistan during the war or something like that. And second of all, we will have everyone systematically tested

by this team in Philadelphia who do this. So there was a much more organized system. At the same time, at no point did the Canadian government say anything about this in the public. There has still not been a word uttered publicly by the foreign minister or by any staff of the Canadian government about this crisis. Why do you think that is? It's partly how diplomacy operates in Canada. It tends to be secret and off the record.

What Global Affairs has done is it's had two deep background off the record briefings by an assistant deputy minister for the Canadian media. And there's been one or two press releases on this topic. It's been conducted much the way that much of this is done, which is generally in secret and in background. I know that you recently met with a group of these diplomats who have come back from Cuba, which I would note, and correct me if I'm wrong, that's quite rare

that these diplomats have been willing to speak to you. The Globe and Mail has granted them anonymity because they're not authorized to speak. But they are angry at how the Canadian government has handled this. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I've been sort of casting about to find out about the situation. And as international affairs writer, I spend a lot of my time talking to people in diplomacy. At most, you sort of hope that somebody over a lunch at some point will give you some piece of juicy information

or something like that. But this was interesting because after, I suppose after hearing that I had been asking about this, I was approached by a group of these diplomats that represented a fairly large share of them, who said, we've decided we have to break our silence and we have to tell our story because we feel that the silence and the hush-hush approach to this by the Canadian government is contributing to our inability to get the treatment that we need.

So I went up to Ottawa and I met them at a third-party location. It was all a little bit cloaked. These are all people who are still employed full-time by Global Affairs Canada. None of them are, as far as I understand, are on medical leave, even though most of them haven't worked for a year. Not most of them. Some of them haven't worked for the year. Some of them are back to half-time work or something like that. A few are back to full-time work, but some are too debilitated to work. But because there's not really a formal acknowledgement that

this is a job-related injury, none of them are on medical leave and therefore their staff positions aren't being hired and replaced as you would on medical leave. So it's a weird, ambiguous situation. And this is the feeling. It's a scattered, weird response from the Canadian government. Personally, from reading the year of correspondence between the government officials and the affected diplomat, the sense I get is not that these are deeply incompetent government officials or that these are people deliberately trying to do wrong, but it's people out of their depth, people who have never faced anything like this before. The diplomacy operation doesn't really know how to deal with this type of a medical

crisis. And they were slower, and they've acknowledged this, that they were slower than the Americans in really getting things together and getting to terms with this. Really, it took a year. I know what we've been talking about today feels like it's out of a movie. But listening to you speak, it's also clear that there are real people who are hurt here. And so what do you think the next step is for them? I think speaking up was an important part of their own getting a handle on this. They had been diplomatic staff in many functions, some of them in very banal sort of technical areas and some of them in the more interesting and high-level areas in the embassy. They're people with a lot of experience. They're

used to filling their little role. I think they realized that they felt like they're being left hanging, partly because it's not a very transparent bureaucracy. They want a public inquiry. Now, they feel that, OK, this is a significant enough group of people. It's a mysterious enough situation. And the symptoms are serious enough that there ought to be a parliamentary inquiry or something in public about this. The lack of transparency is part of the problem that's making things worse for them. Doug, thank you so much for this really informative conversation.

A real pleasure. Thank you. You can find Doug's column on the Havana Syndrome. that's actually what it's called, in the Globe and Mail. I should note that he reached out to Foreign Minister Christopher Freeland's office, and they responded by saying that the department is deeply troubled by the health problems of the diplomats and their families, and that they're exploring any and all possible causes. possible causes. I also wanted to mention that on Monday, the Auditor General scolded the government for not doing enough to protect our diplomats and staff who face security threats at Canadian missions. He talked about physical security, vehicle barriers, alarms, x-ray machines, that kind of stuff. We'll tweet a link out to that story and to Doug's on our Twitter account.

You can follow us at FrontBurnerCBC. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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