Julia Ioffe on the tale of a Russian mystery weapon

This is a disturbing but fascinating story from Julia Ioffe that reads a bit like a Sherlock Holmes story: The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion GQ 10/20/2020.

It's about an affliction that a number of US intelligence employees have encountered in recent years called the Havana Syndrome.

Like many stories involving intelligence agencies, you can speculate about the possible motives and agendas of the sources almost as much as about the supposed mystery weapon. There seems to be good reason to believe there *is* some kind of mystery weapon involved. The mystery ailment is known as the Havana Syndrome because it was first reported by US diplomats in Cuba.

But if you thought the theory of a sonic weapon of some kind that was speculated about at the time the Havana story emerged (late 2016) was odd, the sources cited in Ioffe's article seem to have discounted that as a source. Some kind of microwave weapon? Maybe.

It's a process of research that's been going on since the early reports- See, for instance: Jack Hitt, The Real Story Behind the Havana Embassy Mystery Vanity Fair 01/06/2019

For us among the public at least. this is still very much a story of dangling threads.

But, as is often the case, issues involving Russia get tossed around in American politics as political slogans and partisan clubs. Sometimes with more justification than others. So it's well to remember that while Russia is no longer the geopolitical powerhouse the Soviet Union was, it is still not only the physically largest but militarily one of the most significant countries in the world.

So despite the James Bond vibes that spy stories may give off, even the real-world tit-for-tat contest between intelligence services takes place within a larger network of national interests and international relationships.

[Update 10/25/2020: Ana Kasparian and Nando Villa discuss Ioffe's article in their 10/24/2020 Weekends podcast for Jacobin, starting after 1:34:30 in the linked video. They provide a good example of the kind of critical reading that is very useful in evaluating articles like this. They don't reject the story of the mystery weapon out of hand. But they raise some of the appropriate cautions for a critical news consumer for this article.]