CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'

Anyway, Hollywood spies do kind of exist - but they aren't the Rosenbergs breakdance fighting on a rooftop. They're active duty military on "loan" to the NSA's Special Collection Service. They rarely return to the military, not because a life of blackbag jobs and no stability is fun, but because the military really doesn't want them after the CIA has potentially screwed them up.

Only in popularizations are the two roles confused - though I suppose there are rare circumstances in which an officer goes undercover in order to directly pilfer secrets, as opposed to recruiting someone who can. Hard and rare one expects: language, culture and competent counter-intel have made recruiting someone already inside easier and wiser.

Also I don’t think competent professional spies have ever used “movie inspired” anything, but the generous interpretation of your comment assumes you meant the reverse.

But still a poor assumption to think the fiction ever got it right, starting with the confusion over what an “agent” is but including everything else.

Excepting Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American,” which I suspect nailed the respective damnfool incompetence and arrogant ignorance of a certain type of mid-century patriot keenly. “Harlot’s Ghost,” though mystical, may also speak bizarro truth.

One day he was ordered to verify a DAP meeting, and actually liked what was told. Someone pissed him of, causing him to start one of his famous angry speeches. The DAP was impressed, offered him a position, and the resulting meteoric rise ultimately started a world war.

I believe in Havana they told us that it was their own equipment as that would make the most sense.

But you're right there are a lot of unknowns and wild reporting on it.

Enough proof to believe though, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

Look, I don't agree with US policy towards Cuba but arguing that the whole thing is a PR campaign isn't very persuasive either. It might be a case of psychological contagion among a relatively small and insular community (ie the diplomatic corps) or it might have some factual basis. There's some evidence (detailed elsewhere in this thread) to suggest the latter.

Skepticism is good, but I think your argument here is mere contrarianism.

In the mid 2000s the Canadian Mint was briefly stamping poppies into their coins and putting a red enamel on them to commemorate remembrance day.

A CIA employee found one in his pocket coming back from Canada and claimed the Canadian government was planting listening devices on a coin to record him.

It's 2021.

> definitely don’t believe the weapon hypothesis compared to the much more banal explanations that we all know.

Although nobody knows what is behind the phenomenon, you must admit that it's strange that it seems to only occur to American staff at those locations. It may not be a weapon, but it does seem to target American facilities. For all we know it could be a malfunctioning American system inside those locations.

There might've been speculation that Cuba allowed it or supported a foreign operation, but "from Cuba" doesn't mean "by Cuba".

I think many more countries could do this around the world... I'm not sure about Cuba, but maybe even yes.

If the CIA's goal were to foment anti-Cuban sentiment in relation to Havana Syndrome, why would they have the press write articles which don't blame Cuba, and depend on the public not actually reading those articles but still making the connection by vague association... rather than simply blaming Cuba, so the articles would blame Cuba, and even people who read the articles would make that association directly?

You're reaching. This isn't part of some subtle CIA propaganda double fake, it's just the result of Hacker News preferring to depend on commenters to provide context for articles they don't read.

Better than country names, though.

It's really easy and natural to do that, since the name evolves straight out of the conversation. Especially when it's something new, unknown, and no one really understands what's going on.

> No valuable time is wasted plucking letters out of the Greek alphabet. The names are easy to remember. As long as they are applied consistently, who cares?

That's an artificial naming convention that had to be designed. And it might not be as practical as you assume it is. IIRC, NOAA recently abandoned a similar Greek-letter naming convention.

Some valuable time is also wasted with people needing to answer "WTF is that?" when all the sudden sources start talk about stuff like the "Beta variant," or people having to explicitly explain connections that would have been clear with a geographic name. As someone who has been following the news, the headline "India variant 2x more transmissible than UK variant," would have let me skip reading the article, since it told me everything new I needed to know (e.g. India outbreak caused by new more transmissible variant).

You realize part of the issue with the "China Flu" label was conservatives beating the shit out of Asians?

You realize that there are no reports of US citizens beating the shit out of Cubans because of Havana syndrome? And that a niche affliction in the foreign service is different than a pandemic killing 600,000 domestically?

Huh? I think you're misunderstanding the situation here and misapplying a heuristic. That sample size of 40 people may be the universe of cases (at the time) or a significant fraction of it, and I don't know what could be "weirdly specific" about "48 demographically similar healthy controls."