Adam Entous writes:

In the fall of 2020, [Mark] Vandroff [a retired Navy officer picked by Robert O’Brien, the then new national-security adviser and deputy national-security adviser Matthew Pottinger, to investigate the Havana Syndrome] and his colleagues were shocked by the new cases that came rolling in. One of the most dramatic episodes involved a U.S. military officer stationed in a country with a large Russian presence. As the officer pulled his car into a busy intersection, he suddenly felt as though his head were going to explode. His two-year-old son, in a car seat in the back, started screaming. As the officer sped out of the intersection, the pressure in his head ceased, and his son went quiet. A remarkably similar incident was reported by a C.I.A. officer who was stationed in the same city, and who had no connection to the military officer.

Geolocation data, which is based on signals from electronic devices, indicated that both victims had been in the vicinity of G.R.U. vehicles when they began experiencing symptoms. Some officials believed that this was a smoking gun, and were annoyed by what they saw as the C.I.A.’s and the State Department’s reluctance to call out the Russians. “We’ve talked enough about this,” Chris Miller, the acting Secretary of Defense, said. “Let’s get after it. I mean, this is bullshit. Something’s going on. I thought we were well beyond the phase where we thought it was an unexplained mania or any shit like that.”

The Pentagon assembled its own task force. Part of Miller’s goal was to draw up “response options”—actions that the U.S. could take to deter Russia from targeting American officials. He and his allies wanted U.S. spies to harass and intimidate their Russian counterparts with various tactics—slashing G.R.U. officers’ tires, for example, or leaving threatening messages for them in their homes and in their cars. But career professionals at the Pentagon objected, saying that the C.I.A. still wasn’t certain that the Russians were responsible. “You’re not going to jack up another major power, certainly not publicly, and you’re not going to do something retaliatory unless you’ve really got the goods,” the former N.S.C. official told me. More than four years have passed since the initial incidents in Havana, and the government still doesn’t have the goods. [Continue reading…]