Congress: Please let me give you a classified briefing on Havana Syndrome

In spring 2018, while I was serving as a U.S. diplomat in Guangzhou, China, my wife, my two children and I were medevac’d and then diagnosed by leading American doctors with traumatic brain injuries.

The cause? Pulsed microwave standoff attacks by Russian military intelligence operatives.  

If this sounds outlandish, consider that the U.S. government has paid my family more than $1 million as a result of what happened and our injuries. The government did so even though it continues to deny knowledge of these events and to pretend it doesn’t know who attacked my family in this manner. 

I was one of the first Americans Vladimir Putin kicked out of Russia after he became president. This is because top Russian officials, including Putin himself, have long known who I am and have been paranoid about my work in the former Soviet Union over 22 years.

Around the time I formally joined the State Department in 2011, Julian Assange and Wikileaks illegally published leaked classified cables about sensitive political work I had done in the former Soviet Union. I warned the State Department that this would be a problem for my personal security. A few years later, I was notified by the State Department that sensitive background information in my SF-86 security clearance forms had been hacked and stolen by a hostile country.

State shrugged and acted like I should be happy that they were giving me lifetime free credit monitoring.

At the time of the attack upon myself and my family, I had been complaining to U.S. government security officers about memory loss, headaches and sleep issues, in addition to light sensitivity and hearing strange clicking noises. The State Department grudgingly gave me and my wife U.S. government Havana Acquired Brain Injury Tests (HABIT) only after dangerous levels of pulsed microwave radiation were measured around my residence while my family was living there. 

These radio frequency-pulsed microwave signal strength measurements — which were deliberately withheld from me out of liability and other concerns — caused panic in Washington but have since been buried and the details withheld from Congress.

The State Department knew that the sounds we heard but could not record were due to thermoelastic expansion of the inner ear — “Frey Effect hearing,” caused by pulsed microwave radiation. This, along with the measurements of high levels of pulsed microwave radiation around my residence, led to the intelligence community to compel a very reluctant State Department to administer the HABIT tests, which we failed, triggering our medevacs from China.

The greatest disappointment to me was not that Russia would harm me, my family and my American diplomat neighbor, but that my own government — whom I worked for, bled for, served in Afghanistan, Iraq and countless hotspots around the world — knew when we were evacuated how we had been injured and by whom, yet completely turned its back on me and my family.

Like so many other U.S. government personnel injured before me by microwave radiation attacks (the technology has been around since the 1960s and the Soviets were always much more advanced than the U.S. in weaponizing and miniaturizing it) I would have preferred to stay quiet. And I would have, had the U.S. government actually provided timely medical help to my children.

Instead, State Department doctors told me and my wife in 2018 that “children are better able to handle directed energy waves because they have more padding between the brain and skull than adults do.” They refused to treat my children, which led to their injuries being much worse than they should have been.

The State Department and intelligence community became so upset after President Donald Trump rightly and publicly referred to our injuries as the result of “attacks,” that they covered up and suppressed classified information showing we had indeed been injured by Russian pulsed microwave attacks.

This has led to an absurd situation wherein the State Department is feigning ignorance about the cause of our injuries, yet has compensated my family more than $1 million for our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries due to “external exposure” to high levels of pulsed microwave radiation. 

The American people have a right to know which country caused the injuries for which their tax dollars have compensated us.

Two years ago, while I was being treated for a month at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, my State Department leadership refused to meet with me there. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) met with me, however, and in a very Texan way he gave me a firm handshake, looked me in the eye and told me he knew it was the Russians that had done this to me and my family. He asked what he could do to help. 

I said I needed to brief him in a suitable location to discuss classified material that State’s Diplomatic Security Service and the Intelligence Community were withholding from Congress and sometimes outright lying to him and Congress about.

Since then, the State Department and the Intelligence Community have gone to incredible lengths to try to silence me, to prevent me from briefing McCaul and Congress on classified information about the pulsed microwave attacks that injured my family that Congress should have received more than six years ago.

Congress, and Chairman McCaul: Please, let me brief members of the intelligence and foreign affairs committees in the Capitol SCIF on classified information directly relating to the Russian pulsed microwave attacks that injured me, my family and scores of my U.S. government colleagues. The State Department for too long has tried to prevent you from hearing what I have to say. You need to hear the truth to serve your constituents as they deserve.

Mark Lenzi previously worked for the Republican National Committee and is a former spokesman for the New Hampshire Republican Party. The opinions and characterizations in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.