Trump's critics in the spy world welcome his administration's Havana Syndrome response
Retired senior CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos has not shied away from airing his grievances about President-elect Donald Trump, set to return to the White House in a month. He has warned of a potential purge of intelligence officers, a reduction in intel sharing with foreign services, and the possibility that intelligence may be fabricated. And yet, the MAGA-hated former spy holds an unexpected hope when it comes to the Trump administration and Havana Syndrome, or what the government calls Anomalous Health Incidents.
“I'm a really strange case here because I've been such a critic of Trump,” Marc tells me. “But on this issue, which is incredibly important to me, I think they will be much better… The Biden administration, while there were initially some signs that they would be good on this, they completely failed in the end.”
When I first met Marc in person, sitting in a rocking chair on his porch in 2021 in typical Covid style, he described a life forever changed by Havana Syndrome — a misnomer for a condition reported by U.S. government personnel not just in Havana but across the world. On a deployment to Moscow in 2017, he says he came down with vertigo, headaches, and fatigue. He says his symptoms were so serious that he couldn’t continue his work — after 26 years, eliminated on the battlefield without being killed. But the CIA wasn’t taking his case seriously, so Marc went public, becoming a prominent voice for scores of intelligence officers who say they too have the syndrome.
In those days, Marc told me that the CIA was finally treating afflicted officers with more kindness and respect. It was the first year of Biden’s term, and CIA Director Bill Burns wanted to hear from victims and get to the bottom of the mystery.
Then came an indication that the agency was changing course. “A couple of years ago, I got a call from someone inside the IC,” Marc said. A person in the agency told him that the analytic unit tasked with investigating AHI sent out an email about a happy hour.
“They asked [analysts] to dress up and drink and come drunk and stagger around like Havana Syndrome victims,” Marc told me. “I had an incredible feeling of betrayal. This is the group that was supposed to be investigating us, supposed to be helping us. Yet they were mocking us. I was out-of-my-mind furious.”
And though the seventh floor of the agency where the leadership sits was appalled, the CIA ultimately changed course in its thinking. “I don't know why, but the CIA didn't believe us, then actively worked against us,” Marc said.
He says the shift came as Russia made a play for Kyiv and all of Ukraine in 2022. “At that time, something went awry,” he told me. Were the two events connected? He said he didn’t know but that some see a link.
Inside the agency at the time, an intelligence source told me that the patterns they were finding in the data revealed mainly psychosomatic causes. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told me that it stands behind the community’s analytic judgments while remaining open to finding new information.
But other major voices in the AHI space, including retired Army Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency’s investigation, echo Marc’s belief: Republican leadership will handle the matter with more integrity.
They tell me that members of the Trump administration — such as Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, and John Ratcliffe, his choice for CIA Director — will not shy away from what they perceive as an inconvenient truth: That Russia is behind certain cases, like Marc’s. And they hope the Trump administration will hold the intelligence community accountable for a “massive cover-up.”
An interim report by a House Intelligence subcommittee this month stated that Chairman Rick Crawford “is convinced that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs” and that the intelligence community “has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn.”
The Republican-led subcommittee said it conducted 48 interviews and reviewed more than 5,000 pages of intelligence records. The report stated that the intelligence community tried to “create a politically palatable conclusion” in its 2023 assessment, which pointed with varying degrees of confidence to medical, environmental, and social factors, as opposed to a foreign adversary.
“The Biden administration just didn't want to have the blame pointed towards the culprits like Russia,” a senior national security staffer on Capitol Hill told me on the condition of anonymity. “They didn't want to escalate things. By saying nothing and doing nothing, it's de-escalatory in their bogus playbook.”
The staffer went on to say, “It continues their pattern of weakness that they demonstrated around the world — Afghanistan, Ukraine… When the Russians are lobbing an intermediate-range ballistic missile and using live bombs, they're worrying about six ATACMS [long-range, guided missiles] being escalatory.”
Subcommittee Chairman Crawford vows to continue investigating the origins of AHI and a potential intelligence community cover-up. The Hill staffer believes Congress’ findings could spur aggressive steps by the Trump administration. That could mean faulting former U.S. intelligence leaders, sanctioning foreign individuals responsible for managing an AHI program, and potentially making arrests, seizing assets, and “destroying factories.”
House Republicans squarely blame the Biden administration for mishandling AHI’s origins and threats, but Marc says it’s not that simple. Biden’s National Security Council is “completely in line” with the report. “They have somehow let the agency get out of control,” he said. “For whatever reason, the analysts at the agency have run roughshod over everything. And I think that's going to be absolutely exposed.”
I asked the NSC if officials there agreed with the report’s findings. A spokesperson simply told me, “The Biden Administration continues to support all efforts to better understand the causes of AHI and to ensure that affected individuals receive the care and support that they need.”
Marc believes that under the Trump administration, despite threats to dismantle the so-called deep state, attribution will be made, healthcare will be improved, and the CIA will be held accountable for treating victims poorly. He says that the email mocking AHI survivors came after intelligence officers were told they needed to participate in a National Institutes of Health study as a prerequisite to receiving medical care. “We got treated as a lab rat for a week before getting into Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center], and that was all hatched by the agency.”
He thinks the CIA may be concerned that attributing officers’ suffering to Russia will make it harder to deploy personnel overseas, especially if the agency doesn’t know how to prevent attacks.
“There’s some preposterous choices [by Trump] in national security positions,” Marc said, alluding to the likes of former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be the next Director of National Intelligence. “Yet, whoever gets in [may very well] end up doing the victims and the country a service on this issue.”