The 75th Ranger Regiment is preparing to create a 4th Ranger Battalion in order to meet force readiness and crisis response requirements, according to two officials familiar with the preparations. Rangers are expected to start showing up at the new battalion in September, and by next summer have the unit established on a provisional basis.

When asked about the new Ranger battalion, U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesperson Jacqueline Hill told The High Side via email that “USASOC does not currently have any force structure announcements.” The Ranger Regiment public affairs officer did not respond to Facebook and LinkedIn messages from The High Side prior to the publication of this article.

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It was the height of the COVID pandemic in late October 2020, and SEAL Team 6 was having one of its thrice-weekly morning briefings.

Connected via videoconference, participants in different offices were wearing masks as an intelligence officer briefed potential hostage rescue missions around the world. The unit was keeping an eye on several such situations, according to a former Joint Special Operations Command officer.

On this day, they had a new hostage to brief: Philip Walton, an American missionary in Niger, had been kidnapped by an al-Qaida affiliated group, which JSOC believed was seeking to sell its hostage to another armed group. (JSOC, pronounced “jay-sock,” runs the U.S. military’s most sensitive special operations missions.)

“In that area of the world, terrorists can sell a hostage to another terror organization, and you will never hear about them again,” the former JSOC officer told The High Side. JSOC intelligence officers believed they might be able to free Walton if he could be located.

This happened faster than expected, as the terrorists holding Walton did something foolish: They powered up the missionary’s cellphone and called his parents to negotiate a ransom. But the FBI had already met with the couple and advised them to have these conversations so that the U.S. government could track the cellphone signal in the hope that it would lead the special operators to the hostage takers.

The kidnappers’ mistake led to the first of several hostage rescue missions conducted, attempted or planned by U.S. special operations forces in the western Sahel region of Africa during the past six years that received little media attention.

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For more than three months, a Joint Special Operations Command task force has been standing by in the Middle East, prepared to execute what some insiders say would likely be the most dangerous mission the command has ever been assigned: recovering highly enriched uranium from underground facilities in Iran.

JSOC (“jay-sock”), which runs the military’s most sensitive special operations missions, has conducted extensive training for counter-weapons of mass destruction missions almost since its inception in 1980. But despite — or perhaps because of — that experience, some in the command are comparing a possible operation to retrieve Iran’s nuclear material to the failed mission that gave rise to JSOC in the first place. That mission was Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 effort to rescue American hostages in Iran that was aborted after two U.S. aircraft collided with the loss of eight U.S. service members at an improvised landing strip inside Iran codenamed Desert One. Some JSOC insiders have begun referring to any effort to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium by force as “Eagle Claw 2.0,” according to two defense contractors.

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The pilot of the F-15E Strike Eagle shot down April 3 over Iran was also the pilot of one of the three F-15Es shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident less than five weeks previously, making him “almost certainly” the first Air Force fixed-wing pilot to be shot down twice in the same conflict since the Vietnam war, according to current and former Air Force officials.

The other airman shot down in the April 3 incident, the F-15E’s weapon systems officer, suffered injuries after his parachute failed to properly open when the pair ejected following an Iranian missile strike, according to a former senior Air Force official who was briefed on the episode.

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The first is an episode of Eyes On which is the sister podcast of The Team House, featuring geopolitical analysis with former military and CIA officers but this one has the three authors of our most recent article about JSOC spies on it. You will also get a nice preview of Zach Dorfman’s new book coming out in a year about the CIA’s Non-Official Cover (NOC) program.

After watching that, if you’re game for it, I recently made a second appearance on The Danny Jones show while I was down in Tampa for SOF Week this year. Danny normally covers issues like UFOs, the JFK assassination, etc which I don’t particularly touch upon, but in this episode, we talk about Havana Syndrome, tapping undersea fiberoptic cables, recent High Side articles, the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, and my upcoming novel, The Most Dangerous Man.

I also appeared on Aaron Hale’s Point of Impact podcast to discuss some big picture issues and tell some personal stories.

Please subscribe to Jack’s newsletter, which gives you a snapshot of everything on The High Side and The Team House podcast in a once-a-week email delivered to your inbox, helping you stay up to date on everything we do, without having to worry about social media algorithms. Signing up is easy (and free) right here.

When the elite forces of Joint Special Operations Command sprang into action in April to rescue a downed F-15 weapon systems officer in Iran, it created countless headlines. But it was far from the first time this century that JSOC (pronounced “jay-sock”) personnel have conducted daring missions into that country.

In the early years following the 9/11 attacks, at least two JSOC personnel made repeated undercover trips into Iran, and another pair of operatives — pretending to be a romantic couple — flew into the country and stayed in a hotel for several days, according to Sean Naylor’s “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command.”

Those personnel, however, belonged to an even more rarified group than most special mission unit operators.

In airports around the world, members of this small, secretive club sometimes recognize but never acknowledge each other. Traveling under alias, they stroll through terminals in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

They could be coming from Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Dam Neck, Virginia; or any one of numerous off-site locations maintained by the U.S. government. Walking past airport stores, they sometimes spot someone they know: Perhaps they were in the Ranger Regiment together years before, or they’d worked together on a deployment. Maybe they are even in the same unit currently.

They notice one another in passing but each quickly averts his or her gaze. A handshake, a greeting, or even a lingering stare could potentially blow an operative’s cover, as well as the cover of his or her colleague. They travel the world like this, living under an assumed identity to the point that some operatives lose track of their real names and identities. This is the clandestine world of JSOC’s non-official cover program.

Or that, at least, is how JSOC’s non-official cover veterans (or NOCs, pronounced “knocks”) talk about their lives. But a former contractor to the military’s special operations forces described the work of seasoning these elite operatives for life under deep cover in somewhat less glamorous terms.

That work begins long before operatives’ deployment abroad. While taking an advanced training course, for example, JSOC’s NOC trainees have joined other special operators and flown into U.S. airports. For the purpose of the exercises, these airports are “located” in a fictional foreign country. The trainees are supposed to arrive in non-military clothes and be able to pass as civilians as they transit the airports.

“Part of the class is moving through an airport nonchalantly, undetected, and not raising your profile,” said the former special operations contractor. But many would-be operatives have stood out, recalled the former contractor, who said he has warned trainee NOCs that instructors would be able to easily identify them.

The special operations personnel would be betrayed by their military bearing and appearance. “We would always pick just about every one of them out,” he told The High Side. “It’s because they looked alike … They had the Merrell boots, they had the cargo pants, sunglasses, the ball cap, the beard.”

The course instructors would also inform the local police about the training exercise, and the cops would duly detain the trainees, who only moments earlier had been “yucking it up” together after deplaning, the former special operations contractor said. “It was hilarious because they were totally unprepared. They didn’t have the right identification. They didn’t have a cover story,” said the former contractor.

The contractor’s account highlights what several observers said has been the JSOC NOC program’s Achilles’ heel: It is fiendishly difficult to train armed forces personnel to play civilian roles convincingly, and even when that is achieved, the rapid spread of digital technology and artificial intelligence is making it almost impossible to mask their military backgrounds.

As a result, insiders say, a program that at its height in the 2010s was running source networks across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia may soon be reduced to short, “singleton” (i.e., solo) missions with cover identities that are used once then discarded, rather than adopted for long-term operations of lasting value.

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The sophisticated theft of 15 crop-spraying drones last month in New Jersey has the FBI worried as experts warn of “ridiculously bad” consequences and “a potential nightmare scenario” if terrorists get their hands on the machines.

The unsolved theft has revived fears rampant in the post-9/11 years that terrorists might use crop dusters to disperse biological or chemical weapons with the aim of inflicting mass casualties inside the United States. The difference now is that the potential threat consists not of one pilot flying a small propellor-driven plane, but more than a dozen remotely piloted vehicles. Heightening the concern even further is the fact that the crime occurred against the backdrop of the United States’ war against Iran.

“The bureau is freaked out for a good reason,” Steve Lazarus, a retired FBI agent, told The High Side in an email. “These aren’t hobby drones with cameras. They’re industrial sprayers designed to carry and disperse significant amounts of liquid quickly and with precision. A typical agricultural drone can cover a large area in minutes, following GPS-guided paths — that’s exactly what they’re built for in farming, but it also means that, in the wrong hands, they’re a ready-made delivery system.”

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An Air Force weapon systems officer’s daring rescue by special operations forces captivated the United States over the first weekend in April. Now, new details have emerged about the overall operation, the CIA’s deception plan to confuse the Iranian forces, and how the entire mission almost came undone.

As Iranian militiamen closed in, the airman was rescued after a two-day ordeal by operators from Joint Special Operations Command, which includes secretive but famous special mission units such as the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force. The JSOC operators were available because they had deployed to the region for a completely different mission.

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“Bodyguard of Lies” is a documentary about the Afghan war that grew out of The Washington Post’s “The Afghanistan Papers” project and Post reporter Craig Whitlock’s similarly-titled book. Those works in turn owed much to Whitlock’s discovery of a trove of hundreds of interviews conducted by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with U.S. officials who assumed their words would not be made public. The interviews revealed a marked difference between what those officials said in private and what they said when the cameras were rolling. (It required two lawsuits by the Post to pry the interview recordings and transcripts from the grip of the U.S. government.)

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Most military veterans can relate to the experience of watching an action movie and getting completely irritated with the inaccuracy of the weapons and tactics in the film. Many a spouse is certainly sick and tired of hearing us rant about bad gunplay in the movies. The same goes for video games, which are even more over the top, with heroes and villains alike able to absorb an entire belt of machine gun fire before going down.

Most of us will eventually come to see games like Call of Duty or movies like Die Hard as good entertainment, not to be taken seriously but rather to just be enjoyed for what they are. However, many of us still long for a genre that does try to remain faithful to real-life weapons and tactics. One video game that makes an admirable attempt at being as much a simulator as a video game is called Ground Branch, which is notable for its extreme attention to detail when it comes to accuracy.

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Social media reports of U.S. forces using a “sonic weapon” that caused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s bodyguards to vomit blood during the January 3 raid on Caracas are not true, but U.S. forces do have a secret directed energy weapon that produces different effects, sources told The High Side.

On Jan. 9, an account on X (formerly Twitter) run by right-wing radio and podcast host Mike Netter published what he claimed was a transcript of an interview with one of Maduro’s bodyguards. The alleged bodyguard, who had apparently survived the Delta Force raid that killed 32 Cuban members of Maduro’s security detail, gave a sensational account of U.S. forces using a “sonic weapon” to subdue resistance at Maduro’s heavily fortified residential compound.

“It was like a very intense sound wave,” the guard purportedly said. “Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”

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A bold nighttime raid in Caracas executed by Delta Force and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment with an air package overhead totaling more than 150 aircraft captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores last night. The mission, called Operation Absolute Resolve, was not a typical JSOC capture/kill raid but rather was designed to serve an arrest warrant based on a Department of Justice indictment against Maduro and his regime. In this sense, the Delta operators were escorts to federal law enforcement officers.

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In September 2005, in a remote valley in Pakistan, a CIA contractor locked eyes with a man he was sure was Osama bin Laden and caught the moment on camera.

The images of that encounter (see below) caused the small Joint Special Operations Command task force in Afghanistan to prepare for a possible cross-border mission, according to the contractor, before Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which the CIA’s Islamabad station chief had controversially informed about the sighting, persuaded the agency that it was a case of mistaken identity.

The episode, almost six years before a JSOC raid killed bin Laden in Pakistan, underscored the divide in the CIA over how much their Pakistani counterparts could be trusted and the febrile nature of the hunt for bin Laden after the trail of the al-Qaida leader had gone cold following the December 2001 battle of Tora Bora.

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The Airborne Mafia by Robert F. Williams

“The Airborne Mafia” tells the history of the American airborne infantry fraternity, making the case that the so-called airborne “mafia” has been influential on American national security far beyond its original scope of static line parachute infiltrations.

Williams starts with the birth of American airborne culture in the early 1940s and into its dramatic entrance into World War II, covering not just the history of these airborne units but also what makes them different. What is the airborne culture, and why did it permeate so strongly through the Army after World War II, and in a world where parachute infiltration was increasingly no longer the preferred method to deliver troops into battle?

The author pins the difference on a few key factors, including the specialized assessment and selection that applied to paratroop units. Airborne soldiers had to have a slightly higher IQ than the average soldier back in the 1940s, and then they had to pass the physically and mentally challenging airborne course. Their bravery had to be demonstrated in training by jumping from perfectly good aircraft, a character trait that bled into other aspects of the soldier's job.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of the airborne mafia though was its emphasis on decentralized maneuver warfare. While the hope was always that airborne units would land in one place, and assemble as intact units on the ground, this was rarely the case. More often than not, units were spread out across a dozen or more miles, leading to them fighting as individual squads or coming together in an ad hoc manner on the ground, sweeping up paratroopers dispersed across the battlespace into small platoon-size elements, and then taking the fight to the enemy on their own initiative.

This individual initiative and creativity was cultivated in the airborne for the above mentioned tactical reasons, but it was a quality that bled over into every other aspect of the airborne culture. Commanders expected their platoon leaders, and even their privates, to seize the initiative and come up with solutions on their own.

Airborne officers who went on to have an outsized impact on the overall force after World War II included Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, Brig. Gen. William Yarborough, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and Lt. Gen. James Gavin, all of whom went on to serve in the upper echelons of the Army, where they advocated for airborne units and the airborne mentality. These airborne commanders also founded the airmobile capability — the use of helicopter insertions — which was widely employed during the Vietnam conflict.

While the airborne mafia influenced the development of airmobility, and even the Army’s force structure during the atomic age, what brings the Army’s airborne capability into the 21^st century is that it is sold as a strategic response force. To this day, the 75^th Ranger Regiment maintains a battalion of Ranger Ready Force 1 (RRF1) recall alert while the 82^nd Airborne Division maintains an Immediate Response Battalion (IRB) as a part of its larger Immediate Response Force (IRF). Both of these battalions are prepared to deploy globally in a matter of hours in response to contingencies as directed by the president.

“The Airborne Mafia” is superbly researched, with the author taking a neutral-to-positive tone about his subject matter while also pointing out some of the dangers posed by such an influential community, such as sending paratroopers in to squash domestic riots or civil unrest. “Because of their intrinsic readiness and well-honed combat skills, parachute forces have become a double-edged sword,” the author writes. “High-readiness troops are seldom the best choice for constabulary functions — yet they are often the only choice.”

In short, I highly recommended the book. “The Airborne Mafia” reminds us why the sky is blue, what makes the grass grow green, and why the airborne hates dirty nasty legs.

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp

Roughly analogous to Matthew Cole's “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six,” Seth Harp's new book about murder, rape, drug trafficking, and other criminal activities within Special Forces and Delta Force is sure to blow out a few o-rings down at Fort Bragg as the United States continues a period of post-Global War on Terror reflection that is as needed as it is dreaded.

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By 2016, Pakistani militant Mati-ur Rehman was a wanted man, in more ways than one.

The FBI wanted to convict him. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani allegedly wanted to kill him. And the CIA’s Kabul station wanted to recruit him.

In December 2010, when the U.S. Treasury Department designated him as a global terrorist, Rehman held at least two positions in the interlocking world of militant Islamist groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater: chief operational commander for Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, an anti-Shia group closely allied with al-Qaida and the Taliban; and planning director for al-Qaida itself. Now, six years later, in an effort to avoid the death-by-drone-strike suffered by many of his peers, he found himself in a Kabul safe house, quietly negotiating with someone he believed to be working for the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s spy agency. But while the slim, 30-ish man with whom he was speaking indeed belonged to an all-Afghan espionage cell, that cell did not work for the NDS, where few even knew it existed. The cell, whose existence is revealed here for the first time, was called, simply, the Counterterrorism Unit, and it worked for the CIA.

The agency had created the CTU to recruit jihadists close to the upper tiers of al-Qaida and other Islamist terror groups – militants who would never speak to Westerners, but who might be willing to engage with Afghans. Now, with Rehman apparently willing to strike a deal, the CIA seemed on the verge of realizing its ambitions for the CTU.

There was just one problem. In an interview with the CTU, Rehman admitted to not only having a role in the January 2002 kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in the Pakistani city of Karachi, but to being in the room when al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had decapitated the American journalist. This admission placed at risk not only his potential recruitment as an agent, but also his life. It also laid bare a conundrum that the CIA faced repeatedly in its counterterrorism efforts: Was it possible to recruit valuable assets in anti-American terror groups without, almost inevitably, recruiting individuals who had American blood on their hands?

It was a question to which the agency found no easy answer.

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Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Dec. 24, 2022, on the now-defunct personal website of Jack Murphy, co-founder of The High Side. It is reproduced here with minor editing changes, but contains no new reporting other than the material related to “The Mission” by Tim Weiner.

CIA paramilitary operatives are working with a NATO ally’s intelligence service to run sabotage operations deep inside Russia.

The campaign, which has been underway since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, involves longstanding sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s operation by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.

Years in the planning, the campaign is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, according to three former U.S. intelligence officials, two former U.S. military officials and a U.S. person who has been briefed on the campaign. The former officials declined to identify specific targets attacked during the CIA-directed campaign, but railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants in Russia have all been damaged in unexplained incidents since February.

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A court document obtained by The High Side sheds new light on the case of a senior CIA officer convicted last month of charges including illegal lobbying on behalf of two foreigners. It also contains clues to the identity of one of those individuals.

Dale Bendler pleaded guilty April 23 to failing to register as a foreign agent and to mishandling classified material. A 30-year veteran of the agency’s operations directorate, Bendler retired in 2014 as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, but the charges to which he pleaded guilty concern activities between 2017 and 2020, when he was working as a CIA contractor, according to a Justice Department press release.

A principal charge against Bendler is that starting around July 2017, an unnamed Washington lobbying firm paid him $20,000 a month to “use his position and access at the CIA to influence a foreign government’s embezzlement investigation of one of Bendler’s foreign national clients,” the press release states. The Justice Department, which did not respond to a list of questions submitted by The High Side, has identified neither the individual, whom it refers to as “Foreign Principal 1,” nor the foreign government, but a “statement of facts” filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and signed by Bendler, his attorney and federal prosecutors, includes some tantalizing details.

For instance, the document (attached below) states that Foreign Principal 1 was based outside the United States, “had previously managed the sovereign wealth fund of a foreign country” and was already under investigation by the government of that country (“Foreign Country 1”) for embezzlement of that country’s state funds. The document also states that Bendler “was familiar with governments on the same continent as Foreign Country 1 from his prior work at the CIA.”

At least one relatively high-profile case appears largely to match these criteria.

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The Army is considering a proposal to slash the number of special operators receiving jump pay by more than 40% as part of an overhaul of the service’s paratroop training.

The initiative would also require the Pentagon to update its war plans to reflect the fact that some units were no longer resourced or trained for airborne operations.

The proposal grew out of the Army Airborne Requirements and Structure Analysis, which Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George initiated in September with the aim of making the service’s airborne training more efficient. The Army convened a committee run by XVIII Airborne Corps to conduct the analysis and draft a way forward.

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It was about 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, and two CIA officers were sitting in the window of the Green Eggs Café at the corner of 13^th and Locust Streets in downtown Philadelphia, catching up with each other and enjoying a leisurely breakfast.

Adam and Michael (not their real names, which the CIA forbids them to use) were in Philadelphia to receive treatment for a debilitating range of symptoms from which they – and about two dozen others – had been suffering since their service in 2016 and 2017 at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. In almost all cases, the onset of these symptoms, which included dizziness, vertigo, headaches and nausea, had been sudden and, to those affected, inexplicable.

As other U.S. personnel posted elsewhere came down with similar symptoms, the federal government insisted on using bureaucratic gobbledygook to refer to those episodes, calling them “anomalous health incidents.” But the feds were too late. Because the phenomenon first came to light in the Cuban capital, some in CIA headquarters were keen to tie it to the Castro government, so they fed a catchy name for the symptoms into the public sphere: “Havana Syndrome.”

For many, including Adam and Michael, the symptoms not only continued for several months, but worsened. Some never fully recovered.

What made the Havana victims’ circumstances even worse was the lack of support they received from their own agency. Senior CIA officials tried to convince them that they were imagining things, even as the evidence mounted that they had been attacked. Adam, Michael and their colleagues felt betrayed.

“They just did not want to believe us,” Michael said.

(Officially, Adam is only allowed to say he was a U.S. government employee in Cuba who retired from the CIA. However, the agency allows him to acknowledge that in 2018 then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo awarded him the Exceptional Service Medallion, a CIA award given “for injury or death resulting from service in an area of hazard.” The High Side independently confirmed that Adam was working as a CIA case officer in Cuba.)

Now, in Philadelphia, the next unsettling turn in their story was about to unfold. As Adam tucked into his pancakes, they noticed a tall, white, middle-aged man on the sidewalk photographing them with a camera that was slung around his neck.

The lean, white-haired man was only 15 to 20 feet away “at most,” Adam said. “We noticed he was pointing the camera at us in the window and was taking pictures, and we both looked at each other and then looked around the restaurant, and we’re like, ‘What is he taking pictures of?’”

Other than themselves, the café was almost deserted. And unlike the colorful mural that decorated the building on the other side of the parking lot across the street, which the photographer was ignoring, the beige walls around the restaurant’s large windows were bland and unremarkable.

“It’s just the restaurant window, with me and [Michael] in the window, and a plain concrete wall,” Adam said. Michael and Adam were sure that the man was there to photograph them, even though, Adam said, he tried to “obfuscate” that fact by sometimes pointing the camera away from them. “He was very much focused upon the two of us,” Michael said.

After a few moments, the mystery photographer stepped behind a lamppost. “He’s checking his pictures on his camera to make sure that whatever it is has turned out … then shuffles back over in front of the window, and he starts photographing us again,” Adam said. At this point, Michael pulled out his iPhone and took a series of photographs of the man. After spending no more than two minutes taking photographs, according to Adam, the individual ducked into a nearby alleyway and disappeared.

But that wasn’t the end of it, according to Michael, who said that as he and Adam walked away from the café, the man reappeared behind them, tailing them for about a dozen blocks before they split up to throw him off.

Adam and Michael notified local FBI counterintelligence agents of what had happened, giving them the photos Michael had taken. Using closed circuit cameras in the area, the agents traced the man’s path to and from the café, according to Adam. He had been staying at a nearby hotel, where cameras caught him taking an elevator down and exiting the building with two women, with whom he walked down the street before taking a left on 13^th Street, close to the café, at which point the women went their own way.

After taking his photographs at the café and then tailing Adam and Michael, the man returned alone to the hotel, checked out and caught a cab to the airport, from where he took a flight to another country that the FBI declined to identify to the CIA men. Nor would the bureau tell them where the mystery photographer was from, other than to acknowledge that he was a foreign national, according to Adam.

Michael, however, said that he learned secondhand from security officers at CIA headquarters that the man “had ties to Cuba.” Whatever his origin, the FBI told Adam and Michael that the government had “flagged” the man’s identity in case he ever tried to re-enter the country.

The encounter alarmed the CIA officers. “Why would you go take pictures of a concrete wall, with just a window with two guys eating breakfast, and then immediately leave the country?” Adam said. “Something doesn’t add up.”

Although they had no evidence of malfeasance on the photographer’s part, to Adam and Michael the episode appeared to be the latest incident in an extraordinary campaign of harassment that made it clear someone was trying to intimidate them and other Havana Syndrome victims long after they had returned to the United States. This campaign used spy-versus-spy tactics that CIA officers often face in hostile capitals such as Moscow and Havana but from which they had previously been presumed safe in America.

In addition to overt surveillance, these intimidation tactics included breaking into, stealing from and fouling their homes, remotely accessing and tasking their phones, and mailing sinister packages to them from abroad, all while the victims fought bitterly against an intransigent CIA bureaucracy that seemed to have little interest in helping them recover from their injuries.

The wide-ranging intimidation campaign, which has not been previously reported, targeted not only Havana Syndrome patients, but their doctors and other medical staff. The harassment became so egregious that the CIA deployed its Threat Management Unit to ensure that the homes of Havana Syndrome victims were as secure as possible. Nevertheless, the CIA and the FBI displayed so little interest in figuring out who was behind the campaign that some targets wondered if the agency itself was the guilty party.

As members of the original Havana cohort contended with this intimidation campaign, the number of Havana Syndrome cases continued to grow, with scores of CIA, State Department, FBI and other U.S. government personnel stricken in locations ranging from Guangzhou, China, to Vienna, Austria, to Washington, D.C. But even as the numbers grew, the truth about Havana Syndrome remained frustratingly out of reach, hidden in “the wilderness of mirrors,” as legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton described the world of spy and counterspy.

For this two-part series, The High Side spoke with several of the original CIA victims whose experiences in Havana first brought the “anomalous health incidents” phenomenon to the public eye, including some who have never spoken out before. The High Side also consulted doctors and other medical experts who have studied Havana Syndrome, as well as military experts, some of whom reported that the U.S. government has long had a directed beam device that causes symptoms similar to those experienced by Havana Syndrome victims.

It all begins with the question: What really went down in Havana?

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President Donald Trump was the “elephant in the room” at a Feb. 20 Washington special operations conference, as numerous speakers implicitly questioned his policies, but without mentioning him by name.

Days after Trump appeared to reverse decades of U.S. policy by cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and repeating Kremlin lies accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being a “dictator” who started the war in Ukraine, panelists at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations Symposium nonetheless referred to Russia as an adversary and hailed U.S. special operations forces for the role they have played in helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion that actually started the war.

“We want to be teamed with nations around the world that [support the] rules-based order” and that want “to push back against” countries like China and Russia “that are oppressive or [use] diplomatic coercion,” said Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command.

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