The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has released an interim report where it announced that its assessments have suggested the mysterious Havana syndrome is unlikely to have been deliberately caused by a foreign actor.
The Havana syndrome is a series of mysterious cases that have affected U.S. officials around the globe with no clear medical explanations. The CIA said that the medical conditions were not representative of a "sustained worldwide campaign" by Russia or other foreign nations that allegedly sought to harm U.S. personnel.
Mysterious Havana Syndrome
However, the intelligence agency has not ruled out that a small portion of the incidents could have been attacked by foreign parties. The CIA said that it continues to investigate whether or not there were any devices or mechanisms used that may have caused the symptoms reported by the U.S. officials.
But the intelligence agency has yet to find any evidence that a nation-state was actually behind any of the nearly 1,000 reported episodes from around the globe. The interim findings of the CIA were delivered to United States President Joe Biden and briefed to Congress in recent weeks, CNN reported.
The mysterious cases have caused confusion among U.S. officials for more than five years now since the first report of the illness. The initial cases were reported by personnel at the U.S. embassy in Cuba. Since then, more and more cases have been reported on almost every single continent in more than a dozen countries worldwide.
The cases have surged even more after the CIA and State Department urged employees to come forward if they experienced similar symptoms like the ones in the reported cases. However, it remains unclear how many of the reports were later confirmed as medically diagnosed cases.
CIA Director Bill Burns also issued a rare statement where he said that the symptoms that the affected individuals experienced were "real." The official's remarks come as the agency grows committed to providing care for officers and continues to investigate the incident, ABC News reported.
Investigating the Illness
The intelligence agency is still reviewing roughly two dozen cases that have yet to be explained scientifically. A U.S. official briefed on the findings said that these cases offered the greatest chance of providing clues to whether or not a foreign power was actually responsible for some of the unexplained health incidents that have spread among U.S. officials worldwide.
Despite foreign interference not being proven in the mysterious illness, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pentagon, and other agencies have continued to investigate the possibility. Some of the cases that are being focused on include those from 2016 in Havana and some in Vienna in 2021.
Many of the victims of the mysterious illness were left unsatisfied by the CIA's interim findings, particularly current and former officials who have been fighting against chronic ailments for years without having a clear explanation for the condition they were in. A group of victims issued a statement saying that the CIA's report "cannot and must not be the final word on the matter," the New York Times reported.
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