HavanaHelmetClub-20250610-1PsychologicalFortitude

The BBC Sounds platform offers music, radio, and podcasts, including the "Havana Helmet Club" series. The podcast explores mysterious sounds heard by U.S. government workers in Havana, causing various health issues. The story follows a former CIA agent, known as Patient Zero, who shares his experience of hearing a strange sound and the subsequent medical examinations. The incidents spread worldwide, leading to suspicions of a new weapon. The podcast delves into the complexities of the Havana Syndrome and its impact on those affected, including the protagonist, Adam. The narrative uncovers the espionage and political dynamics surrounding the events in Cuba. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to Havana Helmet Club. New episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early on BBC Sounds. Just to let you know, this episode contains strong language and may not be suitable for all audiences. What is it about trying to figure out a sound when you're alone in your bed? Noises multiply mysteriously, or lurk around corners. Can you even trust that you heard anything at all? Music U.S. State Department Building, Washington, D.C. August the 9th, 2017. Steve Dorsey from CBS News. Hi, Steve. Hi, just a quick change in topic. Can you tell us about the incidents that have been going on in Havana affecting U.S. government workers there? So we are certainly aware of what has happened there. It was the first summer of the first Trump administration. Reporters have been spending a lot of time in this stifling press room. Now something seems to be going on in Havana, Cuba. We take this very seriously. An NBC journalist asks, what is this? This incident, this incident, and that's what we're calling it. We don't know exactly what... It's 2015 and you don't know what this incident is? What this requires is providing medical examinations to these people. Initially when they started reporting what I will just call symptoms. Until that afternoon, it had been a closely held secret that in late 2016 in Cuba, American CIA agents and diplomats began to hear a sound they called the thing. When they heard the sound, they felt a strange pressure inside their heads. And then they started to get sick. The thing seemed to be attacking them. News reports sounded like science fiction. It was these aftermaths of headaches, of nausea, of dizziness, of hearing loss. They say this was brought on by blaring, grinding noises. It seems to have been inside or outside the homes, or if it was some sort of sound weapon fired from outside into inside. A recording of the otherworldly sound was posted on Twitter. At the time, we were on an all-consuming deadline for a podcast about an unsolved murder in West Cork, Ireland. But we were pulled in by this mystery sound. There was an audio graph visualizing the sound waves. I remember playing it over and over, gazing at the spikes, not really sure what I was meant to be looking for. The comments were full of jokes. Maybe it's an alien life form trying to communicate. A new piece by Yoko Ono. A ray gun. Only that last one wasn't a joke. A fabled weapon, dreamt of by the Americans and Russians for more than a century. Had someone finally figured out how to fire invisible bullets? A story took shape. A new weapon, deployed by an old enemy. And this thing that became known as Havana Syndrome spread around the world, infiltrating embassies on every continent, afflicting hundreds. American agents were falling over, blacking out, losing the ability to ever work again. Cases were identified in multiple other countries. Russia, Austria, Colombia, Serbia, India, Vietnam, the U.S. and the U.K. The problem was, no one could find the weapon. Doubt crept in. If you put a lot of pieces of evidence, it gives the appearance of a solid story. But once you start seeing if they do fit together, they don't. Most of these guys are intelligence operatives in Cuba. Intelligence people engage in mendacity all the time. Just read any John Leclerc novel and you'll see. So we're going to believe those guys? Come on. That was Patient Zero. Hey. Hey, man. How are you? Patient Zero. He's a British-American, former CIA agent. We met through a source on an encrypted messaging app called RICA. To prove his identity, he sent a photo of himself standing with Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA at the time. Pompeo is presenting him with the Exceptional Service Medallion in recognition of what happened to him in Cuba. It's like the CIA version of a Purple Heart. They give it to agents who are injured in the field. The CIA once treated him like a hero. Since then, things have become a lot more complicated. Today, he's at the center of a contested reality. To fellow sufferers, he's a whistleblower, refusing to allow his government to sweep an ongoing national security threat under the rug. For the people who dismiss Havana Syndrome as a myth, this man is that myth's creator. He uses an alias, Adam, as in the first man. He was the first spy in Cuba to speak up, to come forward with this story of a mysterious energy, so far undetectable, somehow on the attack. Yeah, it's easy to get in your own head sometimes and think that maybe this isn't real. Maybe they're right. Maybe it's just like, maybe I am crazy. But that's gaslighting. They've done that to us for years. From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club. I'm Sam Bungay. I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is Episode 1, Psychological Fortitude. Psychological Fortitude When Adam first heard the thing, he was alone in his apartment, three miles back from the glorious Havana seafront. The Cubans control what houses the US Embassy can rent, so they control the entire environment. Adam's place was in a modest neighborhood of whitewashed apartment buildings. This was his first posting as a field agent, and he was the new kid on the block. I wasn't in one of the Cuban mansions, unfortunately. I wish I was. Some of my colleagues got that. I got the short end of the stick, and so I got this little crap hole. It didn't matter. It did what I needed it to do. It was Christmas 2016, and most of the staff at the Embassy had gone home to spend it with family in America. On the evening of December 29th, Adam was on his bed watching a sitcom on his laptop. That's when he first got the notion that something was wrong. All the dogs started barking at once, and then a loud sound kind of just came into the room. It just really filled the room. It felt like my head was in a vise, and someone was just like turning it. Excruciating ear pain. Just jarring, disorienting pain. Adam got out his phone and started texting his brother back home in the US. My head feels like it's going to explode. My head is fucking spinning. And then it just ramped up to a level where I started blacking out. Then that tunnel started kicking in, and I realised that if I went out, I guess I didn't know if I would come back from it. He rolled off the side of his bed and let himself drop to the floor. He wanted to get out of his bedroom. Something was present fully in that room, but was only in that room. He managed to make his way downstairs and spent the night on the sofa. And was in quite a lot of pain. I didn't really sleep that night. Can't tell you how happy I was to see the sun coming up. That morning, Adam headed straight to the US Embassy to get a medical check-up. I want to rule out natural occurrences. And he's like, well, you didn't have a stroke. What's going on? And I explain to him the sound and how it's uncomfortable and the pain. And he goes, well, that happened to me about a month ago. And I go, shit, OK. Well, I feel a little less crazy. You know, no-one wants to come forward with a story like this. You know, what happened? And he tells me his whole story. The doctor himself? Yeah, yeah. I don't want to say his name, but he was the embassy medical officer. What did he say had happened to him compared to what happened to you? So with him, he'd been home with his girlfriend at the time. They'd been watching TV downstairs and a very loud sound filled up the living room and it was very uncomfortable. He went outside and looked around and that seemed to have stopped at that point. But he hadn't really thought anything more of that because it wasn't necessarily painful for him. It was more uncomfortable and loud. And so I asked his permission. I'm like, well, can I go and tell your story to the RSO, the regional security officer who's in charge of security for American diplomats? He goes, sure, that's fine. So I went upstairs to see him and as it progressed, the story, to see him kind of having this little realisation happen in his face, he goes, that happened to me. My wife is very sensitive to noise and she was screaming on the other side of the house and whatever was going on. And I go, well, I think we've got a problem now. We reached out to both officials for their stories. The RSO didn't want to talk. The medical officer we didn't hear back from. But Adam's saying there were now three people in the embassy sharing experiences of the same mysterious sound. The others may have had little choice but to shrug it off as a curiosity. But as a trained spy in Cuba, Adam navigated a different realm and he was already connecting dots. From an intelligence standpoint, the Cubans are pound for pound probably one of the best services in the world. Russia is the drunk frat boy. You know, they kick your door and punch you in the face. China will pick your pocket and then steal your social security number and run up credit card debt. The Cubans do both and then make you think that it never happened. What does a poor Caribbean island nation want with such a world-class spy operation? Well, it has a lot to do with the fact that America has been obsessed with trying to defeat its red neighbour. Ever since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, America shut Cuba out of the global economy and secretly used the CIA to try to overthrow the government, dreaming up literally hundreds of plots to kill Castro. Even JFK conceded it made America look, quote, slightly demented. Yet somehow the regime Castro set up is still there, an itch that America just can't scratch. Cuba's own intelligence service confused and countered CIA infiltration by learning from the best, the KGB. According to one senior defector, Soviet intelligence had a particular MO. They wanted to change the way Americans perceive reality. We were there from 1988 to 1990. We discovered that the Cubans had an amazing double agent program. They would throw their officers at us and allow their officers to be recruited. So there was a huge expose right before we moved to Cuba because most of the agents that the agency had were double agents. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the world moved on. But Cuba and America did not move on. They were frozen in time, the Cold War mindset baked into the relationship. Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst, Everybody who's chosen for a post like Havana, whether you're State Department, CIA, or anything else, you should be vetted for your psychological fortitude and your ability to rise above things and not overreact. and not see shadows that aren't there. Adam can't tell us much about his recruitment or training. But the CIA must have seen qualities in him that showed he was cut out for the job. He's medically retired now on account of whatever happened to him in Cuba. It is not a prophecy in the U.S. It is on a prophecy in the U.S. where he built a home shooting range. This is the sound of Adam doing target practice. He sent me the video not long ago. He's wearing ear defenders and emptying a clip from a large pistol, dinging the little steel targets with every bullet. The CIA could train you to use lethal force like this. But what they can't teach, and what they apparently saw in Adam, is a willingness to use it. In order for my job, you get way more additional psych screening to make sure you can handle what the Cuban government is about to throw at you. There's a profile they have found that works psychologically for certain roles, especially for my role. I think they want people right on the line of sociopathic or the ability to get to that line if they need to. This is probably why I was cut out for my job and why I got hired, frankly. But you're dealing with life and death and you need to be able to make pretty cold, calculated decisions when it comes down to it. You can't be emotional or get all upset. There are mind games that go on. You need to understand that mind games happen. That's Fulton Armstrong again. He was posted to Cuba back during the Clinton administration. I had headlights smashed on my car and two flat tires at a time, numerous times, and yelling at me and my daughter and my wife when we're taking Sunday afternoon walks. Yelling? Yeah, yeah. What would they yell? Threats. They would drive by and wave their fists like this. Harassment happened. And inappropriate stuff, undiplomatic stuff. And we did stuff to them up here. He means to his opposite numbers in Washington. We would do fun things like a Cuban diplomat would go into a store and somebody would come up and accuse them of shoplifting just for harassment. They would have to explain themselves and be embarrassed in front of other people and get hustled around and things like that. That's part of life. Obviously part of life if you happen to be a spy. But life is a long way from where Adam had been just three years earlier, working as a cop in an American seaside town. When Adam first agreed to meet, I pictured some furtive encounter in a crowded public place. Instead he invited me to his parents' house in the north of England where Adam was born. Oh, you all right? We can close that door if you want. Sure, OK. Great. I don't think I really imagined secret agents even having a life before they became spies. Yet here I was in Adam's parents' living room looking at his family photographs. Yeah, it was really a bit hot. Well, there you are with your own cruiser and everything. In the photograph, Adam looks tall and stocky with a boyish, open face. Adam's family moved to the US for work when he was still a kid. He went through American high school and then took a job in the summers with the hometown police force. There was no dramatic tap on the shoulder from a CIA recruiter. Adam was just in his mid-20s and restless. PD was great and I loved it to death, but my goal was to find my limits. It's always been to find my limits. That's why I've done everything I've ever done. He started carpet bombing law enforcement agencies with his resume. I was looking for a different job and this one called and I was like, well, that'll be different. Adam got called for an interview with the CIA in Boston. He'd felt like the odd one out among the new prospects, like the only one who hadn't come from an elite college or a high-end law firm. There weren't many people that were like me, kind of more blue-collar-y. But he says he impressed his assessors, After I got hired, you can meet with the docs and basically go through your hiring packet or all your testing and shit. Adam says he did well on his skills tests. In particular, he was off the charts for spatial reasoning, which apparently can mean you're gifted at anything from map reading to efficiently packing a suitcase. If you're in the CIA, it helps you figure your way out of tight spots. Adam's mum confirmed this is something he's pretty good at. He's the one that keeps life entertaining all the time. Oh, yeah, even before this? Oh, yeah. We won't go into all that. What? What do you mean? After his entrance test, you know, you're climbing the pole. Back when he was in the small-town police force, Adam had found an outlet in overseas travel. He saved up to go on long trips during the winter months and kept searching for more extreme experiences. He persevered through bouts of dysentery in Hungary and India, a case of pulmonary edema while mountain climbing in the Himalayas. Not very good. Yeah. He had a decompression chain, which is a little bit of an issue. It's a long story. Like the guy, the dive went wrong. He got washed out to sea, flushed off into shipping lanes. These experiences find me, or I find them. Always. Always. It doesn't seem like a pattern, but when you put it all in one go, it does, I guess. Adam didn't tell his parents he joined the CIA. Not straight away. Then, shortly before his due to head off to a secret camp for training, he broke the news over Thanksgiving. His mum was not thrilled. I said, oh, I'm not so happy about that, you know. Yeah, you weren't very thrilled. No. Why weren't you happy about it when you heard what he was up to? I suppose you're always looking out for your child, aren't you? Obviously, you're worried. You know, it's not a straight job where you go nine to five, you go home and you're done. A lot can happen in between times. From a parental point of view, that was my anxiety. Not that I didn't think he was capable of doing it, because from the olive extracts previously, it always came back amazing, the smelling of roses. Adam says his appetite for extreme experiences was another thing that made him stand out to the CIA. What I think they liked about me was I was willing to go anywhere in the world by myself, and I did it for fun. It was just one less thing they had to worry about with me. They knew that I would be fine wherever they dropped me off. It was just to pick a place. It was my husband's favourite assignment and one of the worst for me. Suzanne Matthews worked for the CIA in Cuba under diplomatic cover alongside her husband, Jason Matthews, who later became a writer of popular spy thrillers like Red Sparrow. They were posted there together in the 80s as what the agency calls a tandem couple. I mean, it takes a special type of person. Everybody wanted one of these assignments. In a place like Havana, there's no such thing as not work. You know, you're on all the time because you're being followed all the time. We had constant harassing surveillance. Suzanne says they might return home to find their dog had been put in a closet or come down in the morning to find a cigarette butt in the ashtray in their living room. And that sends a message, you know, that we own you. You know, this is our house, not your house. Any socialising happened in designated spaces with other spies and diplomats in the tropical heat and mostly in tennis whites. Canadians had a tennis court, so we played a lot of tennis there with the Brits and the Canadians. And then there was this Diplo club outside of Havana with some clay courts and a swimming pool. You know, your world is compacted. Suzanne says you could always spot surveillance at the Diplo clubs. They even followed them to a getaway at a Cuban beach resort. On that trip, they pranked her husband by approaching him about joining their side. We think it was more just harassment. They just wanted to ruin our vacation. These attempts at normal life could be punctured any time, sometimes by events they couldn't explain. We did have some weird experiences in Cuba. It was the weirdest thing. We had a party, and someone picked up a glass to drink out of it, and it just exploded in their hand. Wow. What did you make of that? Well, we didn't know. We thought, OK, so maybe it's cheap glass. So was it the reaction between the ice and the glass and the heat? Well, it was never that hot. But like exploded, not cracked. No, no, it just exploded. Just this weird exploding glass. There are lots of strange stories on the Internet about exploding glasses. It even happened once to our editor in his house in Shepherds Bush. Something that may strike you as odd at home can suggest something much more perilous on hostile ground. For a CIA agent in Havana, it was as if the Cubans might be responsible for anything. And it simply added to that disorientating sense of what lay beyond the confines of the Diplo Club or the embassy or the ambassador's residence, a world that was uncontrollable, uncanny, malevolent. It's hard not to imagine feeling very unsettled by that. Did you ever wonder if you were cut out for it? Always, yes. Always. You know, because the stress is enormous and you have to be able to deal with that stress. There were people who'd freak out and, you know, there's no reason to freak out. That's Michael Parmeny, who headed up a slimmed-down US presence in Cuba during the mid-2000s. I mean, at the end of the day, when your tour of duty is going to end, you'll leave. Then you can tell your grandchildren all sorts of stories about the kinds of experiences you had. But in the meantime, that's your job. But his wife, Marie-Catherine, who was in Havana with him, says the eavesdropping could place a burden on relationships. He couldn't even have an argument in private. You know, in a couple, a normal couple, you have more than one every six months. They would put... things are put strategically. You know, it's inhibiting to have that under your bed. Did you find stuff? We never looked. Don't go looking. And as Michael says, don't replace it, then the next time you won't know where it is. I used to say that the only place that I could have above-board conversation was in the surf, at the beach, you know, away from the shoreline. In the sea. In the sea. Because you knew that they were listening. He said the part of a job as head of the embassy involved overseeing the well-being of his staff, keeping an eye out for anyone not coping so well. Like the time someone came to him convinced that their dog had been deliberately poisoned. The person had that reaction to their environment, and you ought to respect that. And we talked about it, and he came to the conclusion that it might have been an accident, or maybe the dog was just getting old. It wasn't necessarily that the neighbours poisoned it. And was that your conclusion? I didn't know. But I wasn't going to jump to the suddenly paranoid conclusion. Paranoia is not a good thing, and it was understandable that people could become paranoid. It's not as though danger wasn't out there. Even paranoid people have enemies. The harassment was immediate. In the little over two months that Adam had been in Havana, there'd been lots of incidents, like the run-in he had on his way into work. You know, they ran me off the road. This is a busy main thoroughfare going into Havana, onto the Malecon, and it was completely dead that day. Which I was driving down that road going, this is really odd, there's usually lots of cars on this road. Side swipe off the road. Blew up both wheels. And you're like, OK, that makes sense. Got it. So you think they kind of shut down the road in order to do this thing to you? Yeah. But you were so wrong. Could have been an accident. And you can't prove it. So it's just a data point. Another time he found the internet cables had been cut outside his apartment. And one evening he came home had been pulled out of the drawers, scrunched up in the corner of his bedroom and covered in urine. There are other stories. A diplomat who found his mouthwash had been replaced with urine. A colleague who told Adam she had found a scorpion salivate to her pyjamas. You wonder what the point of all this was. Maybe the idea was just to put the CIA agents off their game, to unnerve them, make them less effective in whatever they were there to do by keeping them on edge. Adam records his experiences with a wry amusement. He believes he was particularly suited to dealing with the kind of surveillance and harassment that had rattled former agents like Suzanne Matthews. He seemed to think of it as something like the good-natured hazing rituals for a club that he was excited to be accepted into. It was... I don't know. I don't know how to describe it because it's a bit of a twisted mentality for most people to understand that it was fun. He says there was a man who would sit at the end of the street all night in a plastic chair monitoring Adam and the other Americans in the neighbourhood. Adam made a habit of putting his bins out in the early hours just to startle the guy. You've got to have some fun with it, man. They're fucking with you. You've got to fuck back a little bit. It's no wonder they came after you. They did. That morning after he first heard the sound invade his bedroom, Adam had wanted to get checked over by the medical officer. He hadn't had much of a plan beyond that. But then the embassy's medical officer and the security officer both reported hearing sounds themselves. I go, well, I think we have to meet with the ambassador and tell him what's going on. It appeared to me something had happened. Somebody was doing something and we needed to get to the bottom of it. This is Jeff De Laurentiis, the former US ambassador to Cuba. What would your instinct be to do? Is it something that you investigate further? Do you feel like you need to tell Washington quickly? Both. We immediately informed Washington and immediately tried to figure out what was happening. And how do you figure out what's happening? That I'm not going to talk about. De Laurentiis has been fairly tight-lipped about the meeting with Adam in his office that morning. He's a seasoned diplomat who had been posted to Cuba several times before. He was a heavyweight. And that was precisely why President Obama himself had wanted him in the job. I had already been an ambassador at the UN and I think part of the reason someone like myself was sent down apart maybe from the Cuban experience was that they also wanted to send a signal that we were sending someone at a higher level, I guess, in the hopes that the relationship would begin to change. It was a period after Castro's revolution where the US had no presence at all in Cuba. A huge waterfront modernist American embassy building opened right before Castro seized power stood empty, a seven-story reminder of the failed relationship. Over the years, public figures in many strikes have tried to make a difference, but the territory was politically treacherous. Cuba was not a place to touch. It had burned many a career because it was very controversial. The relationship was controversial. It had a very strong domestic element to it. By domestic, he means in the US, where anti-Castro Cuban exiles pressure Washington to remain hostile towards Castro, hoping to one day take their country back. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter made some progress with Cuba and a small number of American diplomats began to rattle around an embassy building that wasn't formally an embassy. Then there was a change of administration and everything halted and so those who were at the point of the spear of pushing for that particular opening found themselves in a difficult situation and that cycle repeated itself. Sorrentos had been hired to help manage the most significant progress in relations since Castro's revolution in 1959, but what he was hearing from Adam and the RSO in his office on the seventh floor of the embassy building sounded concerning. And he said to me, he goes, if it happens again, come to my house. You know, come to the residence and I'll send a message to them that we know what's going on, we're not playing. So I go, OK. Adam drafted a report for De Laurentiis to send back to the State Department in Washington and wrote a cable to his own higher-ups at the CIA. I wasn't asking them to do anything. I wasn't asking for help, I wasn't asking for anything at the time. I was just going, these are the facts of what happened. Be aware. We'll keep you updated, sort of thing. And then it was the holiday weekend. Were you thinking, let's see if this happens again? No, I thought it was done. I thought it was... In my mind, it was a won and done sort of thing. I was like, all right, well, that's it, you know. I didn't think that it would possibly happen again, but it did. I was on my computer watching TV just like I had the night before, same time, same routine. The first time he'd heard the noise, Adam lay in his bed putting up with the sound for as long as he could. He didn't want whoever was doing this to know it was getting to him. The whole Cuban MO is to find what gets under your skin and keep doing it for the duration of your tour. But now Adam dropped the act. That was the time when I go, well, you know, time to go and figure it out. This is when Adam began making recordings. I went outside almost immediately after hearing it. So you're moving... I'm moving around my house and my backyard. It's a typical Saturday evening in Havana. Dogs barking, neighbours chatting, an American CIA field agent groping in the bushes with a recording device. I caught it tonight, motherfuckers. Staggering around to the outside of his bedroom window, he registered a spike in the sound. It seemed as if the sound was being directed there at his bedroom. It wasn't lost on me that those sounds and shit and feelings would stop quite quickly after you go out there with your phone to record it. For now, Adam didn't want to bother the ambassador again. But he knew he didn't want to stay in his apartment. So he crashed at a friend's house nearby and returned in the morning to investigate. When he spoke with the guy in the apartment above him, a US embassy worker who'd been at home at the time of the attacks, that guy remembered hearing all those dogs that all started barking at once. But as for any mysterious ear-splitting drone, he hadn't heard a thing. Yet any time Adam went back into his bedroom to grab some clothes, the dogs would bark and then the sound and strange pressure would start up again. Adam rode his bicycle around the neighbourhood, looking for what exactly he didn't know. But he expected to find some kind of smoking gun, a dodgy-looking van with blacked-out windows, radar equipment hidden under a tarpaulin. But things looked normal. There were some people out and about, but there was nothing that I would pinpoint as anomalous, so I was a bit aggravated by that. Then again, since Adam was living in a fishbowl, there was only so much snooping around that he could get away with. I tried to break into the house behind me, but people were watching, and I just didn't want to get arrested by the Cuban police. I thought it was a bad idea. Meanwhile, Ambassador De Laurentiis was trying to work out what the official next step should be. I don't know whether you've experienced anything like this in previous posts. No. I should say I don't think anybody has, because it's a very unusual situation. We're not talking about petty harassment. This is something different. Escalation. Yeah, sure. Previously, harassment in Cuba took the form of psychological trickery. This was something quite different. These people weren't letting air out of tires or leaving cigarettes in ashtrays. The concern was that they were targeting Americans using a state-of-the-art weapon. There is sort of a code of conduct for intelligence officers worldwide. We know, you know, it's the great game. This is former CIA agent Suzanne Matthews again. It's like playing chess. There's nothing physical about it. There's nothing violent about it. You know, there is a respect, and there is a line that you don't cross. Adam ran things down as far as he could. Then he shook it off. He tried to get back into the mindset of the guy who loved being a young CIA agent in Havana. I was doing my job, and I was getting a lot of praise. He was so busy that when he began, about a fortnight later, to display weird symptoms, at first he didn't even notice. Adam says in Havana, feeling a little off was normal. When you're in Havana, like, everyone gets sick all the time. It's an embassy thing. Oftentimes it's a small space for a lot of people. It's almost like a daycare with kids. People are always fighting off illness and sickness. You just call it Havana. Like, oh, it's Havana. Anything strange that happens, anything weird illness you get, any oddity, you're like, oh, it's just Cuba. Like, that's just what everyone did. But what was happening to him was increasingly hard to shake off. By mid-January, he was feeling woozy and generally off his game at work. Adam says he would be hit by waves of exhaustion. Having a meal with friends, he'd fall asleep at the table. I knew that my writing and everything became incoherent. I was forgetting things, and I couldn't function correctly. He developed disturbing problems with his balance. When I would enter a room with different lighting that was dimmer, I couldn't stay standing. I would get these massive, like, vertigo, spin, drop, beat to the floor, violent, violent events. He'd felt safer crashing at his friend's house, but then whatever he believed had been targeting him seemed to find him there. Not the sound this time, but those same feelings of pressure. They felt very similar, and I'd wake up with pools of blood on the pillow from coming out of my nose, like massively amounts of blood. Adam started playing the last few weeks over in his mind conversations he'd had with colleagues. At a party one evening, he'd run into that medical officer and the security official from the embassy. He played them his recordings and says they agreed it sounded very similar to what they had heard in their own homes. Adam realized he hadn't been right for weeks, not since that very first night. With the recordings of the sound on his phone, he felt like he had all the proof that he needed. He texted his brother with his theory of what was being fired at him. This was some kind of ultrasonic noisemaker. One of those things that can make you puke and your head cave in. You know, the Navy has those on ships. They said, but selectively shot through windows. Oh, yes. He said if this was brought to light, it would make a sound. Adam knew the stakes of making such a claim. If he called this out, he risked upending something historic. For the first time since the 1960s, America and Cuba were speaking again. And right now, on the surface, they were practically the best of friends. There was a great diplomatic party going on. And here was Adam, the new guy, about to switch on the lights and cut the music and tell everyone that the hosts had spiked the punch with poison. Next time on Havana Helmet Club. President Eisenhower said, that's enough, we're leaving. There were people in the administration who would have tried to sabotage negotiations. I used to send messages, not signed by anybody, but this is for Obama, this is for Castro. There was a sense that the clock was ticking. There were forces within the Cuban government having second thoughts about a rapprochement with the United States. There's a CIA agent in Cuba. It's a provocation, right? You have to understand, if you're the only one without putting your intelligence officers in other countries, then you're the only stupid one on the block. From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club. Listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sound. If you want to be notified when the latest episode drops, make sure you're subscribed to Havana Helmet Club on BBC Sound and have push notifications turned on. Havana Helmet Club is written and presented by Sam Bungley and Jennifer Ford and edited by Guy Crossman. Our story editor is Mike Olliv and our producer is Larry Rine. Original music by Tom Pinton. Sound design by Merrin Royards. Additional sound design and mix by Peregrine Andrews. Commissioning editor for the BBC is Dylan Haskins, assistant commissioning editor for Sarah Green and Natasha Johansson. Havana Helmet Club is yarn production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sound. In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers. Men and women accused of passing information to the police and the British Army. But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA was himself an informer, a secret British Army agent with the codename Steak Knife. These were British agents, but not the final irisids. Just how was one man allowed to lead a double life for so long? It's not like James Bond. It's not a black and white situation. When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm not the IRA. Steak Knife. Listen there on BBC Sounds.