Gabbard rescinds Biden-era intel assessments that were skeptical about ‘Havana Syndrome’

By Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — In what is expected to be among her final acts as the nation’s top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has rescinded a pair of Biden-era intelligence assessments that took a skeptical position on the existence of a mysterious ailment known as “Havana Syndrome” that has sickened spies, diplomats and other officials overseas.

The issue, which has long scrambled traditional political lines and caused deep divides within the intelligence community itself, has been a focus point for Gabbard and her allies on Capitol Hill.

In a memo to the entire intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the two assessments had selectively excluded relevant intelligence, suppressed alternative analysis, relied on an ethically flawed medical study and “limited intelligence collection to maintain an analytic line which relied on absence of evidence.”

But with Gabbard expected to leave office later this month, it’s not clear whether the rescission of the two assessments will spawn a new investigative effort to understand what the government officially terms “anomalous health incidents,” or AHI.

“This is huge news for the AHI victim community, analytic integrity, and for the American people,” Rep. Rick Crawford, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement about the recall. “These flawed, fraudulent, and manufactured Intelligence Community Assessments have caused significant harm to some of our nation’s bravest.”

On Thursday, President Donald Trump nominated Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, to replace Gabbard.

The mysterious illness first emerged in late 2016, when a cluster of US diplomats stationed in the Cuban capital of Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma, including vertigo and extreme headaches. In subsequent years, there have been cases reported around the world.

Since then, the intelligence community and the Defense Department have sought to understand if those officials were the victims of some kind of directed energy attack by a foreign government. Senior intelligence officials said publicly that there wasn’t enough evidence to support that conclusion while victims argued that the US government ignored important evidence that Russia was attacking American government officials.

Both of the assessments Gabbard is recalling underscored the thorny difficulty analysts seem to have faced in diagnosing what happened to these officers. One, from 2023, said that the intelligence community could not link any cases to a foreign adversary, ruling it unlikely that the unexplained illness was the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the US. In January 2025, the broader intelligence community assessed that it was very unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor — even as an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emphasized that analysts cannot “rule out” the possibility in some small number of cases.

That stance has long incensed victims, many of whom believe strongly that there is intelligence offering black-and-white evidence that Russia is behind their symptoms, some of which have been severe enough to force retirement.

Other intelligence officials have long emphasized the difficulty of determining after the fact whether the diverse set of symptoms experienced by sickened officers originated from a single cause.

Former President Joe Biden’s CIA director, Bill Burns, had initially entered the post believing that the intelligence community would come to find Russia was behind the incidents and launched a broad investigation. But as time went on and analysts continued to argue that there was no definitive evidence linking a nation-state to any of the reported cases, he gradually changed his view.

Complicating matters for victims and analysts is the fact that not all of those reporting AHIs have the same set of symptoms — and the vast majority of cases have been explained by other causes, officials have previously said. Another problem is that tests were done, in some cases, long after symptoms began, making it harder to understand what physically happened.

In 2022, an intelligence panel investigating the cause of AHIs said that some of the episodes could “plausibly” have been caused by “pulsed electromagnetic energy” emitted by an external source. And in the waning days of the Biden administration, the government spent more than $10 million to clandestinely purchase a device that produces pulsed radio waves and which some officials came to believe could be an example of the kind of technology behind some of the injuries. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components, CNN has previously reported.

But there has remained strong analytic disagreement over the origin of the injuries.

Intelligence and administration officials during the Biden administration were at pains to emphasize that even as they did not assess Russia was behind the injuries, they did not doubt that the injuries were real and deserving of government compensation — and that the issue remained, effectively, a mystery.

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