This week, 60 Minutes reported on the Havana Syndrome, the mysterious constellation of injuries – like cognitive difficulties, vision impairment, and issues with balance – that have befallen high-ranking officials in the United States government while they were serving in the U.S. and abroad.
For nine years, producers Oriana Zill de Granados and Michael Rey reported with correspondent Scott Pelley on what victims described as an invisible force that suddenly overwhelms their senses, causing headaches, nausea and vomiting in some cases, while they are in their homes, walking to their cars, or asleep in their beds.
Some victims believed they were attacked with an energy weapon, and were targeted because of their job within the U.S. government.
“When we first heard all of these stories, it sounded odd and hard to believe… that some invisible ray gun was hitting these people and hurting them,” Zill de Granados told Overtime.
But this week, 60 Minutes reported the U.S. government acquired a directed energy weapon from a Russian criminal network, and is believed to be testing it on animals.
“We now believe there are directed-energy weapons that can do this, and we believe that in a subset of the large body of cases, that’s what happened, ” Zill de Granados said.
60 Minutes Overtime spoke with Zill de Granados and Rey about their Havana Syndrome investigation, which found links between Havana Syndrome incidents and Russian intelligence, and over 65 victims who believe they were targeted by a directed energy weapon.
Targeting Americans (March 17, 2019)
In 2019, Pelley first reported on American officials who were stationed in China who said they were struck by an invisible force in their homes.
Zill de Granados and Rey interviewed Mark Lenzi, a State Department security officer who worked in the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China. Lenzi said he and his wife began to suffer symptoms after hearing bizarre sounds in their apartment in 2017.
Lenzi described the sound as a “marble” circling down a “metal funnel.” He said he heard the sound four times, always in the same spot and at the same time: right above his son’s crib when he put him to bed at night. Lenzi said the sound was like nothing he’d ever heard before and “fairly loud.”
Shortly after hearing the sounds, he, his wife and his children began to feel ill. Eventually, he found out his neighbor, Catherine Werner, had experienced a similar, strange phenomenon.
Werner, a U.S. Commerce Department trade officer, told 60 Minutes she woke up one night to “intense pressure” on her temples and a “low, humming sound.” She later experienced symptoms like vomiting and nosebleeds.
“And both of them, his family and the neighbor, their health was going downhill rapidly. They were developing cognitive issues, vision, hearing, headaches, all sorts of problems,” Zill de Granados explained.
Rey told Overtime that Lenzi is struggling and still needs treatment for his injuries: “He’s battling these long-term cognitive issues, balance issues, issues with his vision and his hearing.”
Lenzi told Pelley he believed he was targeted because of his work using top-secret equipment to analyze electronic threats to diplomatic missions. “This was a directed standoff attack against my apartment…it was a weapon,” he said.
The 60 Minutes team found another family who also heard strange noises in their apartment in Shanghai, China.
Robyn Garfield, a Commerce Department official, and his wife, Britta Garfield, said they heard strange sounds in the night. This was followed by symptoms of memory loss, impaired vision, and difficulty with balance, for both them and their two children.
“We went on a walk and [my daughter] just fell on her face. It was very abnormal. She never does that. And then a second time she completely lost her balance and just fell to the side,” she told Pelley in an interview.
Targeting Americans (February 20, 2022)
In 2022, the 60 Minutes team reported on domestic incidents that involved high-level government officials working in Washington, D.C.
Olivia Troye, a former homeland security and counterterrorism advisor to then-Vice President Mike Pence, told Pelley in an interview that she was struck by a physical sensation as she descended stairs toward the White House from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in 2019.
“It was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head… I got like, vertigo. I was unsteady, I was, I felt nauseous,” she told Pelley in an interview.
Troye said she was struck by a “similar sensation” when she was walking out to the staff parking lot in the Ellipse, south of the White House.
“It was very much the feeling of vertigo and dizziness. And I felt like I couldn’t really walk… it was like I had a depth perception issue where I couldn’t figure out where the ground was,” Troye explained. “I felt like I was just going to fall right into the ground.”
Pelley also interviewed former CIA Director William Burns for the 2022 story.
“[Burns] followed along with what the agency had been saying… they still found it unlikely that there was a foreign adversary behind these incidents,” Rey said.
Pelley asked the former CIA director: “You understand how frustrating your comments must be to some of these people who believe they know exactly what happened to them, on what day and at what time, and what happened to their children? And yet, the director of the CIA is saying: ‘We can’t connect the dots. We don’t know enough yet?'”
“We’re not at a position yet where we can offer hard evidence that would connect all those dots,” Burns responded.
60 Minutes Overtime examined the case of two Canadian diplomats who were also interviewed for “Targeting Americans.” They said they were attacked in their homes while they were stationed in Havana, Cuba, and their children suffered from symptoms like nosebleeds, fainting, vision problems, and dizziness afterward.
Targeting Americans (March 31, 2024)
In 2024, the third installment of “Targeting Americans” brought a major development to the story with the help of investigative journalist, Christo Grozev.
Grozev famously identified the men behind the August 2020 poisoning of the late Russian dissident Alexey Navalny. He also identified other men who attempted to poison Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, who later became a double agent for the United Kingdom, and his daughter Yulia.
In 2018, Grozev was the first to identify the existence of a top-secret Russian intelligence unit, Unit 29155. He said this elite unit consists of assassins and saboteurs who use countersurveillance, explosives, poison, and technologically advanced equipment on their targets.
“This particular unit had been engaged with somewhere, somehow, empirical tests of a directed energy unit,” Grozev explained.
He tracked down an email, what he considers a receipt, for services provided to the Russian government by a member of Unit 29155 for “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
“There it is… written down in black and white,” Pelley said, looking at the document.
“It’s the closest to a receipt you can have for this,” Grozev replied.
“As we built a database of victims, we started to see… most of these people worked on issues related to Russia in their jobs,” Rey told Overtime.
The team spoke to Greg Edgreen, who ran the investigation into the Anomalous Health incidents for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who also noticed the connection.
“One of the things I started to notice was the caliber of our officer that was being impacted,” he told Pelley in an interview. “This was happening to our top 5, 10 percent performing officers across the Defense Intelligence Agency. And consistently, there was a Russia nexus.”
Targeting Americans (March 8, 2026)
For their report this week, the 60 Minutes team met Chris and Heidi, who asked that their last names not be used. Chris retired as a lieutenant colonel working on highly classified spy satellites. He told Pelley that near Washington, D.C. he was struck by an unseen force five times in five months.
“The fifth one was by far the worst,” Chris told Pelley. “I woke up with a full-body convulsion, the worst pain I have ever felt. It felt like a vice gripping my brainstem.”
His wife Heidi was in proximity for the last two attacks. She said she “woke up with immense joint pain everywhere” during one of the incidents. She later saw a doctor and found that bones in her shoulder were dissolving— called osteolysis. She had to have surgery.
Chris told 60 Minutes that he believes he and his wife were the victims of an attack by a foreign adversary while serving in the line of duty.
“I think it’s time we as a country come to grips with the fact that the game has changed. Our adversaries are now able to reach out and touch us here in the United States, specifically at our homes,” he said.
Dr. David Relman is a Stanford University professor of medicine asked by the government to lead two investigations. His panels included doctors, physicists, engineers and others and their reports in 2020 and 2022, proposed a theory of the incidents.
“That the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy,” he told Pellley.
Dr. Relman also said the investigations found one country had done a great deal of research on creating a unique pattern of microwaves that can damage the brain.
“We found the large majority of work to have been conducted in the former Soviet Union. And what they found was that effects could range from loss of consciousness to seizures to memory lapses, inability to concentrate, headaches, intense pressure, pain, disorientation, difficulty with balance, many of the things that we heard about from victims of Havana Syndrome,” he told Pelley.
Years after the panels had concluded, Relman suggested the injuries in the Havana Syndrome incidents could have been caused by such a weapon, but the idea was shelved by federal officials.
“Do you believe that your studies were downplayed by the U.S. government?” Pelley asked Relman.
“By parts of the U.S. government, absolutely,” Relman replied. “And not only downplayed but dismissed, in some cases, buried.”
Zill de Granados told Overtime about another key development in their reporting: “more than four sources have told us about a new weapon that’s been discovered by the U.S. government…this device uses the technology that Relman’s panels theorized could be used to inflict these same injuries.”
Confidential sources told the team that the U.S. acquired this weapon through a Russian criminal network and has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year. They also told 60 Minutes that tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans.
For this report, the Department of Defense declined to comment. The office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees 18 agencies including the CIA, said a new review of the Havana Syndrome incidents will be “comprehensive and complete” and “we remain committed to delivering the truth.”
Zill de Granados and Rey have written a book called “The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time,” which will be published by Penguin Random House this September, and is now available for presale.
“Our biggest hope with writing this book is that the 60 Minutes stories tell part of the story, but we wanted to tell the full story,” Zill de Granados said.
“And part of that story is looking into the cover-up, which we believe has taken place within the intelligence community,” Rey explained. “We’re trying to pull out more of the victims’ stories to give much more detail about how this happens, what happens, the impact on families [and] the impact on government.”
“We did it for the victims,” Zill de Granados explained, “because they deserve to have their true stories told.”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Nelson Ryland.
