Havana Syndrome victims get $3m payout from US government

The US Department of Defence said it would continue to prioritise “the care of affected personnel” as it announced the compensation, paid out under the Havana Act which was signed into law in 2021.

There has been widespread speculation for many years over what – and who – is responsible for Havana Syndrome.

Some have claimed the illness is caused by microwaves, prompting further speculation that a foreign power may have used some kind of sonar weapon to attack US overseas staff and their dependants.

“My brain is broken,” former CIA analyst Erika Stith told CBS News in 2022, external.

“We got this as a result of serving our country. And we deserve to be taken care of,” she said.

Last year, most US intelligence agencies and departments surmised that it was “very unlikely” that a foreign actor used “a novel weapon or prototype device to harm” US personnel and their families.

Although, a small component of the US intelligence community did not completely dismiss the theory.

The report, by the National Intelligence Council, said none of the agencies or departments it spoke to “call[ed] into question the experiences or suffering” of US workers and their families.

The community believed that they “experienced genuine, sometimes painful and traumatic, physical symptoms and sensory phenomena and honestly and sincerely reported those events as possible anomalous health incidents”.