Havana Syndrome Weapon: US Secretly Acquired Russian Microwave Device Causing Brain Injuries, 60 Minutes

A weapon that can silently fry your brain through a wall. It sounds like fiction. It's not.

The US government secretly bought a portable microwave device from a Russian criminal network in 2024, and the Pentagon has spent over a year testing it on animals at a military facility, according to a 60 Minutes investigation that aired on 8 March.

The injuries in those animals match what more than 1,500 American officials have reported since 2016: debilitating headaches, vertigo, memory loss, and cognitive damage.

The condition is called Havana Syndrome. And the weapon that may cause it is now in US hands.

What the Device Can Do

Three independent sources from different government agencies described the weapon to 60 Minutes. It doesn't look like a gun. It's small enough for one person to carry, silent, and programmable for different scenarios. It can be operated by remote control.

The range? Several hundred feet. It can penetrate windows and drywall.

Department of Homeland Security undercover agents purchased the device for approximately $15 million (£11.28 million), funded by the Pentagon. The vital components were made in Russia.

For years, the CIA insisted a microwave weapon capable of causing these injuries would need to be the size of a truck. That argument just collapsed.

The Cover-Up Allegations

A former CIA officer who worked on the agency's Havana Syndrome investigation told 60 Minutes the unit's mission from day one was to 'bring down the temperature' by steering conclusions toward environmental causes. He quit in 2022.

'This is a massive CIA cover-up,' said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer who was disabled after an incident in a Moscow hotel in 2017. Another senior intelligence official called it 'the biggest cover-up I've seen in my adult life.'

The former officer recalled senior staff mocking victims by pretending to have strokes at happy hours. 'It was apparent to me that they did not take this issue seriously,' he said.

The House Intelligence Committee backed these claims in a 2024 report, stating that the intelligence community's 2023 assessment 'lacked analytic integrity.' According to CBS, committee members accused officials of 'stonewalling, slow-walking, and cherry-picking of information.'

Attacks on US Soil

Here's what makes this personal for Americans: these incidents didn't just happen overseas.

Sources told 60 Minutes that attacks were reported at CIA headquarters in Virginia and at least twice on the grounds of the White House. Victims include White House staff, CIA officers, FBI agents, military officers, and their families.

Dr. David Relman, a Stanford University professor who led two government investigations into Havana Syndrome, told 60 Minutes that his panels concluded 'the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy.'

Russian scientists, he added, had been perfecting pulsed microwave weapons for decades. The key isn't the hardware. It's the software that shapes electromagnetic waves to pulse rapidly, mimicking and disrupting normal brain activity.

'Ideal, because literally the person feels as if this is in my head,' Relman said.

What Happens Now

The sources who spoke to 60 Minutes raised a disturbing point. If undercover agents could buy this weapon from gangsters, the Russians would have lost control of it. These devices could be anywhere. Used by anyone.

'The CIA always claimed that none of this technology even existed,' Polymeropoulos said. 'Their entire analytic assumptions are now blown up.'

The Biden White House reportedly wrote a public statement backing victims but never released it. The Trump administration hasn't changed the official 2023 assessment that attacks by a foreign adversary are 'very unlikely'. But sources say officials have briefed Congress and shown them a classified photo of the weapon.

A weapon that sounds like fiction. Over 1,500 victims who say it's real. And a government that, for nearly a decade, looked the other way.

That's not fiction either.