National Security Archive Posts Special Declassified Collection on Microwave Transmissions Aimed at U.S. Moscow Embassy, 1953-1979
Was the Moscow Signal a Historical Precedent for the "Havana Syndrome"?
Project BIZARRE: Pentagon Officials Conducted Radiation Tests on Monkeys, Planned Secret Human Experimentation
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and William Burr
For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Maclyn Musser, the State Department security technician who first identified the Moscow Signal in the early 1960s. (Source: History of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the United States Department of State)
Washington D.C., September 13, 2022 - On the 5th anniversary of the CIA’s September 13, 2017, decision to pull its agents out of Cuba, after several operatives were stricken with what has become known as the “Havana Syndrome,” the National Security Archive today posted the first of a declassified documentation series on the “Moscow Signals”—a decades-long chapter of the Cold War during which Soviet intelligence bathed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with microwave transmissions on a daily basis, and, in the late 1950s, penetrated the U.S ambassador’s residence with ionizing radiation. The records published by the Archive are among those being reviewed by a special, high-level panel tasked by the Biden administration to search for clues into the enduring mystery surrounding cognitive brain traumas experienced by several dozen U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel in Havana, and elsewhere, over the last five years.
The CIA announced in late August that it is compensating at least a dozen of its officers and operatives for syndrome-related injuries known as “Anomalous Health Incidents” (AHI).
The documents posted today record Project BIZARRE, the actual—and rather appropriate—codename for a program of radiation experiments conducted on monkeys to determine if the Moscow Signal was intended to degrade the abilities of U.S. personnel to function at the Embassy. Project BIZARRE was a highly classified component of Project PANDORA, a broader research effort undertaken by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that included evaluating blood samples of U.S. personnel posted in Moscow and surveying medical records of crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga to determine if exposure to radiation-emitting technology on board produced physiological effects.
“The Soviets have reported in the open literature that humans subjected to low-level (non-thermal) modulated microwave radiation, show adverse clinical and physiological effects,” ARPA official Richard Cesaro reported in a TOP SECRET, September 1967, update on Project BIZARRE. “The ARPA BIZARRE program will establish methods which should permit us to relate the behavior of sub-human primates to man under conditions of microwave exposure. This may require direct testing with humans under controlled conditions.”
Among the documents posted today is the original TOP SECRET “Justification Memorandum for Project Pandora,” written by Cesaro in October 1965, which stated that the White House had ordered a program of “intensive investigative research” “under the code name project ‘TUMS’’—Technical Unidentified Moscow Signal. The posting also includes a SECRET May 1965 memorandum by ARPA scientist Samuel Koslov which argued that “a program to specifically check the complex Moscow signal waveforms on higher primates should be carried out to supply some data base for possible use in a protest action” against the Kremlin. Titled “Biomedical Phenomena,” the memo was obtained by science historian Nicholas H. Steneck for his groundbreaking 1984 study, The Microwave Debate, but has never been published in full on the Internet before now.
Despite four years of efforts, the multi-million-dollar PANDORA-BIZARRE projects failed to prove the early hypothesis that the Russians deployed the microwave beams to degrade the mental and physical abilities of U.S. Embassy officers to perform their diplomatic and intelligence duties. An initial experiment of modulated microwave beams on a single monkey appeared to show an impact on its behavior. But the test was conducted using the CIA’s inaccurate readings that the power of the beams was .5 to one milliwatt—exceeding Soviet safety levels by a factor of 100. In reality, as the CIA correctly determined in 1967, the power density of the beams was "no greater than .05 mw/cm in the Moscow Signal," a level that was well below U.S. and Soviet safety levels, as ARPA official Cesaro advised in a TOP SECRET update on Project BIZARRE from September 1967. At the corrected levels, he reported, the “modulated microwave radiation did not cause the primate to degrade in conducting his work tasks.”
The findings, according to one CIA scientist working with ARPA, indicated that the beams were not dangerous to U.S. personnel at the Embassy. “I feel confident in stating,” as Joe Johnston reported in September 1967 on Project BIZARRE results, “that, at the power levels reported for TUMS, persons exposed are at no risk of injury.”
Another theory pursued by the U.S. intelligence community suggested that the signal served as a jamming device intended to disrupt U.S. espionage operations that were conducted out of a surveillance shed on the roof of the Embassy building. A third, and prevalent, theory is that Soviet intelligence agencies employed the Moscow Signal to activate, power and/or interpret eavesdropping devices in the walls of the Embassy building. “Defense feels we must bear in mind the possibility that some of the signals are [deleted] for the activation or interrogation of audio devices implanted in the Embassy,” stated a TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE White House memorandum for President Ford in February 1976, drawing on the Defense Department’s evaluation of the microwave beams. [Note: The memorandum to President Ford will be posted on September 15.]
Numerous such bugging devices were discovered in April 1964, hidden in the walls of at least eleven Embassy offices—including the office of the U.S. Defense Attaché. The realization that Soviet intelligence had penetrated the Embassy and compromised secret U.S. communications set in motion a series of countersurveillance measures and a major focus on the mysterious energy beam directed at the building. U.S. technicians first detected the energy rays in 1953, shortly after the Embassy opened, but only began to actively monitor the radiation rays in the early 1960s. A technician from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Maclyn Musser, identified them as microwave radiation and reported, in 1963, that the beam was 50 feet across. “More effort should be made to understand the purpose of the microwave signal directed at the Embassy, or failing in this, to stop it,” Jerome Wiesner, the former chairman of the White House Science Advisory Board advised in a SECRET June 1964 memo on “Bugging of U.S. Embassy, Moscow”—the first document posted today as part of the Moscow Signal collection. “It is hard to understand why we have been so unconcerned about it.”
As the declassified documents posted today record, in the mid-1960s, U.S. national security agencies initiated a series of programs, assessments and operations designed to address the microwave beams, codenamed “TUMS”—Technical Unidentified Moscow Signal. (In the mid-1970s, after a second signal was detected, the codename was upgraded to “MUTS”—Moscow Unidentified Technical Signals.) The Pentagon conducted the Project PANDORA and BIZARRE studies. Those included:
Project Big Boy: A set of medical evaluations of the personnel aboard the Navy’s aircraft carrier Saratoga. ARPA, according to one status report, would place “observers aboard the Saratoga to get base line [sic] readings on selected members of the crew.” The purpose of Project Big Boy was to evaluate physical and mental differences between distinct groups of crewmen: veteran members of the crew whose duties exposed them to microwaves generated by radar instrumentation; newer recruits with no history of previous exposure to microwaves; sailors who were detailed above deck; and others below deck. The study produced no discernible evidence of physiological and psychological differences between the test groups.
The Monkey Experiments: Between 1966 and 1969, ARPA teams conducted and contracted for a series of radiation experiments on chimps and rhesus monkeys, compiling data on behavior modification, heart rates, and tissue and blood analysis, among other physiological elements. (Initially codenamed PANDORA, after the first set of experiments, the primate tests were given their own specific codename—Project BIZARRE.) As members of the ARPA team disagreed on whether the tests had produced any conclusive evidence of radiation exposure on health and behavior, the experiments were sent for outside peer review. One review from the RAND Corporation concluded that “the data do not present any evidence of a behavioral change due to the presence of the special signal within the limits of any reasonable scientific criteria.” Another RAND Corp evaluation of a specific set of experiments noted that it had produced “no material…which is scientifically credible” of any impact. In addition, “animal care was not in accordance with good laboratory practice,” the RAND panel reported. “Examination of the data log indicated that of five monkeys’ deaths, three were certainly due to strangulation resulting from poor experimental design of the restraint system.”
Planning for Human Experimentation: Declassified summaries of the meetings of the PANDORA program’s Science Advisory Committee record preparations to go beyond primate experimentation and use unwitting human subjects who would not be aware of the nature of the radiation tests. Subjects for human testing of radiation impact would be secured from Fort Detrick and subjected to radiation exposure over a period of six months, according to the discussion at an April 1969 meeting. “Study should be double-blind with protection of eyes and gonads,” Committee members suggested. “Shielding of testicles is recommended.” Before any such experiments could be performed, however, the PANDORA/BIZARRE program was shut down in 1970.
The State Department also played a role in the TUMS inquiry, commissioning George Washington University’s Human Cytogenetics Research Laboratory to conduct a SECRET study, “Cytogenetic Evaluation of Mutagen Exposure.” The study gathered, coded and analyzed blood samples taken under false pretenses from U.S. personnel posted in Moscow. They were told that the State Department Medical Office was monitoring the spread of Russian viruses. Publicly, the research was given the innocuous title: “The Moscow Viral Study.”
Among other countersurveillance measures that remain highly classified, the CIA monitored the signal and, in 1965, sent a special technician to evaluate security at the Embassy. He recommended installing thin shields on the Embassy windows to block the radiation beams from entering the building—a recommendation that went unimplemented for more than a decade, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.
U.S. officials also undertook efforts to convince the Soviet leadership to shut off the signal. The first high-level effort took place at a June 1967 superpower summit held in Glassboro, N.J., between U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. At a side meeting, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko that “we were very much concerned at an electro-magnetic signal directed at our Chancery building in Moscow.” “We did not know the purpose of this activity,” Rusk said, according to a declassified memorandum of conversation, but the U.S. wanted “the matter to be investigated and the activity stopped.” In response, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin suggested that the U.S. was conducting “similar activity” against the Soviet Mission in New York and the Soviet Embassy in Washington. While expressing skepticism at the U.S. claims—which were, in fact, incorrect—that the radiation exceeded Soviet safety standards, Gromyko “indicated he would look into the matter.”
But the daily doses of radiation continued. By mid-1975, U.S. intelligence monitors detected additional, and stronger, signals aimed at the Embassy. Hundreds of diplomats, security and intelligence officers, and their families who lived in the residence section of the Consulate building, were unknowingly exposed to radiation for up to 19 hours a day.
The U.S. ambassador, Walter Stoessel, became the unsung hero of the Moscow Signal saga in the fall of 1975 when he forcefully pushed a reluctant Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to pressure the Kremlin to terminate the transmissions and to authorize a classified briefing for the Embassy staff—who had been kept in the dark about the existence of the Moscow Signal. A strictly confidential Embassy staff briefing was scheduled in early February 1976, cancelled, and then rescheduled and held. Sensitive information Stoessel shared with U.S. Embassy personnel immediately leaked to U.S. newspapers, setting off a major scandal in U.S.-Soviet relations.
The publicity surrounding the Moscow Signal generated congressional inquiries and hearings and renewed internal U.S. government efforts to halt the transmissions. The National Security Agency eventually sent one of its leading technical officers, Charles Gandy, to Moscow to assess Embassy security and to determine how the microwave beams were being used to intercept U.S. Embassy communications and identify U.S. spies in Russia. Gandy’s investigation became the focus of a recent book, The Spy in Moscow Station, by former NSA official Eric Haseltine.
But the intelligence operations and assessments produced by the NSA and CIA on the Moscow Signal remain TOP SECRET. “Information on nonbiological testing that followed the discovery of the Moscow signal is still classified,” Professor Steneck noted in his book, The Microwave Debate, which contained several detailed chapters on the microwave beams and the U.S. government response when it was published in 1984. After nearly four decades, almost none of the intelligence community’s records on the Moscow Signal have been released.
Pursuant to demands by Congress, however, the U.S. government did begin to declassify select parts of the history of U.S. efforts to understand and address the Moscow Signal. ARPA declassified some documentation for a 1979 investigation by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Other records were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Steneck while researching his book. In the mid-1980s, the Associated Press used the FOIA to obtain several thousand pages of records. An investigative reporter named Michael Drosnin also obtained numerous PANDORA documents under the FOIA but never published the information they contained. Some of the PANDORA documents were eventually posted on a Pentagon website and later used by former Foreign Policy executive editor Sharon Weinberger in her book, Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. The book was excerpted in an article for the Foreign Policy website, “The Secret History of Diplomats and Invisible Weapons,” that noted that the alleged use of a “sound weapon” against U.S. Embassy officials in Cuba “harks back to a Cold War medical mystery” in Russia. Former U.S. diplomats who were exposed to the Moscow Signal in the 1970s—especially those who believe their rare blood cancer illnesses derive from that exposure—have also written about the parallels with the "Havana Syndrome." “It is like ‘déjà vu’ all over again,” said retired diplomat James Schumacher, who was posted in Moscow over 40 years ago and wrote in an article for the American Foreign Service Association titled “Before Havana Syndrome, There Was Moscow Signal.”
The National Security Archive obtained the declassification of phone conversations between Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin relating to the Moscow Signal through the FOIA and has located dozens of reports on PANDORA/BIZARRE—along with diplomatic cables and reports relating to the diplomacy with the Kremlin to end the microwave beams—in the files of the National Archives and various presidential libraries. The Archive will continue to use the FOIA to uncover the full historical record on this episode, including the CIA assessments and the still secret records on how Washington and the Kremlin negotiated an end to the microwave transmissions.
Part II of the series, “The Moscow Signals Declassified: Microwave Diplomacy,” which records more than ten years of back channel diplomatic efforts to address the radiation beams aimed at the Embassy, will be posted on September 15, 2022. Part III, “Irradiating Richard Nixon,” which documents ionizing radiation detected during the Vice President's 1959 trip to Moscow, will be posted the week of September 19th. A supplementary, special collection of documentation on “Moscow Signals Declassified,” will also be posted the week of September 19.
Acknowledgements: The National Security Archive respectfully thanks Nicholas Steneck for his original, groundbreaking research on the Moscow Signal, and for his support and encouragement on this project; and also Louis Slesin for his assistance. Thanks also to Jacqueline Schluger, George Washington University, for research assistance on this posting.
National Security Archive, John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, eds., “Understanding the CIA,” Document 14
In the wake of the discovery of 17 Soviet listening devices hidden in the walls of U.S. Embassy in Moscow in June 1964, the chairman of the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, MIT Provost Jerome Wiesner, conducted a security review of the Embassy. His classified report to Clark Clifford, who chaired the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), contains a number of recommendations, among them using headsets and microphones to conduct secure conversations in the building, “inducing masking sounds” into the walls to disable the function of the eavesdropping equipment, and mounting screens to block electromagnetic-reflection surveillance operations. Wiesner also sounds the alarm on the microwave radiation beams that have been bathing the building for a decade: “More effort should be made to understand the purpose of the microwave signal directed at the Embassy, or failing in this, to stop it,” he advised. “It is hard to understand why we have been so unconcerned about it.”
Nicholas H. Steneck personal collection
In one of the earliest arguments in favor of conducting experiments to explain the Moscow Signal, scientist Samuel Koslov of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) sends a memo to the State Department’s security office with a brief overview, based on Soviet scientific literature, of the “possible effects of low level continuous exposure” to radiation on human health. “A possible explanation of the Moscow Signal may reside in an attempt to produce a relatively low level neurophysiological condition among Embassy personnel,” Koslov postulates, while admitting that “the detailed studies of the signal do not give this a high probability of interest.” Koslov insists, erroneously, that “the Soviet irradiation of the Embassy exceeds their own ambient safety level by a factor of 100.” (Initially, U.S. intelligence significantly overestimated the strength of the signal when, in fact, it was well below both Soviet and U.S. safety standards.) He advocates for “a program to specifically check the complex Moscow signal waveform on higher primates” in order to “supply some data base for possible use in a protest action.” Within a few months, ARPA receives authorization to initiate a secret program to test the impact of radiation exposure on the behavior of monkeys.
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
ARPA initiates a special research program codenamed “Project PANDORA.” In this memorandum introducing the project, supervisor Richard Cesaro explains that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has been radiated with low-level electromagnetic beams on a continuous basis for a number of years. In response, the White House has ordered the U.S. Intelligence Board to assure that “intensive investigative research be conducted within the State Department, CIA and DOD to attempt to determine what the actual threat is and stop it.” The code name for the multi-agency efforts is “TUMS”–Technically Unidentified Moscow Signal. But, Cesaro advises, the ARPA contribution “is known as Project PANDORA” and will address “one of the potential threats, that of radiation effects on man.” Cesaro informs the other agencies participating in the project that a “program has been outlined to irradiate a group of primates under carefully controlled conditions simulating the dosages and complex modulation of the threat.” Cesaro adds that, “The trained primates will be carefully observed under varying and controlled irradiated conditions in an attempt to determine if any changes in their behavior or physiological condition can be detected.” Eventually, as ARPA expands its work on the Moscow Signal, the experiments on rhesus monkeys will be referred to as “Project BIZARRE.”
Nicholas Steneck research papers, Gerald Ford Presidential Library
The State Department’s medical office cables the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to advise them of the “Moscow Viral Study” that the department is conducting as a cover story to draw blood from U.S. personnel to research the physiological effects of the Moscow Signal. To identify potential subjects, the Department requests quarterly reports on employees and dependents who are due to return from Moscow to the U.S. for home leave.
Nicholas Steneck research papers, Gerald Ford Presidential Library
The State Department medical office offers George Washington University an 11-month contract to evaluate and code blood samples taken from Moscow Embassy diplomats, employees, and dependents. The project is titled “Cytogenetic Evaluation of Mutagenic Exposure” and will be supervised by Dr. Cecil Jacobson, a George Washington University scientist assigned to the Human Cytogenetics Research Laboratory who is on the PANDORA team. In a reference to PANDORA, a summary of the contract states that the human blood samples may inform experimentation on animals. “Confirmative animal experiments will be undertaken later,” states a summary of the program.
U.S. National Archives, Department of State Records (RG 59), Subject Numeric Files, 1967-1969, BG Moscow 13
During the June 1967 Summit between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, U.S. officials issue the first high-level protest of the ongoing microwave signals. At a side meeting between Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Rusk stated that “we were very much concerned at an electro-magnetic signal directed at our Chancery building in Moscow.” Rusk said the U.S. “did not know the purpose of this activity,” but said the U.S. wanted “the matter to be investigated and the activity stopped.” In response, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin suggested that the U.S. was conducting “similar activity” against the Soviet Mission in New York and the Soviet Embassy in Washington. While expressing skepticism at the U.S. claims, Gromyko “indicated he would look into the matter.”
Nicholas Steneck research papers, Gerald Ford Presidential Library
In a special summary to a colleague, the CIA’s representative on Project PANDORA/BIZARRE, Joseph Johnston, records the status of the experiments. He notes that analysis of the “TUMS power levels” has been revised and considerably lowered. There is now “reasonable certainty that the power level is not over 50 microwatts/cm2” but closer to 2 microwatts/cm2 at its average high level. Citing the results of the first test on a monkey (which were conducted when U.S. analysts mistakenly believed the signal was at a higher power level than it was) Johnston notes that there were “pronounced behavioral affects [and] performance decrement.” The impact on behavior, he suggests, was “due to the modulation feature” of the signal, “and not to the energy bearing carrier frequency.” “This very intriguing and important observation in one animal must be pursued,” he advises, and confirmed by an independent laboratory. Johnston emphasizes that “all positive findings of Project BIZARRE were achieved at one half an order of magnitude below the accepted U.S. standard for safe exposure.” Moreover, subsequent experiments at the adjusted lower level of radiation “produced no behavioral effects,” Johnston points out. He concludes: “I feel confident in stating that, at the power levels reported for TUMS, persons exposed are at no risk of injury.”
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
Ricard S. Cesaro, overseer of the PANDORA/BIZARRE program, sends a “progress report on Project BIZARRE” to the ARPA research and engineering director in September 1967. His report references a series of previous updates on subjecting primates to microwave exposure, as well as a secret CIA memorandum titled “Summary of TUMS Power Density Measurements” which reported that the levels of the microwaves beamed at the U.S. Embassy were considerably lower than previously believed. (They were, in fact, at levels below the Soviet safety standards, and likely not threatening to human health.)[1] “New measurements with ARPA instrumentation of the ‘Moscow Signal’ on site has [sic] now been completed,” Cesaro advises. Using the corrected level, “the recent BIZARRE tests have completed one experiment on primate behavior” that demonstrates “no overt primate performance degradation …” Even so, Cesaro’s memo lays out the argument to go beyond radiation experiments on monkeys and conduct tests on human subjects. “The ARPA BIZARRE program will establish methods which should permit us to relate the behavior of sub-human primates to man under conditions of microwave exposure,” he advises. “This may require direct testing with humans under controlled conditions.”
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
ARPA official Herbert Pollack reports on a meeting held on the USS Saratoga aircraft carrier with key naval officers to discuss a new PANDORA project. The project will review medical records of the ship’s personnel, and place “observers aboard the Saratoga to get base line readings on selected members of the crew.” The purpose of the study is to evaluate medical differences between distinct groups of crewmen: veteran members of the crew whose duties exposed them to microwaves generated by radar instrumentation; and new recruits with no history of previous exposure to microwaves. At ARPA, the project is code-named operation “Big Boy.”
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
In one of a series of monthly meetings in 1969, Pandora’s scientific-government board reviews its research efforts on the Moscow Signal. The first part of the meeting covers the initial results of project “Big Boy,” the study of the crew of the USS Saratoga. Early tests “were negative,” finding “no significant differences in psychological tests performed on apparently exposed and control groups,” and no “significant differences” in genetic and physical findings. After almost four years of experiments on monkeys, the panel agrees that “there is at present insufficient evidence to draw conclusions” about the potential impact of the Moscow Signal on human behavior. The inconclusive nature of the research reinforces proposals at the meeting to move beyond exposing monkeys to radiation to “develop[ing] a human program.” Subjects for human testing of radiation impact could be secured from Fort Detrick (misspelled as “Ft. Dietrich” in the document) and subjected to radiation exposure over a period of six months, according to the discussion. “Study should be double-blind with protection of eyes and gonads,” the board suggests. “Shielding of testicles is recommended.”
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
The PANDORA officials devote most of this meeting to developing a specific protocol for subjecting humans to radiation tests, addressing the levels of radiation to be used, and the “behavioral aspects of the program.” They also discuss “classification considerations” and “an appropriate cover” story to maintain secrecy around the research, including from the personnel being subjected to the tests. “DOD regards the general line of effort to acquire human-based data on effects of the signal, with appropriate safeguards, as a high priority,” the minutes state. “ARPA believes that the entire effort should be classified for several reasons.” Reflecting the sensitivity around the issue of human testing, according to the minutes “It was urged that DOD provide written security specifications and guide for the program.” (Emphasis in original.)
Drosnin FOIA, DOD Reading Room
RAND Corp. scientist Samuel Koslov, the former ARPA official who in 1965 who helped initiate the PANDORA project, assesses the data generated by several years of experiments on the impact of radiation on the behavior of rhesus monkeys. “I am forced to conclude that the data do not present any evidence of a behavioral change due to the presence of the special signal within the limits of any reasonable scientific criteria,” he writes. “There is evidence of behavioral change in some cases but this change could be attributed to a variety of causes or systematic measurement errors all well within the limits of experimental methodology. Evidence of other effects such as EEG, histology, and chromosomal analyses have not accumulated with either adequate detail or control to tell whether effects due to radiation are present.”
U.S. National Archives, Record Group 46, Records of U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, 90 to 95th Congress, Project Pandora Folder
In response to a request from the Navy, a panel of experts led by RAND Corporation scientist Samuel Koslov evaluates one of the last Project BIZARRE-type contracts for radiation experimentation on monkeys and rabbits. The panel concludes that the leading experiments to measure the impact of “long-term, low-level chronic exposure of primates” to radiation have produced “no material … which is scientifically credible ….” Among the factors the panel cites are the failure of the Navy to provide proper radiation devices, bad management, poorly trained technicians, and “poor” animal care. “Animal care was not in accordance with good laboratory practice,” the panel reported, citing the death of five of the monkeys. “Examination of the data log indicated that of five monkeys’ deaths, three were certainly due to strangulation resulting from poor experimental design of the restraint system.”
Drosnin FOIA, DoD Reading Room
In the aftermath of the scandal over the Moscow Signal, and publication of a high-profile article on the subject in The New Yorker magazine by Paul Broduer, several congressional committees investigate U.S. government efforts to address the microwave beams, including the PANDORA and BIZARRE projects at DARPA. In response to a series of questions posed by Representative Warren Magnuson, chairman of the House Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, DARPA director George H. Heilmeier transmits this letter providing answers and a general summary of the PANDORA program. Among the details: PANDORA was shut down in March 1970 after almost five years of work; its total costs amounted to $4,615,000. Heilmeier misleads the committee by denying that PANDORA was intended to “probe” the use of microwaves as a form of “mind control.” He also states that DARPA “does not foresee the development, by DARPA, of weapons using microwaves and actively being directed toward altering nervous system function or behavior. Neither are we aware of any of our own forces or possible adversary forces developing such weapons.” In the letter, Heilmeier also announces that meeting minutes of the PANDORA board have been declassified.
U.S. Senate Committee Print
Following the scandal of the Moscow Signal, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation conducts a lengthy review of the documentation on the PANDORA/BIZARRE projects and of various official investigations in an effort to determine the health and safety effects on U.S. personnel who served at the Embassy. This staff report criticizes the official secrecy that kept U.S. personnel in the dark about the ongoing radiation: “Embassy employees were not informed by the State Department of the presence of this radiation throughout the period from its initial discovery until early 1976,” the report notes. “The employees should have been promptly informed of the situation.” At the same time, the report concludes that as of 1979 the medical survey studies on U.S. personnel showed no discernible evidence of impact on health from exposure to the low-level radiation beams. “No convincing evidence was discovered that could directly implicate the exposure to microwave radiation experienced by the employees at the Moscow Embassy in the causation of any adverse health effects as of the time of this analysis,” the Senate inquiry concluded, with the caveat that “it is too early to have been able to detect long-term mortality effects” among hundreds of U.S. personnel exposed to radiation waves between 1953 and 1977.
[1] See also Nicholas Steneck, The Microwave Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 110.
CDC Report on the ‘Havana Syndrome’: Medical Mystery Remains Unresolved Feb 2, 2021
U.S.-Cuba: Secrets of the 'Havana Syndrome' Feb 10, 2021
2021 Documents in Review: Declassified State Department Review of the 'Havana Syndrome' Nov 19, 2021
Michael Isikoff, How a Soviet plot to beam the U.S. Embassy with microwaves led to a 'brain weapons arms race', Yahoo! News Sep 15, 2022
James Schumaker, "Before Havana Syndrome, There Was Moscow Signal," Foreign Service Journal Jan/Feb 2022
Sharon Weinberger, "The Secret History of Diplomats and Invisible Weapons," Foreign Policy August 25, 2017
Barton Reppert (Associated Press), "Zapping an embassy: 35 years later, the mystery lingers," Times Daily, 22 May 1988.
Nicholas H. Steneck, The Microwave Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984)
Paul Brodeur, "Microwaves~I," and "Microwaves~II," The New Yorker, December 5, and December 12, 1976.
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