60 Minutes Report Ties Havana Syndrome to Russian GRU Unit (Plus a Smoking Gun Email)

It really seemed as if the story of Havana syndrome was over. Last month US Intelligence Agencies concluded that what the government now calls Anomalous Health Incidents were not the result of a secret energy weapon. Two weeks later, the NIH revealed new medical evidence concluding the victims of Havana Syndrome had symptoms but no signs of brain damage. This was a bit strange since a previous investigation had connected the AHIs to some kind of directed energy weapon. Even last month the author of those previous studies, Stanford University professor of medicine David Relman, was given space to argue that the conclusions of the current investigation were wrong.

So it’s fair to say the government seemed to be collectively signaling that Havana Syndrome was not a thing. But last Sunday, 60 Minutes published a report which it had worked on with Insider and Der Spiegel. That report came to completely different conclusions, Not only did it conclude the AHIs were the work of Russia’s GRU, they named the specific unit and some of the people in it who are responsible.

Consider the story of Joy (not her real name) the wife of an embassy official who was stationed in Tbilisi, Georgia in early 2020.

On October 7, 2021, Joy, an American nurse and the wife of a U.S. Embassy official, had been taking her laundry out of the dryer when she was completely consumed by an acute ringing sound that reminded her of what someone in the movies experiences after a bomb has gone off. “It just pierced my ears, came in my left side, felt like it came through the window, into my left ear,” Joy remembers. “I immediately felt fullness in my head, and just a piercing headache.” She ran out of the laundry room on the second floor of her house and into the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom. Then she vomited.

Despite the “all-consuming” noise in her head, Joy called Hunter. (Both their names have been changed for this article to protect their identities.) As the spouse of a U.S. official serving abroad, she’d undergone overseas survival training and remembered that if something didn’t feel right, the first thing you do is “get off the X” – leave the location. Joy checked the house’s security camera at the front door to see if anyone was outside.

A black Mercedes crossover was parked just beyond the gate of her property, directly opposite her laundry room. Joy went outside, and that’s when she saw the tall, thin man. She raised her phone to photograph him.

“It was like he locked eyes with me. He knew what I was doing.” Then he got into the Mercedes, and it drove off. Joy took a picture of the car and its license plate as it pulled away. She says she didn’t see the man again until three years later, when she was shown a photograph of Albert Averyanov, a Russian operative attached to Unit 29155, a notorious assassination and sabotage squad of the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence service.

Albert Averyanov isn’t just a random Russian, he’s the son of Gen. Andrei Averyanov, the head of GRU unit 29155. As for Joy, she would subsequently undergo two surgeries on her inner ear to repair damage resulting from the incident.

60 Minutes and Insider may even have identified the creator of the energy weapon being used against US personnel. His name is Col. Ivan Terentiev.

Col. Ivan Terentiev spent a decade as the deputy commander of the unit, and held an additional ominous title of «commander of group for special tasks of Unit 29155»…Terentiev, a trained engineer, also moonlighted as a research and development specialist for Russia’s Ministry of Defense. In that capacity he co-wrote dozens of military-scientific papers, including one on the “effectiveness of underwater shooting.” He’s also spent time exploring acoustic weapons.

In mid 2019, Terentiev was suddenly promoted to a Kremlin position. As part of the vetting process, he had to explain to the Kremlin why he had failed to declare a bank account into which he received an unaccounted-for transfer of funds in late 2017. Part of this disbursement had come from Terentiev’s handing over the intellectual property rights of his research and inventions to the Ministry of Defense. Namely, he had provided research work on developing a new weapon for the Foundation for Advanced Military Research. One of Vladimir Putin’s pet projects, the foundation was created in 2012 with a mandate for building “innovative weapons including [ones] based on new physical properties,” as its website states, and “to close a gap in advanced research with our Western partners after 20 years of stagnation in the Russian military science and defense industry overall.”

Terentiev’s prized research was focused on the “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons in combat activities in urban settings,” according to an addendum The Insider obtained from an email account belonging to Nikolay Ezhov, Terentiev’s aide in Unit 29155 and his travel companion to Europe in 2014, just before Taylor’s attack.

There’s a photo of the message in the Insider report and in the 60 Minutes report below. Is this the smoking gun? The fact that Terentiev was working on “non-lethal acoustic weapons” and that he turned all of his research over to the state and was rewarded with a Kremlin job suggests his research was both real and a success.

The other part of this investigation is the evidence that most who’ve been “hit” by an Anomalous Health Incident were working in opposition to Russia.

Of all the cases examined by The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, the most well-documented involve U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel with subject matter expertise in Russia or operational experience in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, two post-Soviet states that have undergone pro-Western “color revolutions” in the past two decades. (Some of these personnel are still active and declined to speak for this article.)

It’s quite a coincidence if it is one. It’s even more of a coincidence that Russian GRU agents can be found traveling to and from the locations where several of these AHIs took place.

But if there is such a strong case that Russia is behind this, why does the US government seem intent on dismissing this? The people who’ve suffered these AHIs have their own suspicions about that.

A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay. The second is that acknowledging Havana Syndrome is caused by a foreign adversary could put a damper on recruitment to the CIA and State Department. After all, how many Americans would be willing to serve their country overseas in the full knowledge that their next load of laundry or morning jaunt to the embassy could result in permanent physical and mental ailments?

I’m just scratching the surface of the Insider report. Read the whole thing for a much more detailed and convincing picture that this is a Russian operation targeting US covert opposition. Also, this 60 Minutes report is worth a look.