Havana Syndrome: High-level national security officials stricken with unexplained illness on White House grounds

By Scott Pelley

Since 2016, U.S. government officials overseas and their families have reported sudden, unexplained, brain injuries with symptoms of vertigo, confusion and memory loss. The CIA, FBI and State Department are investigating a theory that some of these officials were injured by an unseen weapon. Who might be targeting Americans and why are unknown. Incidents have been reported in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, but our reporting has found senior national security officials who say they were stricken in Washington and on the grounds of the White House. The former officials you are about to meet are revealing their experiences for the first time. They were responsible for helping to manage threats to national security.

Olivia Troye: I covered any and all emerging threats, homeland security incidents domestically, so I covered whether it was from mass shootings to hurricanes, natural disasters…

Olivia Troye was homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. She had served in the Pentagon, deployed to Iraq, served in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center. At the White House, she worked in the 19th century Eisenhower Executive Office Building beside the West Wing. In the summer of 2019, she was descending stairs, toward the White House, when she felt she had been physically struck.

Olivia Troye: But it was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head, it was like, I remember it was on the right side of my head and I got like, vertigo. I was unsteady, I was, I felt nauseous, I was somewhat disoriented, and I was just, I remember thinking, “OK you gotta—don’t fall down the stairs. You’ve gotta find your ground again and steady yourself.”

She steadied herself on a railing but the “piercing feeling” continued as she passed by an entrance to the West Wing.

Olivia Troye: It was almost like I couldn’t really process. It was like a paralyzing panic attack. I’ve never had that. I’ve never felt anything like that. And so I– you know, I– I thought to myself, “I mean, do I have a brain tumor out of the blue? Is this what happens? Am I having a stroke?”

Olivia Troye was inside the security perimeter—headed to her car. She went down the steps, past the West Wing and down the closed parking lot, used by presidents, called West Executive Avenue. Then she passed through the Secret Service gate and out to the staff parking in the Ellipse, south of the White House.

Scott Pelley: Did you ever experience anything like this again?

Olivia Troye: So not immediately. But I did again about a year later. It didn’t happen on the steps. It happened a couple times walking to my car on the Ellipse.

Scott Pelley: Tell me about those times.

Olivia Troye: It was a similar sensation. But this time it was very much the feeling of vertigo and dizziness. And I felt like I couldn’t really walk. There was sort of– it was like I had a depth perception issue where I couldn’t figure out where the ground was. And I would start walking. And I felt like I was just gonna fall right into the ground.

Troye says she didn’t report the episodes because she didn’t want to believe she was seriously ill and she worried what it would mean to her security clearance and career. After this interview she reported for the first time.

Olivia Troye: There is a human aspect of it of shame. And do you really want to admit you’re sick? Do you want to come forward and tell someone that, especially as a member of the intelligence community? I think I’m still processing all of it and thinking about, like, how many more people are like me who felt this.

It appears there are several. A senior member of the National Security Council says he was stricken in November 2020, on the same steps by the West Wing. That former official, whose incident was first reported in the New Yorker, asked us not to name him. But he described the incident to a close colleague, John Bolton, former national security adviser.

John Bolton: They had disorientation and ringing in their ears. And just a general inability to function.

Bolton told us the official said he couldn’t speak or think clearly. He was taken to an emergency room. The former official sent us a note saying that, more than a year later, “I’m still recovering and suffering from headaches and other symptoms, and have been diagnosed with two other medical conditions that are believed to be the result of the attack…” He’s still an outpatient at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

John Bolton: That was a very debilitating attack. And similar to what others have reported.

Those “others” include Miles Taylor, also speaking for the first time. Taylor was deputy chief of staff and, later, chief of staff of the Trump administration Department of Homeland Security.

Miles Taylor: Your job is to oversee the roughly 250,000 men and women of the department that conduct a range of missions from aviation security to border security to cybersecurity.

Taylor told us he was hit with the same symptoms described by Olivia Troye.

Miles Taylor: It was late one night in April 2018. I’d just become deputy chief of staff of the department, taking on some additional sensitive issues at DHS, and woke up in my apartment that night, a row house on Capitol Hill, to a really strange sound.

The sound that woke Miles Taylor is a common experience reported by dozens of Americans stricken overseas.

Miles Taylor: It was sort of a chirping, somewhere between what you would think is a cricket or sort of a digital sound. I didn’t know what it was, but it was enough to wake me up. What was really strange about it is, I went to the window, opened up my window, looked down at the street. And keep in mind, Scott, this is probably 3– 3:30 in the morning and I see a white van. And the van’s brake lights turned on, and it pulled off and it sped away.

Scott Pelley: How long did it last?

Miles Taylor: This whole episode only lasted about seven to ten minutes.

Scott Pelley: How did you feel the next day?

Miles Taylor: Off. Off, not ready to go to work, you know, kinda wanting to take the day off, you know, sick.

Then, about five weeks later, Taylor says it happened again.

Miles Taylor: Next day, feeling off balance, feeling just out of it, again, those sort of concussion-like symptoms you would have from, you know, getting knocked pretty hard in a sport. And that incident stood out to me, because I was actually just getting ready to leave to go to Israel on a congressional delegation. We were going to meet the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have some sensitive conversations with the Israelis on important cybersecurity issues. And I remember because I got to the airplane at Andrews Air Force Base to take off and thought, “I’m already nauseous. I don’t know if I can do this flight.”

Both Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye became critics of the Trump administration, but they told us that has nothing to do with what they see as a potential threat to national security. Taylor says he became alarmed by that threat in 2018 after he heard of another case like his in the Washington area.

Miles Taylor: I became aware of a U.S. government official more senior than me who’d experienced similar episodes at their place of residence.

Scott Pelley: You say more senior than you. Are you talking about a cabinet level secretary?

Miles Taylor: This was an individual that, yes, was roughly at the cabinet level in the Trump administration who had similar episodes occur. That to me, as a homeland security professional, was a big blinking red light. I mean, to me this said, “five-alarm fire.” We may have ongoing activity targeting U.S. government officials here in our country.

Scott Pelley: Who was it?

Miles Taylor: I can’t say the individual outta respect for, you know, their privacy. I’ll leave it at that. But someone senior enough to say, this is more than just a fluke.

More than a fluke, a pattern across two administrations. Recent injuries among U.S. officials were reported in Vienna, Austria—ahead of a trip by the vice president to Vietnam and in India during a visit by the director of the CIA. In 2019, during a visit by President Trump to London, two members of John Bolton’s national security staff became ill in a hotel.

John Bolton: And that it was on the floor where we’d completely taken up with personnel from the White House and White House agencies struck me as being pretty good evidence of a deliberate attack.

Scott Pelley: You believe it was an attack?

John Bolton: I don’t think there’s any other hypothesis when you begin to look at the number and the pattern that we’ve experienced.

Bolton says, months later, one of those staff members hurt in London said she was overcome, again, walking her dog in the Washington area. We have found, she is not the only one who says they were attacked abroad and, later, at home.

Scott Pelley: You must have thought that when you were home in America that you were safe?

Robyn Garfield: I’ll tell you, when I landed from China, I literally was kissing the ground.

We met Robyn Garfield in 2019. He’s a Commerce Department official who told us that he, his wife and two children were repeatedly hit in China.

Scott Pelley: Your daughter was literally falling down?

Robyn Garfield: Yes, she fell down multiple times a day.

They were evacuated and enrolled in a State Department treatment program at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, Garfield told us his family was hit again during their year of treatment in Philadelphia.

Robyn Garfield: My wife catapulted out of bed and sprinted down the hallway to check the children without any word. And she came back, and she told me that an extremely loud, painful, sound had woken her up.

So, they moved to a hotel where Garfield says it happened again.

Robyn Garfield: And we woke up around I believe 2:00 a.m. with strange vibrations in our bodies, and a sound.

Which led Garfield to check on his children, in another room.

Robyn Garfield: I saw an extremely eerie scene where both were thrashing in their beds– asleep. But both kicking and moving pretty aggressively. And I went over to my daughter, and I put my head down next to her head. And I heard a very distinct sound, just right there sort of like water rushing. So, I picked her up, took her and put her with my wife, and I came back and I checked my son. Same sound just right next to his head. So, I picked him up, put him on my shoulder, walked over to my wife and I said, “We’re getting out of here.”

Garfield reported this to the FBI. Today, his family is posted abroad where they continue to work to improve balance, eyesight and memory.

Robyn Garfield: This is the most difficult aspect of this whole issue for me are the children who’ve been impacted, both mine as well as many others. I personally know the parents of, I believe, eight other children. I can tell you I’ve personally seen balance issues in children that have never had that. Trouble with finding their words, stuttering. And then continuing challenges around vision. One of the things that we have heard from some parents is that these are manifesting in the classroom in real, tangible ways.

Persistent neurological symptoms are not the only fight these Americans have faced. Some of their early reports were dismissed as psychosomatic, or illnesses connected to an infection or exposure to pesticides. Some were told that they were suffering the effect of old sports injuries. One theory had it that the sound these victims heard during the incidents was actually a particular species of cicada.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: It was rough. It was rough in the beginning. It was a dark place to be. We were kinda shoved aside and they wanted it to go away.

This man is among those who fought for recognition. He’s one of the first cases, from 2016. Americans assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba say they and their families were struck at home, frequently, in the night. He remembers the first time.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And that night all the dogs started kicking off, in the neighborhood barking, which was very unusual for them all to go in chorus. And then this just loud sound just absolutely filled my room. It felt like my head was slowly starting to get crushed.

We agreed not to use his name. He is not allowed to say what federal agency he worked for.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And then the severe ear pain started. So, I liken it to if you put a Q-tip too far and you bounce it off your eardrum. Well, imagine taking a sharp pencil and just kinda poking that. It was very jarring and painful. And eventually, I started blacking out.

With the first public reports coming from Cuba the affliction became known as “Havana Syndrome.” More than two dozen embassy officials reported injury, but an early FBI report speculated it was all mass hysteria. His brain injuries left him disabled, essentially retired, at the age of 36. A weighted vest helps him balance. His service dog helps with walking and his loss of vision.

Scott Pelley: Legally blind in one eye?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Correct. Yeah.

Scott Pelley: What have the doctors told you?