Overview
- Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rescinded two declassified intelligence community assessments on Havana Syndrome, an action announced Thursday that reverses earlier findings that a foreign actor was unlikely to be responsible.
- Gabbard’s office said the reports selectively excluded relevant intelligence, suppressed alternative analyses, omitted key information about source quality, and relied on an ethically flawed medical study.
- The rescission does not itself assign a cause and it is unclear whether it will trigger a new formal investigation, with the intelligence community facing persistent analytic disagreement about origins of the symptoms.
- Technical threads that continue to inform the debate include a 2022 panel that said pulsed electromagnetic energy was a plausible cause for some cases and reporting that U.S. agents covertly bought and tested a small pulsed radio/microwave device in 2024 that produced injuries similar to reported cases.
- Victims and Republican lawmakers praised the move as corrective and it arrives as leadership at ODNI is shifting, with President Trump naming an acting DNI and nominating Jay Clayton, which could influence whether and how the government reopens inquiries and provides remedies for affected personnel.