CBS: Since 2014, GRU agents around the world have been blowing the minds of US diplomats, officials and intelligence officers with beams of “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”

CBS Since 2014 GRU agents around the world have been CBS: Since 2014, GRU agents around the world have been blowing the minds of US diplomats, officials and intelligence officers with beams of “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”

Sergeev and Gordienko are replaced by the next group. First, Ivan Terentyev (“Lebedev”) and his assistant Nikolai Yezhov (“Kononikhin”) arrive, who arrives in Vienna on October 11. A little later, on the 15th, Danil Kapralov (“Stepanov”) joins them. From October 17 to 24, Alexander Kovalchuk (“Danilin”) joins the group. By the way, all the above-described persons, except Mishkin, will take part in the poisoning of the Bulgarian gunsmith Emelyan Gebrev in a year “Newbie” – and then they will act in the same way, replacing each other in shifts.

The operation winds down on November 3, when all three members of group 29155 fly away simultaneously, but through different airports: Yezhov from Vienna, and Terentyev and Kapralov from Geneva. Based on Kapralov’s hotel reservations and the dates of airline ticket bookings, it becomes clear that they knew about the planned departure on November 3 much in advance.

And on November 4, in Frankfurt, employees of the American consulate encountered a series of strange attacks. One of the victims (let’s call him/her Taylor) felt unwell right in the consulate building: strong pressure in the chest, then in the neck and head, the head began to spin, began to sweat, began to feel sick, the heart began to beat wildly, the hearing seemed to have turned off , only a loud and high-pitched sound was heard in my head. A few seconds later, Taylor lost consciousness.

Taylor recalls that a few weeks before the incident (he does not remember exactly when), he noticed a suspicious man of strong build and tall stature walking around the residential complex intended for consulate employees and taking photographs of the area. Taylor asked what he was doing here, and he answered something with a strong accent and retreated.

When, through intermediaries, The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel showed Taylor a photo of Yegor Gordienko that fit the description, he responded confidently: “Yes, that’s him, I’m getting goosebumps now when I look at this photo.” .

Perhaps this is just a coincidence? Could the victim identify himself? But such coincidences will subsequently continue almost every year with increasing frequency.

China and rally

It was this summer that strange incidents involving employees of American consulates were noted in China. The first victim was an IT specialist from the State Department, responsible for storing classified information and working in Shanghai. His symptoms also appeared suddenly: on June 12, he began to experience severe dizziness, he had difficulty maintaining his balance, and even getting out of bed was a problem. Sometimes he simply fell while walking on the street, and problems with short-term memory began. After a few months, the symptoms began to subside, but in 2018 he again began to lose his balance out of the blue. After several months of examination, the doctors’ official verdict was only “unknown environmental exposure causing traumatic brain injury.”

In 2017, GRU officers from military unit 29155 continued to use the rally as a way to get to China. In the photo below, for example, Sergei Andreenko is smiling in the background – he joined the racers under the guise of a car mechanic and entered China on July 12, 2017, and returned by plane from Xi’an to Novosibirsk on July 23, 2017.

Meanwhile, more and more Americans are reporting strange health incidents. In the summer of 2017, several victims appear in Guangzhou at once: some of them say they heard a strange high-pitched sound, unlike anything they had ever heard before. Victims also complained of dizziness, brain fog, headaches, short-term memory loss, insomnia and nausea. One victim reported that she would suddenly lose her balance and sometimes feel a sharp pressure in her ears. As a result, the US State Department had to evacuate more than ten employees from Guangzhou.

There were also similar incidents in Beijing in 2017. At least one American government employee, an employee of the Department of Commerce, reported strange sounds and sudden health problems – nausea, loss of balance, ear pain.

Information about the Chinese incidents is clearly incomplete, there may be more cases than we know today, just as there could be more trips by GRU employees, so it is difficult to make any comparisons between specific episodes and trips of 29155 members to China. Perhaps, thanks to this investigation, other victims will tell their stories, and this will allow us to establish the full picture.

Belgrade and Hanoi

According to our sources, a few days later there was a new incident: early on the morning of August 21, a CIA employee who had previously worked in Ukraine woke up with strange sensations. At first he heard some kind of low-frequency sound, and then it was as if there was an explosion in his head. He is one of the few people who was medically examined shortly before the incident, so doctors could compare biomarkers in the blood before and after the incident and record neural damage (more on which biomarkers help identify brain damage, below).

Before the attack, he ran ultramarathons, and after it he could barely walk for more than 15 minutes and, according to his own feelings, was “functioning at 35%” due to brain fog. Official diagnosis: neural network dysfunction and persistent dysautonomia due to brain injury.

Since it has not yet been possible to establish where exactly Averyanov’s group flew from Dushanbe in July and August and – unlike Tbilisi and Frankfurt – no one has identified them on the spot, there is no direct evidence of their involvement in these incidents. However, it is interesting that the operations of group 29155 are synchronized in time with episodes of the “Havana syndrome”.

Agreement

What kind of “acoustic weapon” was Terentyev developing? If we were talking about weapons that use sound waves, then we could be talking about infrasound weapons that operate at a great distance and are designed to cause panic in the enemy, or about waves of the audible spectrum that produce a deafening effect. It is unlikely that this could be ultrasound, which is quickly absorbed or scattered. But perhaps the weapon was called acoustic for another reason: microwave radiation by the human ear under certain conditions can be converted into an acoustic signal (Frey effect). It is this effect that most likely occurred in the case of the “Havana syndrome.”

Effects on the brain

The panel heard testimony from several people who were accidentally exposed to electromagnetic signals. Although these cases were not controlled experiments, they provide interesting evidence that such stimuli can have meaningful clinical effects. However, they also suggest that different people may experience the same type of stimulus differently, which may explain some of the observed heterogeneity in the cases studied where such effects emerged. Additionally, higher-intensity exposures appear to produce different symptoms than lower-intensity exposures, suggesting that more than one variable or biological mechanism may be at play. Finally, the effects of electromagnetic exposure may accumulate over time (eg, over several hours) and may also cause sudden, acute symptoms. However, the team emphasizes that confirming or refuting any of these preliminary observations will require systematic research.”

One of the most studied cases of the consequences of the “Havana syndrome” was the case of Joy, where two clinics independently diagnosed bilateral semicircular canal divergence (Minor syndrome). This is a bone defect in which tiny holes form in the semicircular canal of the inner ear. Key symptoms include hyperacusis (when a person can even hear themselves blinking or moving their eyeballs while reading), loss of balance, tinnitus, which patients describe as a “whooshing” sound or a sound similar to the chirping of a cricket or grasshopper (this has been reported by many victims of “Havana syndrome”), brain fog and migraines.

Minor syndrome is an extremely rare and poorly studied phenomenon that almost no one has studied in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), except… the Kirov Military Medical Academy (VMEDA), the professor of which is GRU doctor Sergei Chepur, a permanent consultant to General Averyanov, and whose graduate is Alexander Mishkin. It is in VMEDA that Alexander Kovalchuk (“Kalinin”), who flew to Europe in 2014 during the Frankfurt operation, now works. VMEDA and the Institute of Military Medicine, headed by Chepur, are the main testing grounds where the GRU studies the effect of its drugs and weapons on the human and animal bodies.

It was Sergei Chepur, as a specialist in cholinesterase inhibitors, who was and remains a key consultant on Novichok for the GRU officers from group 29155; in General Averyanov’s telephone conversations, Chepur was one of the main interlocutors. Chepur studied not only biochemistry, but also, judging by his publications, the effects of radiation on the brain.

One way or another, it seems an amazing coincidence that at the same time that Joy was attacked in Tbilisi, which led to the appearance of her Minor syndrome, this rare syndrome examined by doctorsclosely associated with General Averyanov and his team.