Wall Street Journal, Apr 6, 2024

choi

(1) Sharon Weinberger, Microwave Weapons are Real, But They Can't Explain Havana Syndrome. My own experience being zapped years ago dpesn't chamge the fact: it's very unlikelky that high-energy devices are behind the stmptpms reported by A,ericans abroad. at page C4 (on Saturday, section C is "Review").
https://www.wsj.com/politics/nat ... a-syndrome-171c6efa

Excerpt o the wonfow of print: If a foreign adversary developed an advanced weapon, why waste it on random attacks?

Note:
(a) In print, atop the essay is a quotation: 'It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacificstation, that great characters are formed.' -- ABGAIL ADAMS
(b) Quantico, Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantico,_Virginia
("is a town in Prince William County, Virginia, United States. The population was 480 at the 2010 census. Quantico is approximately 35 miles southwest of Washington, DC, bordered by the Potomac River to the east and the Quantico Creek to the north. The word Quantico is a corruption of the name of a Doeg village recorded by English colonists as Pamacocack.   Quantico is surrounded on its remaining two sides by one of the largest US Marine Corps bases, Marine Corps Base Quantico. The base is the site of the HMX-1 presidential helicopter squadron, the FBI Academy * * * "

But FBI itself is headquartered at J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC.

-----------------------------------
In 2007, I stood in an open field in Quantico, Va., bracing myself for the blast of a microwave weapon. When the invisible beam switched on, my first sensation was mild warmth, not the intense burning that had been promised. The weapon was a clunky, noisy device that sat on a Humvee. It required many hours to power up and was generally fickle. And as I found out that day, when I volunteered to be hit by the weapon during a Pentagon demonstration, it didn’t work well in wet conditions, because moisture attenuated the beam.

Ten years later, when claims of exotic energy weapons were first publicly raised in connection with “Havana Syndrome”—the unofficial name given to an array of symptoms suffered by spies, diplomats and other U.S. personnel abroad—my first thought was that soggy field in Quantico. How could someone trundle a device that unwieldy down the street in Havana unnoticed?

The cases that the U.S. government now calls Anomalous Heath Incidents started in Cuba in 2016 and quickly spread. Hundreds of instances have been reported in countries such as China, Russia and even Vietnam, where it briefly delayed a visit by Vice President Kamala Harris in 2021.

A “60 Minutes” report on March 31, part of a joint investigation with the Insider and Der Spiegel, revealed new cases, including an unnamed FBI agent who says she heard a high-pitched noise, followed by symptoms that range from dizziness to headaches. Decked out in a wig to disguise her identity, she described how she had been hit in her home in Florida: “It’s next-generation weaponry. And unfortunately, it’s been refined on some of us, and we’re the test subjects.”

The “60 Minutes” investigation offers tantalizing details and some impressive sleuthing, including tracking the movements of a suspected Russian intelligence agent who may have been in Tbilisi, Georgia, at the time of a reported attack. But it shies away from delving into the type of technology that may have been used. Understandably so.

Microwave weapons have often been suggested as the best explanation for these attacks. Such a weapon—not exactly the type that was tested on me in 2007—would supposedly involve pulsed microwaves designed to cause cognitive problems, such as the sensation of hearing noises in your head.

But there have long been serious problems with this theory. These include the technical implausibility of building a device that could be easily transported; the lack of any evidence that such weapons were built or used; and the seeming absurdity of a hostile country randomly zapping diplomats and spies with their most advanced weaponry for no discernible reason other than harassment.

Size remains the most prosaic but fundamental of these problems. The microwave theory supposes a weapon that can be ferried around the world, targeting unsuspecting victims, often inside buildings, without ever being spotted. In one case, a senior aide to then Vice President Mike Pence says that she was struck near the White House, one of the most closely monitored places on Earth.

When I asked Kenneth Foster, emeritus professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, what a microwave device capable of producing an auditory effect would look like, he described doing experiments on himself in the 1970s with a transmitter the size of a fridge. “Since the intensity of the radiation falls off as a square of the distance, well, if I wanted to produce that sensation more than a few feet from the transmitter, I would have to have a much bigger transmitter,” he told me. The technology has gotten smaller over the decades, but not that much smaller.

“You know these shipping containers you see being dragged by trucks down the highway? Something like that,” Foster told me, when I asked him how large a device would be needed to target people over the distances suggested by Havana Syndrome scenarios. “A small transmitter might look like a big refrigerator. This is not something that you can just pick up, put in the back of your car and drive away.”

David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist who appeared on “60 Minutes” and co-chaired an expert panel that studied Havana Syndrome for the intelligence community, said he believes that theoretical microwave devices designed for certain biological effects could be made small enough to conceal. But there is, he said, no peer-reviewed scientific literature to show that such devices are possible.

The panel nonetheless concluded that attacks might have caused the symptoms. “There are other kinds of evidence that we relied on, including foreign language reports, open source reports, classified reports and personal accounts from people who suffered accidental exposures to known devices,” Relman said. The panel failed to convince the intelligence community, however, which “basically just ignored our findings,” he added.

Another problem is that no one in these cases appears to have ever detected actual microwaves, which are invisible to the eye but can be spotted with the proper electronics. In 2018, the State Department tasked an elite advisory group of scientists known as JASON to look at Havana Syndrome, and they built detectors that could pick up microwaves in Cuba, a scientist familiar with their work said. “They designed some stationary ones that could sit in your apartment or office and some others that you could wear,” the scientist said. “Nobody ever got a recording of a microwave.”

Allan Frey, a biophysicist whose Cold War-era work is cited as the basis for the theoretical microwave weapon, says that the lack of detection was a showstopper for him. He recounted speaking with the CIA about the cases: “I said, ‘First of all, there was never a measurement done. So we know nothing about whether or not there were any microwaves there.’”

Frey, who in the early 1960s demonstrated that pulsed low-energy microwaves could cause a sensation of sounds in the head, sees an even bigger flaw in the weapons theory: common sense. If a foreign adversary had developed an advanced weapon, managed to shrink the components in a way that defies modern engineering, and done it all in secret, why waste it on random attacks?

“It doesn’t make sense logically,” he said, when I interviewed him amid the Havana Syndrome frenzy in 2022. If Russia had built a newfangled microwave weapon, why roll it out in Cuba? “The last thing that you want to do, if you’re the military, is to give out information on a weapon you might use in a war,’” Frey recalled telling the CIA.

None of that logic is likely to resolve the debate, and as the “60 Minutes” episode shows, people continue to come forward saying they were targeted. Microwave weapons are an irresistible narrative for the media and, for those affected, offer a simple explanation for a confusing array of symptoms.

As an attempted way out of this conundrum, President Biden has allowed the CIA and other agencies to provide financial support to personnel they determine have been afflicted by Anomalous Health Incidents, even though the U.S. intelligence agencies found “no credible evidence” that any foreign adversary had used a weapon or device linked to the symptoms.

What is actually behind the many accounts is impossible to say. Some have suggested mass psychogenesis—essentially a social contagion—a theory that is insulting, of course, to those who say they have suffered life-altering injuries. Others say we should keep looking for a cause.

I spoke again to Foster following the “60 Minutes” investigation, and he thinks that some more compact device, like a pulsed laser, could perhaps explain some of the incidents. He says the government created a mess by withholding information in the early days and focusing on microwave weapons, and now the large number of Havana Syndrome reports make it impossible to determine who was affected, and by what.

“Something’s going on we don’t know about,” Foster said. “But it’s not someone walking around with a microwave oven zapping people.”

Sharon Weinberger is the national security editor at The Wall Street Journal.

choi

Melanie Kirkpatrick, Present at the Creation. at page C7.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... e-creation-3de95813
(book review on John L Smith Jr, the Unexpected Abgail Adams; A woman not apt to be intimidated. Westholme Publishing, to be published on Apr 12, 2024)

Note:
(a) the title came from a 1969 book:
(b) Present at the Creation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_at_the_Creation
(i) US Department of State was established in 1789.
(ii) Thomas E Ricks, A classic Book Revisited: Acheson's 'Present at the Creation' Reminds Us of How Our Government Should Work. Foreign Policy, Mar 22, 2017 (in print; not jusr online ONLY).
ttps://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/22/a-classic-book-revisited-achesons-present-at-the-creation-reminds-us-of-how-our-government-should-work/

Here is the table of contents of the Mar 22, 2017 issue.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/22/
, where the essay was second from the last.

(c) "Abigail heartily disliked English royalty, with whom she was obliged to interact when her husband became the first American ambassador to England after the British defeat. * * * George III was a 'stout well made Man' who would look better 'if he had not sacrificed so much to Bacchus.'
(i) John Adams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams
(1735 – 1826; 1st United States Minister to Great Britain  1785-1788; vice presidency 1789-1797; presidency 1797-1801 (defeatd by Thomas Jeffersopn))
(ii) Bacchus
(disambiguation)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus_(disambiguation)

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If you know anything about Abigail Adams, the second first lady of the United States, you are probably aware that she liked to write letters. Approximately 2,300 examples of her prolific correspondence survive, written from her young adulthood—she was born in 1744—until shortly before her death in 1818 at age 73. Her letters are a national treasure, full of insight into the reasons why Americans declared independence in 1776, the tribulations they endured during the Revolutionary War, and the fractious establishment of what has become the world’s longest-enduring democracy.

In “The Unexpected Abigail Adams,” John L. Smith Jr., a retired corporate executive and historian, puts Abigail’s correspondence front and center—so much so that at times his narrative voice seems to fade into the background and the book reads almost like a memoir. His stage-setting and commentary are excellent, but they are secondary to Abigail’s words, which he presents without modernizing her creative spellings and grammatical flights of fancy. If readers sometimes must work a little to grasp her meaning, they are rewarded by a glimpse of 18th-century authenticity.

As the wife of John Adams, Abigail knew most of the principal players of the Founding generation, and one of the book’s many charms is her well-drawn portraits. Benjamin Franklin—or “Dr. Frankling,” as she spells it—was “grave, yet pleasant, and affable.” She mistrusted Alexander Hamilton, of whom she wrote: “O I have read his Heart in his Wicked Eyes many a time the very Devil is in them.” The admirable Martha Washington was “modest and unassuming, dignified and femenine.” In Paris in 1784, Thomas Jefferson, with whom she would later have a falling out, was “one of the choice ones of the Earth.”

Not surprisingly for an American revolutionary, Abigail heartily disliked English royalty, with whom she was obliged to interact when her husband became the first American ambassador to England after the British defeat. Her tart comments, penned in a letter to her sister Mary, described the lords and ladies of the court as “like the rest of Mankind, mere Men and Women, and not of the most personable kind neither.” George III was a “stout well made Man” who would look better “if he had not sacrificed so much to Bacchus.” As for the queen, her majesty and the ladies of the court were “in general very plain ill shaped and ugly, but dont you tell any body that I say so.”

She had a reverential regard for George Washington, whom she first met in July 1775, a month after the Continental Congress unanimously elected him commander in chief of the ragtag American army. She wrote to John of his “Dignity” and “ease,” adding that “the Gentleman and Soldier look agreeably blended in him.” At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, she spoke for most Americans when she proclaimed that “History will not produce to us a Parrallel.” Her sole complaint about Washington was a humdrum, entirely human, one. She was upset that, as president, Washington had established a tradition of lavish entertainment on the Fourth of July. The Adamses felt obliged to do the same, even though they couldn’t afford it. “We cannot avoid the trouble nor the expence,” she griped.

Abigail’s observations on political life can be strikingly modern as well as plainly down-to-earth. To her son John Quincy’s mother-in-law, who had presumed that she and John, then president, were living the high life, she wrote that government service was “not a Bed of roses.” Her support of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts—which criminalized “malicious writing” aimed at the government—can be explained in part by her low opinion of journalists, who reminded her of an “envenomed toad spit[ting] forth his poison.” The many presidents who have followed John in the White House would recognize the wisdom of Abigail’s warning to her husband upon his election: “You know what is before You. the whips and Scorpions, the Thorns without Roses, the Dangers anxieties and weight of Empire.”

Abigail was 19 and John 29 when they wed in 1764. Their 54 years of marriage constitute one of history’s great love stories, chronicled in the letters they exchanged during the many years that John’s work kept them apart. The youthful Abigail described their love as two hearts “cast in the same mould.” When John began his presidency in 1797, he urged her to come to him in Philadelphia (then the capital) as quickly as possible. “I can do nothing without you,” he wrote.

The most famous quotation from Abigail’s correspondence with her husband comes from her March 31, 1776, letter imploring him “to Remember the Ladies” in the forthcoming Declaration of Independence. Mr. Smith cautions 21st-century readers not to assume that this statement is evidence that she supported women’s suffrage. “It is fair to say that the right to vote never realistically crossed her mind in her time,” he writes. Rather, her exhortation was “a sweeping claim for just status (not necessarily equal status) for women.” He wisely notes that history and progress “often stumble forward in tiny steps.”

Abigail wasn’t a feminist in today’s understanding of the word—Mr. Smith calls her a “selective feminist.” But she advocated policies that provided the building blocks for the eventual establishment of equal rights for women. She wanted women to have educational opportunities, and she deplored the common-law doctrine of coverture, under which the economic rights of married women—to sign legal documents, own property, keep earned or inherited money—belonged to their husbands.

Jefferson called Abigail Adams “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” So, too, she is one of the most estimable women in our history. In the midst of the political chaos, legal disorder and cultural vulgarity that sully our country today, it is refreshing to encounter a woman who exemplifies classic American virtues. May we learn from her example.

Ms. Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page, is the author of “Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.”