FAIR 12月16日：

Completely disregarding the cricket explanation, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released earlier this month about the 2017 Havana incident suggested that the symptoms displayed by US government workers there were consistent with those of exposure to microwave energy, although it very prominently warned that "evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven and the circumstances remain unclear." Russia is mentioned in only one paragraph of the 77-page document, which does not make any accusations against any country. Experts immediately challenged the report as completely incoherent "science fiction."

Despite this, a host of big media outlets (e.g., Slate, 12/5/20; Mother Jones, 12/5/20; Reuters, 12/6/20; Vox, 12/6/20) immediately took the idea of a Russian attack on the embassy in Cuba as highly likely. There is "strong evidence that the incidents were the result of a malicious attack," the New York Times (12/5/20) informed its readers. Other explanations, it said, were "unlikely." "CIA analysts who are Russia experts, diplomats and scientists contend that evidence points to Moscow," it added. NBC News (12/7/20), meanwhile, festooned its broadcast with pictures of the Kremlin (despite the event happening in Cuba), telling viewers that "Russia has a long history of working on these weapons."

"Is Russia Microwaving American Spies?" read the headline of Ben MacIntyre's London Times column (10/30/20). "Dozens of US officials have been hit by ‘Havana Syndrome' but no one seems to want the truth to come out," he added, also claimng that US officials in Guangzhou had suffered a similar fate to Polymeropoulos in Moscow.

The Washington Post editorial board (12/9/20) took the news to its logical endpoint, combining the Moscow, Havana and Guangzhou cases, together with other discredited Russiagate theories, to demand that President-elect Joe Biden must "call out" Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous doomsday clock—symbolizing the risk of the destruction of the planet through nuclear weapons—to the closest it has ever been to midnight, upping tensions with Russia would be reckless in the extreme. For the single-minded Post, however, Putin's denials are actually further proof of devious, "asymmetric warfare" being waged against America.

Incidents like these are surprisingly common in Cold War history. Going further back in time, during the 1980s, the US government formally accused the Soviet Union of supplying chemical weapons—so-called "Yellow Rain"—to Communist states in Southeast Asia to use on American troops fighting there. While media took it deadly seriously at the time, it is now commonly accepted that the "chemical weapon" was actually just honeybee feces (Scientific American, 9/85; New York Times, 9/3/87).