

Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA man then working in Havana, remembers Patient Zero’s own zealous campaign: “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” Armstrong has said. Nothing was found, and after a few weeks the mysterious sounds faded, then disappeared.īut in the light of Patient Zero’s troubling experience, his friend felt duty-bound to raise the alarm. Neither man noted any associated symptoms, though the neighbour had been concerned enough to ask for maintenance workers to investigate. His neighbour, yet another CIA officer, had also heard odd noises, and to him they seemed “mechanical-sounding”.

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“It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV,” this officer later told ProPublica, an independent US investigative newsroom, in an anonymous interview. The humming, buzzing noise seemed eerily similar to one that had disturbed him a few months earlier outside the Spanish-style home he shared with his family in Havana. The colleague – a fellow CIA officer working undercover at the embassy – was dumbstruck. Before he did so, though, he played his friend a recording of the sound he said had tormented him. After his return to Cuba, Patient Zero approached a friendly colleague, revealed his harrowing ordeal and said he would soon be leaving Cuba. Patient Zero, later described as a fit-looking man in his 30s and an experienced spy, was sent to Miami for tests in early 2017, which diagnosed a roster of medical issues, including hearing loss. In his compelling later account, he said it felt as though a powerful, high-pitched sonic beam had been aimed directly at him. There he told a nurse about peculiar and disturbing sensations of sound and pressure he had endured at his home in the city, leading to dizziness and headaches. But it’s one that a CIA officer then based in Cuba has been saddled with since December 30, 2016, when he walked into the US embassy’s Havana health centre.
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See all 12 stories.Īs code names go, Patient Zero wouldn’t be the first choice of many secret agents. This story is part of the May 28 edition of Good Weekend.
