C.I.A. Psychosis, Synema Fantasies, and Wall Street's Golden Age

Good afternoon, and thanks as always for reading The Daily Courant, a private email highlighting the most remarkable journalism being published at Puck. 

Today, we draw your attention to Julia Ioffe's urgent reporting on the maddening, Cold War-style mystery gripping Washington: What is be causing the disturbing set of symptoms known as Havana Syndrome, which has affected dozens of C.I.A. agents and U.S. diplomats? And could a foreign adversary be to blame?

Plus, below the fold, don't miss Teddy Schleifer on the latest political machinations to emerge from Silicon Valley, where a small group of extremely wealthy people have devised a plan to redesign state primaries to elect more Andrew Yangs.

A Cold War Saga in Biden’s Washington

Members of the intelligence community are increasingly convinced that the Russian government is behind the hundreds of terrifying directed-energy attacks on diplomats and spies known as the Havana Syndrome. Will Congress respond to the “medium confidence” intelligence with countermeasures? As one member of the community told me, “We got bin Laden with medium confidence.”

In the summer of 2019, I met a newly retired C.I.A. officer named Marc Polymeropoulos for lunch at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C. One of my sources was his friend, and he had brokered an introduction. As we sat in the echoing and empty restaurant, Polymeropoulos told me about what he had been doing in the clandestine service before he left Langley for good: he had overseen the Agency’s efforts to expose and push back against Russian active measures in Europe and Eurasia, areas that are of utmost geopolitical and symbolic significance to the Kremlin. 

As we talked, I couldn’t square two things: Marc’s retirement and his age. He had just turned 50, and, by his own account, he had been on the up-and-up at the C.I.A. Why had he left so soon? I asked him. Donald Trump was still president, and, given Marc’s work foiling the Russian security apparatus, I expected to hear something about the White House’s interference, given the president’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. After all, it was a constant during the Trump years: U.S. government apparatchiks resigning in protest over such meddling—or reaching out in private to journalists to warn them about it. But Marc’s answer surprised me: Havana Syndrome. He told me, off the record, that he had been “hit” while visiting Moscow and that the attack had undermined his health so badly that he physically couldn’t work anymore. A promising career in an organization he loved, and had come of age in, was over.

I had been hearing and reading about Havana Syndrome since late 2016, when American diplomats stationed in Cuba as part of President Obama’s detente with the Castro regime started falling ill. Many of them reported hearing a loud, piercing sound and then suffering from vertigo, nausea, tinnitus, headaches, insomnia, cognitive difficulties, vision and hearing problems. A couple dozen U.S. diplomats and spies (as well as some Canadian embassy workers) had been affected, and no one could understand what was happening to these people. Was it chemical exposure? A virus? Mass psychosis? Was it some kind of attack? And if it was, who could have perpetrated it and how? 

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT