AHI is more colloquially known as “Havana Syndrome” owing to the cluster of cases reported in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, not long after the U.S. Embassy in Havana reopened there during the Obama administration’s rapprochement with the Castro regime. The syndrome has been one of the most perplexing controversies in American national security, the subject of countless news items, congressional investigations and government statements, with skeptics insisting it is either one of the most stubborn examples of social contagion — i.e. mass hysteria — or that it is triggered by environmental conditions such as crickets or heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems on the fritz. But biomarkers cannot manifest in someone’s bloodstream because of a psychological condition.

Several AHI victims with credible stories and verifiable medical records previously worked as spies, military officers, or diplomats overseas. And most have done work for their country aimed at countering threats from Russia. They share another thing in common: they speak of moral injuries more grievous than their physical ones because the former were inflicted not by trained Russian operatives but by cynical American ones.

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The GHIC was the brainchild of Bill Burns, a longtime State Department diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. Shortly after being confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee to head the CIA in March 2021, Burns authorized a task force to investigate AHI. “I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious,” he said four months into the job.

However, Thorne told The Insider that the GHIC’s investigation was driven not by rigorous fact-gathering and dispassionate analysis but by an agenda not to uncover the truth or even take its own remit seriously. Now retired from the CIA, he has stepped forward for the first time to reject his own organization’s official assessment and to speak of America’s foreign spy service as a house divided. “You had about 50 percent of the building that believed [AHI] was true. The other 50 percent believed that it was a fake issue. And it became very divisive. And it created a lot of infighting in the headquarters and within the intelligence community.”

Thorne said the GHIC was rife with big egos and sinecurists, and two thick layers of upper and middle management that dismissed AHI as a hoax unworthy of CIA resources while characterizing the victims as fantasy merchants or grifters. The GHIC’s substantive work lasted mere months, with most eight-hour days dedicated to only a half hour of real effort for Thorne. “It took us a decade to find Osama Bin Laden but months to get to the bottom of Havana, which is: there is no bottom, because there is no Havana,” Thorne said, summarizing the GHIC’s mentality. The unit’s true purpose, he said, was “to bring down the temperature on AHI at CIA headquarters… The phrase was ‘there is no there there.’”

The hell there isn’t, Thorne counters.

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The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel have spent the last three years looking into AHI and the U.S. government’s dogged insistence that evidence is lacking to link these injuries to Russian actors. In 2024, we found there was evidence in two cases, one in Frankfurt, Germany in 2014 and the other in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2021, implicating members of Unit 29155 of the GRU, or Russian military intelligence, also responsible for a spate of well-documented poisonings and bombings throughout Europe, plus one abortive coup.

The Insider has spoken to dozens of former or active U.S. intelligence officers with familiarity with this investigation, which one high-level CIA official called “the biggest cover-up I’ve seen in my adult life.” Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University who helmed two studies of AHI — the first for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the other for the U.S. intelligence community — before going on to advise Biden’s White House, agrees there is a cover-up. “If there had been bigger ones than this,” Relman said, “I’d hate to see what those looked like.”

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For an ailment that is said not to exist, the CIA has put extraordinary effort into trying to silence or discredit those unsatisfied with the official explanation about AHI. Senior leadership even authorized one of their own to infiltrate a victims’ support network, hosted on encrypted messaging platforms, to conduct illegal domestic surveillance on their former colleagues, who by then were private citizens, according to confidential sources.

Moreover, those who adopted the see-no-evil approach at CIA were rewarded with promotion within the building, in some cases to the fabled Seventh Floor of CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, where executive leadership make decisions and judgment calls that can lead the United States into wars such as the one now raging with Iran. The former head of the GHIC, in fact, is now the Deputy Director for Analysis for the CIA.