Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rescinded two Biden-era intelligence assessments that cast doubt on whether a foreign adversary was behind the mysterious ailment known as "Havana Syndrome", a move that vindicates American diplomats, spies, and military officials who have suffered debilitating symptoms for years while their own government told them, in effect, that the threat wasn't real.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a memo to the entire intelligence community announcing the rescission, CNN reported. The memo laid out a damning set of reasons: the assessments selectively excluded relevant intelligence, suppressed alternative analysis, relied on an ethically flawed medical study, and "limited intelligence collection to maintain an analytic line which relied on absence of evidence."

That last phrase deserves a second read. The intelligence community, under the Biden administration, didn't just fail to find the answer. It actively narrowed the search to protect a predetermined conclusion.

A pattern of dismissal

The saga dates to late 2016, when a cluster of U.S. diplomats stationed in Havana, Cuba, began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma, vertigo, extreme headaches, and other neurological effects severe enough in some cases to force early retirement. The incidents quickly spread beyond Cuba, with cases reported around the world among American intelligence officers, diplomats, and Defense Department personnel.

For years, the intelligence community and the Pentagon tried to determine whether the symptoms were the product of a directed energy attack by a foreign government. In 2022, an intelligence panel investigating the cause said some episodes could "plausibly" have been caused by "pulsed electromagnetic energy" emitted by an external source. That finding should have intensified the investigation.

Instead, the opposite happened. By 2023, one intelligence community assessment declared it could not link any cases to a foreign adversary and ruled it unlikely the illness was the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the United States. Then, in January 2025, the final days of the Biden administration, the broader intelligence community went further, assessing it was "very unlikely" the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor.

Victims and their advocates argued throughout this period that the U.S. government was ignoring important evidence pointing to Russia. Biden-era intelligence and administration officials pushed back, emphasizing they did not assess Russia was behind the injuries, did not doubt the injuries were real, and said the matter remained effectively a mystery. The government even offered compensation to affected personnel, an odd gesture if the whole thing was nothing.

The $10 million device nobody wanted to talk about

One detail makes the Biden administration's skeptical posture especially hard to defend. In its waning days, the government spent more than $10 million to clandestinely purchase a device that produces pulsed radio waves, a device containing Russian components. That purchase sits awkwardly beside official assessments insisting a foreign actor was "very unlikely" to be responsible. If the threat was imaginary, why was the outgoing administration quietly buying the hardware that could produce it?

The rescinded assessments, according to the ODNI memo, didn't just reach the wrong conclusion. They were built on a corrupted process, one that excluded evidence, silenced dissenting analysts, and leaned on a medical study the memo describes as ethically flawed. The specifics of that study and the suppressed intelligence remain unclear, but the institutional indictment is plain.

Gabbard's tenure as intelligence chief drew sustained scrutiny and internal debate about her position. She is expected to leave office later this month, and President Donald Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as her permanent replacement.

Crawford: 'Significant harm to some of our nation's bravest'

Rep. Rick Crawford, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, praised the decision. In a statement, Crawford said:

"This is huge news for the AHI victim community, analytic integrity, and for the American people."

Crawford went further, describing the withdrawn assessments in blunt terms. As the New York Post reported, he called them "flawed, fraudulent, and manufactured Intelligence Community Assessments" that "have caused significant harm to some of our nation's bravest."

That language, "manufactured", is not the kind of word a House Intelligence Committee chairman uses casually. Crawford is alleging that the assessments were not honest analytical products but engineered conclusions designed to close the book on a question the evidence had not resolved.

An ODNI official, meanwhile, framed the rescission as the fulfillment of a commitment Gabbard made when she took office. Just The News reported the official said the move "fulfills her promise to initiate a review of the assessments, make the findings public, and ensure the mistreatment and dismissal of those impacted by anomalous health incidents is never again tolerated."

Even with the rescission, an ODNI official emphasized that analysts cannot "rule out" the possibility of foreign involvement in some small number of cases. Previously, officials had said the vast majority of reported cases could be explained by other causes. The question was always about the unexplained remainder, and whether the intelligence community was doing honest work to investigate it.

A broken process, not just a wrong answer

The distinction matters. Reasonable people can disagree about what caused Havana Syndrome. The evidence is murky, the science is contested, and the intelligence is incomplete. But the ODNI memo doesn't merely say the Biden-era assessments reached a debatable conclusion. It says they reached that conclusion by cheating, by excluding evidence, suppressing dissent, and starving the investigation of the collection activity it needed.

That is an institutional failure of a different order. It means American officials who were sickened overseas, some badly enough to end their careers, had their government not only fail to protect them but actively work to ensure the question of who attacked them would never be answered.

Former President Biden's CIA director, Bill Burns, initially entered office believing the intelligence community would find Russia was behind the incidents and launched a broad investigation. But Burns gradually shifted his view as analysts continued to argue there was no definitive evidence linking a nation-state to any reported cases. Whether that shift reflected genuine analytical rigor or the kind of institutional pressure the ODNI memo now describes is a question that demands further scrutiny.

Speculation about Gabbard's future had swirled for weeks online, and the White House had previously reaffirmed Trump's confidence in her amid personnel changes across the intelligence community. Her departure, with Bill Pulte named acting DNI and Clayton nominated as the permanent successor, closes a chapter, but the Havana Syndrome question she reopened is far from settled.

What comes next

The rescission does not, by itself, prove that a foreign government attacked American personnel. It does not name Russia or any other adversary. What it does is strip away the official conclusion that said such an attack was "very unlikely" and expose the analytical rot that produced it.

The open questions are serious. What intelligence was excluded from the Biden-era assessments? What alternative analysis was suppressed, and by whom? What was the ethically flawed medical study, and who approved its use as an analytical foundation? Did the decision to limit intelligence collection, to maintain a conclusion built on the absence of evidence, come from analysts, or from political leadership that wanted the problem to go away?

Those answers matter not just for the victims but for the integrity of the intelligence community itself. If the nation's premier analytical institutions can be steered toward a preferred conclusion on a question this consequential, one involving the physical safety of American government employees serving overseas, then every assessment they produce is suspect.

The men and women who reported debilitating symptoms in Havana and around the world deserved a government that took the threat seriously and followed the evidence wherever it led. Instead, they got assessments built to confirm a comfortable answer. Gabbard's final act as DNI was to say that isn't good enough. The next intelligence chief will have to decide whether to actually find the truth, or just let it drift back into the fog.