Tag: Havana syndrome

  • GRU Unit 29155: Russia’s Assassination and Sabotage Squad Explained

    On March 4, 2018, a former GRU colonel named Sergei Skripal was found slumped on a park bench in Salisbury, England, next to his daughter Yulia. Both were unconscious. Both were foaming at the mouth. The substance that poisoned them — smeared on the front door handle of Skripal’s home — was Novichok, a Soviet-developed nerve agent with a lethal dose measured in milligrams. Skripal had been a double agent for British intelligence during the 1990s and early 2000s, was imprisoned in Russia in 2006, and had been released to the UK in a 2010 spy swap. Both Skripals survived. A police officer who responded to the scene was hospitalized. Four months later, a man named Charlie Rowley found a discarded perfume bottle in a charity bin in nearby Amesbury, gave it to his partner Dawn Sturgess, and Sturgess died from Novichok exposure. The two Russian operatives British police identified as responsible — operating under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov — went on Russian state television to claim they had traveled to Salisbury as tourists to see the cathedral’s 123-meter spire. Within weeks, the investigative site Bellingcat had identified them as Alexander Mishkin, a military doctor, and Anatoliy Chepiga, a decorated special forces colonel — both members of GRU Unit 29155. The unit had existed since at least 2008. Its existence had never been publicly confirmed before.

    What Unit 29155 is

    Unit 29155 is a subdivision of the GRU — Russia’s military intelligence directorate, now formally called the GU but still referred to by its Cold War abbreviation — specialized in foreign assassination, sabotage, and destabilization operations. It operates from the headquarters of the 161st Special Purpose Specialist Training Center in eastern Moscow. Its members are drawn from GRU special forces veterans of Russia’s wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Ukraine. It was commanded, through most of the period it has been publicly documented, by Major General Andrei Vladimirovich Averyanov — a man whose daughter’s 2017 wedding photos, obtained by The New York Times in 2019, show him posing alongside Chepiga, the Skripal operative who had been given the Hero of the Russian Federation, Russia’s highest honor.

    The unit’s operational profile is distinct from the GRU’s other cyber and signals intelligence units. Unit 29155 does human operations — sending officers across borders on false passports to conduct assassinations, detonate ammunition depots, and destabilize foreign governments. The unit’s existence only became publicly known in 2019, eleven years after it is believed to have begun operating. Its tradecraft, according to the security officials who study it, is notable for its sloppiness — a pattern of operations that either fail outright or succeed despite leaving trails the unit apparently didn’t believe anyone would follow.

    The operational record

    The documented case history, compiled by Bellingcat, Czech intelligence, British authorities, The Insider, and multiple European intelligence services working from open-source data, includes operations across at least eight countries over more than a decade.

    In 2014, during Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, Unit 29155 operatives were deployed to eastern Czechia. On October 16, 2014, ammunition warehouses at Vrbětice exploded. Two Czech citizens were killed. A second explosion followed in December. The Czech government initially treated the blasts as industrial accidents. Seven years later, on April 17, 2021, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš announced that Czech counterintelligence had determined Unit 29155 was responsible — and that the operatives involved were the same men wanted in Britain for the Skripal poisoning, including Chepiga and Mishkin. The motive, reconstructed by investigators, was operational: the Vrbětice warehouses stored munitions belonging to Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, scheduled for delivery to Ukraine, which desperately needed them to fight Russia-backed separatists. The GRU was destroying weapons bound for Russia’s adversary in an undeclared war.

    In April 2015, Gebrev — the Bulgarian arms dealer whose munitions had been in the Vrbětice warehouses — was poisoned in Sofia. A substance was smeared on the handle of his car. He was hospitalized alongside his son and an employee. Released from the hospital, he was poisoned again with the same substance and survived. Bulgarian investigators identified at least eight Unit 29155 officers who had traveled to Bulgaria in the weeks surrounding the attack, including the man British authorities later identified as the commander of the Skripal team — Denis Sergeev, operating under the alias Sergei Fedotov. Three Russians were eventually charged. The case, according to The Times, became the “Rosetta Stone” that let Western intelligence services decode Unit 29155’s operational pattern after the Skripal attack three years later.

    In October 2016, Montenegro’s government announced it had foiled a coup attempt on the day of the country’s parliamentary elections. The plan, according to Montenegrin prosecutors: occupy the parliament building, assassinate Prime Minister Milo Đukanović, and prevent Montenegro from joining NATO. Fourteen people were charged, including Russian citizens. Two — Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov — were identified as Unit 29155 operatives. Both were convicted in absentia in 2019.

    In October 2018, Dutch officials caught four GRU officers in a rented car outside the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, attempting to hack into the organization’s Wi-Fi network. The OPCW was investigating the Novichok used to poison Skripal. At least one of the operatives has been linked to Unit 29155.

    Parallel operations have been documented or credibly alleged in Moldova (a 2014 destabilization campaign), France (15 operatives tracked visiting the Haute-Savoie region between 2014 and 2018), Switzerland (surveillance of World Anti-Doping Agency investigators in 2016-2017), and Spain (possible destabilization operations during the 2017 Catalonia independence referendum). In April 2024, a joint investigation by 60 Minutes, Der Spiegel, and The Insider alleged that Unit 29155 was connected to cases of “Havana syndrome” — the neurological symptoms reported by U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in multiple countries since 2016. The Kremlin denied the allegations. The U.S. National Intelligence Council’s 2023 assessment concluded that adversary involvement was “unlikely.” The investigation disputed the assessment.

    The tradecraft failures

    The detail that makes Unit 29155 distinctive in the history of foreign intelligence services is how badly it operates. The two Skripal operatives used passport numbers that were sequential — four digits apart — suggesting they had been issued in a batch from a GRU-controlled office rather than produced through normal passport-issuance channels. Their cover identities could be penetrated by cross-referencing travel records with Russian databases that Bellingcat and its collaborators could access online. The perfume bottle containing Novichok was discarded where a Salisbury resident could find it, resulting in the death of a British citizen who had no connection to the operation. The 2017 Chechen guerrilla hit failed when the target’s wife shot the assassin. The Montenegro coup was rolled up on the day of the elections. The OPCW hack was caught in the parking lot.

    The sloppiness is so consistent that some Western intelligence analysts have concluded it is not entirely accidental. Moscow’s willingness to conduct operations that can be traced back to the Russian state, with operatives who receive state awards and whose handlers appear in family wedding photographs, signals a particular kind of message: the operations are deniable in the formal diplomatic sense, but the authorship is not supposed to be invisible. The targets — dissidents, journalists, arms dealers supplying Ukraine, NATO candidate countries — are meant to understand who is coming for them. The deterrent function requires attribution. The operational failures are embarrassing. The structural message — Russia reaches its enemies wherever they are — is preserved by the attribution itself.

    Why Unit 29155 is Lecture 24

    Unit 29155 is the final lecture of the Shadowcraft course because it’s the most current case study and the most operationally straightforward. The course’s earlier lectures — United Fruit, the British South Africa Company, BCCI, P2, the Vatican Bank — document covert power operating through commercial, financial, or institutional intermediaries. Unit 29155 operates through officers traveling on false passports with vials of nerve agent. The mediation layer is thin. The state is directly conducting the operations.

    But the structural logic is the same. Operation Gladio maintained Cold War paramilitary networks for purposes beyond their stated defensive mission. Wagner Group provides Russia’s state with deniable violence in theaters where direct military involvement would be politically costly. Unit 29155 provides deniable violence in theaters where even Wagner’s presence would be too visible — London, Salisbury, Sofia, Prague, Podgorica. Each institution fills a different rung on the deniability ladder. The Safari Club outsourced covert operations to allies. Western Goals outsourced surveillance to a nonprofit. Unit 29155 doesn’t outsource. It does the work in-house, sloppily, and relies on the formal deniability of state denials to maintain the architecture that lets the state keep denying.

    We cover Unit 29155 alongside Crypto AG, Mossack Fonseca, China Poly Group, and 20 other case studies of covert institutional power across our Shadowcraft course — where the final lecture is about a unit whose tradecraft fails often enough that it proves a harder point: the failures are visible because the attributions are the point.

  • Mass Hysteria: From Salem Witch Trials to TikTok Tics — How Groups Generate Symptoms

    In 2021, neurologists across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Denmark, and France began seeing a surge of teenagers — predominantly girls, median age around 18 — presenting with explosive-onset tic-like movements and vocalizations that resembled Tourette syndrome. The symptoms appeared abruptly rather than gradually. They were overwhelmingly complex (full-body jerks, coprolalia, bizarre stereotyped phrases) rather than the simple eye blinks and throat-clearing that characterize early Tourette’s. They didn’t wax and wane the way tics do. And when clinicians asked the patients what they’d been doing before the symptoms started, the answer was consistent: watching TikTok.

    Researchers at Hannover Medical School in Germany identified the specific trigger. A 22-year-old German YouTuber named Jan Zimmermann, who runs a channel called Gewitter im Kopf (“Thunderstorm in the Brain”), had been posting videos of what he claimed were his Tourette symptoms. The channel became the second most successful YouTube channel in Germany. Clinicians determined that while Zimmermann likely had mild actual Tourette syndrome, the majority of his on-camera behaviors were functional — not tics. Teenagers watching the videos developed symptoms that overlapped specifically with the behaviors Zimmermann displayed on camera. The symptoms weren’t random. They were modeled — unconsciously reproduced from a virtual index case that the patients had never met in person, had never shared a room with, and had encountered only through a screen.

    The researchers named the phenomenon Mass Social Media-Induced Illness — MSMI — and published it in Brain, one of the oldest and most respected neurology journals. It was the first documented outbreak of mass psychogenic illness spread entirely through social media, without any physical proximity between the affected individuals. The condition that has existed for at least 600 years had found a new transmission vector.

    The mechanism: how groups generate symptoms

    Mass psychogenic illness — historically called mass hysteria, now more precisely termed mass sociogenic illness — involves the spread of physical symptoms through a population in the absence of any infectious agent, toxin, or organic cause. The symptoms are real. The suffering is genuine. The mechanism is psychological: emotional contagion, suggestibility, and the unconscious modeling of observed symptoms, amplified by stress, anxiety, and social cohesion within the affected group.

    The pattern is remarkably consistent across centuries. An outbreak typically begins with a single person — the index case — who develops symptoms in a stressful environment. Other people who are socially connected to the index case, or who learn about the symptoms through communication, begin experiencing similar symptoms. The spread follows social networks, not transmission pathways. It usually begins among people of higher social status within the group and expands outward. Media coverage amplifies and perpetuates outbreaks. And the symptoms, while they lack organic cause, are not fabricated — the people experiencing them cannot simply choose to stop.

    The TikTok tic outbreak is diagnostically distinguishable from actual Tourette syndrome on multiple clinical criteria. In the MSMI patients, onset was abrupt rather than gradual. Symptoms constantly deteriorated rather than following the waxing and waning pattern of tics. Simple movements like eye blinking were absent or rare — the symptoms were overwhelmingly complex and theatrical. Movements were primarily in the arms and trunk rather than the face and eyes. Premonitory urges — the sensation that precedes a tic in Tourette syndrome — were either absent or described with atypical qualities. And nearly all patients had pre-existing psychiatric conditions: 81 percent showed abnormalities in social behavior, 47 percent had obsessive-compulsive behaviors, 41 percent had anxiety, and 31 percent had depression. Psychological stressors — including the pandemic lockdown, social isolation, and family disruption — were identified in every case.

    Havana syndrome: mass psychogenic illness in the intelligence community

    In late 2016, U.S. diplomats and CIA personnel stationed in Cuba began reporting neurological symptoms — dizziness, headaches, hearing loss, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, memory problems — that they attributed to exposure to mysterious sounds around their homes and offices. The condition spread to personnel in other countries including China, Austria, and the United States itself. Over 1,000 people eventually reported symptoms. The U.S. government labeled the cases “anomalous health incidents” and spent years investigating potential causes including microwave weapons, directed-energy devices, and sonic attacks.

    In 2024, NIH studies published in JAMA examined 86 people with reported Havana syndrome. The results showed no clinical signs or brain image abnormalities to explain the symptoms. The only significant differences between affected personnel and matched controls were self-reported fatigue, stress, and depression. A 2023 intelligence community assessment concluded that the injuries were not the result of foreign attacks, pointing instead to previous injuries, stress, environmental factors, and “social factors” — group psychology in which symptoms reported by one individual spread serially through a community.

    The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had reached the same conclusion in 2018: mass psychogenic illness. The finding was classified. Recordings of mysterious sounds that victims said coincided with their attacks were analyzed and identified as the mating calls of the Indies short-tailed cricket. Medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew, co-author of a book on the subject, described the outbreak as following the textbook pattern: it began among a small, cohesive group of high-status individuals in a stressful environment, then spread through their social network, amplified by media coverage and institutional attention.

    The political dimension made the diagnosis almost impossible to deliver. Telling CIA officers that their debilitating symptoms are psychogenic — real but psychological in origin — is functionally equivalent to telling them their suffering isn’t legitimate, which it is. The stigma attached to psychogenic illness created a vacuum that alternative explanations (energy weapons, foreign attacks) filled, which in turn attracted congressional hearings, diplomatic consequences, and further media coverage that perpetuated the outbreak. The condition persisted in part because the correct diagnosis was politically unacceptable.

    The pattern across centuries

    The TikTok tics and Havana syndrome are the 21st century’s most prominent outbreaks, but the phenomenon is old enough to have its own medieval literature. The dancing plagues of the Middle Ages — most notably Strasbourg in 1518, where hundreds of people danced uncontrollably in the streets for days — are the earliest well-documented cases. Nuns in convents experienced outbreaks of involuntary meowing, biting, and convulsions throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. The Salem witch trials of 1692 featured young girls exhibiting fits, contortions, and screaming that were attributed to demonic possession — symptoms that fit the pattern of mass psychogenic illness in a small, stressed, theocratic community.

    In 2011, students at Le Roy Junior-Senior High School in upstate New York developed symptoms resembling Tourette syndrome. Environmental causes were investigated and ruled out. The students were diagnosed with conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness. In Sweden, refugee children facing deportation developed resignation syndrome — coma-like states lasting weeks or months — a condition that appears to exist exclusively among the refugee population in Sweden and is believed to involve psychological contagion among young people in similar circumstances.

    What social media changed

    Until the TikTok outbreak, every documented case of mass psychogenic illness required physical proximity. People had to be in the same school, factory, convent, embassy, or community. The spread followed face-to-face social networks. The German researchers’ designation of MSMI as a new category of mass psychogenic illness reflects the structural break: for the first time, the index case was virtual. The affected teenagers had never met Jan Zimmermann. They encountered his symptoms through a screen. The emotional contagion that drives the phenomenon — identification with the index case, modeling of observed behaviors, amplification through stress and anxiety — operated across a digital medium rather than a physical one.

    The implications are straightforward and alarming. Physical proximity imposed a natural limit on outbreaks. A school has a few hundred students. A convent has a few dozen nuns. An embassy has a few hundred staff. TikTok has over a billion users. The transmission vector that social media provides is orders of magnitude larger than any physical social network. Zimmermann’s channel had millions of subscribers. Tourette syndrome content on TikTok accumulated billions of views. The potential population of susceptible individuals exposed to modeling stimuli expanded from the hundreds (in a physical-proximity outbreak) to the hundreds of millions.

    The German researchers found that the sex ratio of affected patients correlated with the sex of the index case: in Germany, where the index case (Zimmermann) was male, roughly half the patients were male. In English-speaking countries, where the most influential Tourette content creator was female, patients were predominantly female. The identification mechanism — emotional connection to the index case — was specific enough to follow demographic alignment between the model and the affected population.

    Treatment that worked included reducing social media exposure (specifically tic-disorder content), cognitive behavioral therapy, stress management, and reassurance about the functional nature of the symptoms. Medications used for actual Tourette syndrome were largely ineffective, which is itself a diagnostic criterion: functional tics don’t respond to the pharmacology that works on neurological tics because the mechanism is different.

    The condition researchers described in Brain is the 21st-century expression of a phenomenon that has existed for as long as humans have lived in groups: the capacity of social networks to generate real physical symptoms through psychological contagion. What changed isn’t the mechanism. It’s the scale. The convent had walls. TikTok doesn’t.

    We cover mass psychogenic illness alongside ball lightning, the Hum, UAPs, and the full landscape of phenomena that exist at the boundary between the explained and the unexplained across our Fortean Phenomena course — including why the oldest psychiatric phenomenon in recorded history found its most powerful transmission vector in an app designed for dance videos.