Two CIA officers in a tech team who were sent to investigate reports of Havana Syndrome incidents in Bogota in 2021 and were themselves “hit” also received compensation, the sources said. They also won a long battle to obtain workers’ compensation from the Department of Labor. To obtain workers’ compensation, a program that covers medical treatments, the agency had to accept they suffered a traumatic brain injury at work.

Under the Havana Act, the CIA made one-time payments of up to $187,300 in 2022 or $195,00 in 2023 to officers injured in Havana, Moscow, Vienna and other places who demonstrated “an inability to work, sustain relationships, perform cognitively or physically, or other factors indicative of severe brain injury,” according to agency regulations. In 2024, compensation will be up to $204,000.

After this story was published online, a CIA spokesperson on Friday pointed to the Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment published earlier this month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the latest evaluation of anomalous health incidents.

According to the report, the intelligence community still assesses that the symptoms reported by the U.S. personnel in connection to these incidents “were the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary,” though “these findings do not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported.”

The report also said the intelligence community is still investigating these incidents, “particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis..”

“We continue to prioritize or work on such incidents, allocating resources and expertise across the government, pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and seeking information to fill the gaps we have identified,” the report adds.

More than seven years into the Havana Syndrome affair, the lack of timely diagnosis and study of the victims and the lack of information-sharing across U.S. government agencies have resulted in contradictory scientific research and government reports.

A team of University of Pennsylvania doctors who studied Havana Syndrome patients injured in Cuba and published the results in a 2019 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found significant brain anomalies in that group that were not a result of past traumatic brain injuries. But the authors of a recent National Institutes of Health study found no trace of brain injuries.

Intelligence officials first hinted in 2018 that they suspected Russia was a possible culprit. A study commissioned by the U.S. government found that commercially available technology using pulsed electromagnetic energy could cause the array of symptoms seen in Havana Syndrome victims. But in March 2023, analysts from seven U.S. spy agencies that put together an intelligence assessment said they could not attribute the incidents to a foreign adversary. However, they disagreed about how sure they were of the conclusions.

Despite that assessment, the U.S. Defense Department is still investigating the incidents, and the Defense Health Agency developed protocols to diagnose and treat Havana Syndrome in a way similar to how doctors treat concussions.

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