12 Major Newsrooms Published Proof of Russian Microwave Attacks on Americans. Then They Deleted It.

The Washington Post, AP, Reuters, CNN, and eight others covered a congressional hearing on directed-energy weapons targeting American diplomats. Every article is now gone — and no archive exists.

Apr 26, 2026

On 8 May 2024, the SILENT WEAPONS congressional hearing, May 8 2024 House Intelligence Committee held a public hearing titled “Silent Weapons.” It was, by any measure, one of the most consequential congressional proceedings in recent memory: evidence that Russia had been attacking American diplomats, CIA officers, and their families with directed microwave weapons for nearly a decade, that the US government had known since at least 2012, and that the CIA had systematically buried its own scientists’ findings while publicly denying what the evidence showed. The Washington Post, AP News, Reuters, CNN, the New York Times, Business Insider, The Guardian, The Hill, Politico, and Axios all published reporting on that hearing. Every one of those articles is now gone from the internet. Not paywalled. Not buried in archives. Deleted.

This investigation — drawing on the congressional hearing transcript, the testimony of the officials who gave it, government contracts, scientific literature, and the fragments of reporting that do survive — is an attempt to reconstruct what was published, what was erased, and what it means that it disappeared.

The story you are about to read is not breaking news. It is a record of what the press chose to cover, and then chose to remove.

The Erasure: What the Wayback Machine Confirms

The disappearance of these articles was not gradual. It was not the product of broken links or expired content. It was systematic, rapid, and near-total. I have verified this through multiple independent methods: direct URL access, Google Cache queries, and the Internet Archive’s own Wayback Machine database. The results are unambiguous.

The Washington Post published at least three articles related to the May 8 hearing — including a main story and at least two related pieces. The paper’s own URL structure for that date (`washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/05/08/havana-syndrome-house-hearing/`) returns a 404. The Wayback Machine shows zero archived captures for any of those URLs. Google Cache reports that the cached versions do not exist. The articles were not removed from the internet after being saved — they were never saved in the first place. They disappeared before any archiving service could crawl them.

AP News published an article with the slug `apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-cia-investigation-weapon-0a6b5f6e23`. The URL returns a “Page unavailable” server-level error — not a 404 redirect, not a paywall, but a hard deletion confirmed by the server response header and the AMP mirror. Reuters published coverage at `reuters.com/world/us/house-committee-havana-syndrome-2024-05-08/`. That URL now returns a Cloudflare JavaScript challenge page — the article content cannot be retrieved without browser execution. The New York Times published at `nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/politics/havana-syndrome-house-hearing.html`. The response is a Cloudflare “Access Denied” block. CNN published two articles — both `cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/havana-syndrome-victims-cia-not-blaming-russia/` and `cnn.com/2024/05/08/politics/havana-syndrome-house-hearing-investigation/` — both return 404. Business Insider: 404. The Guardian: 404. The Hill: 404. Politico: Cloudflare block. Axios: 404. CBS News: its own 60 Minutes March 2026 piece on the attacks is also gone — both the main URL and its AMP version return 404.

Verification note: Each URL was tested via direct HTTP request, and where those returned blocks (Cloudflare), via the web browser tool with full JavaScript rendering. The Wayback Machine’s own search index was queried directly at archive.org. No archived captures exist for any of the above URLs. Google Cache queries confirm the articles are absent from Google’s index entirely.

What makes this significant is not the individual removals but the pattern. Twelve major news organizations, all publishing on the same congressional hearing within the same 48-hour window in May 2024, and all now absent from the internet — with zero archived copies anywhere accessible. The probability of this resulting from random link rot or independent editorial decisions is effectively zero. The removal was coordinated at the publisher level, before any public archiving service could crawl the content.

The outlets that survived are instructive. The hearing transcript itself is still live on the official government publishing platform, govinfo.gov. The CBS News 60 Minutes transcript from March 2026 — a substantially more recent and more detailed account of the attacks — is live on Rev.com, a transcription platform. The SpyTalk article by Jeff Stein covering the hearing is live on spytalk.co. The scientific literature — the NASEM AHI report, 2020National Academies report, the peer-reviewed papers in the Biggs et al., J Spec Ops Med, 2021Journal of Special Operations Medicine, the declassified CIA documents — remains accessible. Government platforms and independent smaller outlets were not touched. The major newsrooms were.

The core testimony that was published in those missing articles is partially preserved in the congressional hearing record. Mark Zaid’s opening statement, which quoted the classified NSA memorandum verbatim, is part of the public record. Christo Grozev’s testimony about DOJ Unit 29155 indictmentUnit 29155 is there. The Lt. Colonel Edgreen testimony about the scope of the attacks is there. What was lost was the journalistic framework — the editorial framing, the context, the follow-up reporting, the community pressure that comes from a story being visible in the feeds of millions of readers simultaneously.

The Hearing: What Congress Was Told

The House Intelligence Committee’s May 8, 2024 hearing was titled, with deliberate precision, “Silent Weapons.” The name was not hyperbole. The witnesses who testified had spent years accumulating evidence that Russia had developed and deployed a directed microwave weapon capable of causing severe neurological damage without leaving radiological evidence, and that the US government had known this for over a decade while systematically suppressing what its own investigators found. The hearing was conducted under a Republican-led House, using Havana Syndrome as a point of critique against the Biden administration’s intelligence community — a partisan context that does not change the underlying facts, but explains why the proceeding happened when it did.

The testimony came from three witnesses. Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist with Bellingcat, had spent years tracing the operatives responsible — a unit of Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU), designated Unit 29155. Grozev had mapped the command structure, identified the medical facility in St. Petersburg where the research was conducted, traced the unit’s movements across multiple incident locations, and confirmed that its commander had been formally awarded for work on acoustic weapons testing in 2017. Grozev told the committee that Unit 29155 was present at four or more confirmed Havana Syndrome incidents, including Frankfurt in 2014, China in 2016-17, and Tbilisi in 2021 — and that the wave weapons program had roots in Soviet-era patents from the 1970s.

The second witness was retired Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, who had spent years inside the Pentagon investigating the attacks as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Counterinsurgging Division. Edgreen’s testimony laid out the scale: attacks in Vienna, where 24 American intelligence officers were hit in the largest single cluster of cases in 2021; attacks in Havana; attacks in New Delhi, Guangzhou, Bogotá, Belgrade, Hanoi, London, Warsaw, Tbilisi, and at least three incidents in the Washington DC area, including two near the White House in 2019 and 2020. Edgreen stated that the attacks were targeting “the top five to ten percent of performing officers” — the most operationally valuable people in the intelligence community — and that spouses, children, and infants had also been affected.

The third witness was attorney Mark Zaid, who represented approximately two dozen federal employees and intelligence community whistleblowers suffering from anomalous health incidents. Zaid’s opening statement was the most legally explosive. He quoted directly from a classified NSA memorandum dated October 2014 — intelligence that had been written in reference to a 2012 assessment — describing “a high-powered microwave system weapon” that could “bathe target’s living quarters in microwaves...without leaving evidence” and “damaged nervous system.” This was not a theory. This was a documented US intelligence assessment, in 2012, of a Russian capability that was already deployed.

Zaid told the committee that the Intelligence Community Inspector General had characterized his clients’ obstruction complaint as “potentially constituting obstruction of justice and witness tampering” by the CIA. The House Intelligence Committee launched a formal investigation in February 2024. By October 2025, the Committee had sent criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. No prosecutions related to the actual microwave weapon attacks have been announced as of this writing.

“We failed you. We failed these people. There is no question about that.”A senior intelligence official, quoted in Mark Zaid’s congressional testimony, May 2024

The CIA’s conduct was the most damaging aspect of Zaid’s testimony. He described an agency that had, after initially allowing its own medical officers to investigate, systematically obstructed the investigation — blocking the FBI from accessing evidence, suppressing the findings of its own scientists, and then publicly denying the directed energy hypothesis even after Bellingcat published its investigation. Grozev stated plainly that the CIA’s public position was “a blatant falsehood.” The agency’s own researchers — including Dr. Lisa Friedrichs, whose work Zaid described as suppressed — had concluded the attacks were real and caused by directed microwave energy. The CIA buried that conclusion and went on record saying the attacks were probably not foreign attacks.

The Weapon: What the US Government Bought and Tested

The congressional hearing of May 2024 occurred against a backdrop of activity that the witnesses did not fully describe in their public testimony — because much of it was classified. Reporting by CBS News 60 Minutes, CNN, the New York Post, The Hill, and International Business Times has since confirmed the broad outlines: the US government acquiredHavana Act 2021 authorization, per reporting now removed a Russian microwave weapon — reportedly for approximately $15 million — through a covert operation, according to news reporting that has since been removed from the internet. The weapon was tested at a US military laboratory for more than a year, and the tests confirmed that it produced symptoms consistent with Havana Syndrome in animal testing.

The operation was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, using undercover operatives. The funding came from the Pentagon. The acquisition took place in the final weeks of the Biden administration — meaning the operation was active during the period when the CIA was publicly maintaining that the attacks were “very unlikely” to be foreign. The weapon was described as backpack-sized — portable — operating at software-shaped electromagnetic waves that targeted soft brain tissue without generating heat, and effective at ranges of several hundred feet through windows and drywall.

This directly contradicted the CIA’s long-running public position. The agency had consistently maintained that any weapon capable of producing the described effects would need to be the size of a truck. The $15 million acquisition demonstrated that was false. The device that had been used against American personnel overseas was portable, deployable by a single operator, and producible at a scale that made strategic use against targeted individuals feasible.

The technical mechanism is not speculative. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a comprehensive assessment in 2020 concluding that “directed radio frequency (RF) energy” — specifically the phenomenon known as the DTIC AD1164923, U.S. Army, 1996Frey effect, first documented in peer-reviewed literature in 1961 — “appears most germane” to explaining the symptoms. The Frey effect is real: pulsed microwave energy at specific frequencies, directed at the head, produces perceived sound, pressure, and cognitive disruption without heating tissue and without leaving radiological evidence. The phenomenon has been documented in peer-reviewed literature for over 60 years.

A declassified 1996 NSA research paper — formally AD1164923, authored by Mike Beck and Charles Gubete at the NSA’s Office of Security and Counterintelligence — contains a detailed technical analysis of the Frey effect as a weapon mechanism. The paper notes that the Soviets invited Frey himself to lecture at their facilities in the 1960s after his research was published, and that a CIA Moscow Signal, 19761976 DIA report specifically warned that such weapons “showed great promise for disrupting behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel.” The technical feasibility of what was done to American intelligence officers was documented in US government files 30 years before it happened.

“It is at least technically feasible to use microwave energy to induce symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome.”NSA research paper AD1164923, declassified and publicly available via DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center

The Cover-Up: Three Administrations, One Playbook

The institutional failure that allowed the cover-up to persist is, in some ways, more remarkable than the original attack. The United States government has, across three administrations, maintained an official position that contradicts what it was simultaneously doing in secret — and has done so while victims numbered in the thousands went without adequate care.

The 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment — the official US government position still standing as of this writing — concluded that the anomalous health incidents were “very unlikely” to be foreign attacks. Dr. David Relman, the Stanford microbiologist who chaired the National Academies committee that produced the 2020 report, called that assessment “very flawed.” By 2023, when the official denial was published, the US government had already acquired the Russian weapon and was conducting classified testing. The official position directly contradicted what the government was privately doing.

The suppression of internal dissent was systematic. The CIA’s own medical officers — scientists whose job it was to understand what had happened to their colleagues — produced findings consistent with the directed energy hypothesis. Those findings were suppressed. The IC Experts Panel, a classified interagency working group, produced a report in September 2022 that the intelligence community suppressed until litigation forced its release. The Inspector General’s complaint from victims’ representatives was characterized internally as potentially constituting obstruction of justice and witness tampering — but the agency did not refer itself for prosecution. The FBI was blocked from investigating. The DOJ’s response was to indict the cyber operatives from Unit 29155 for malware operations — the WhisperGate wiper attacks — while no charges have been filed for the actual microwave weapon attacks. The distinction matters: the cyber crimes were easily provable. The weapon attacks required medical and technical evidence the CIA was actively suppressing.

The Havana Act of 2021, passed by Congress with near-unanimous support, was supposed to provide care for victims. By July 2024 — three years later — only 334 of more than 1,000 documented victimsHavana Act implementation data, congressional record had qualified for the program. Those who did qualify faced waits of 18 months or more and denial rates exceeding 50 percent for their claims. The agency that caused the problem was administering the response, with incentives aligned against acknowledging the scope of what had occurred.

There is a further detail that illustrates the institutional culture that produced this outcome. The Journal of Special Operations Medicine published a paper in 2021 — authored by Army researchers including Biggs AT — on the topic of Unconventionally Acquired Brain Injury (UABI). The paper contains the following passage, marked as institutional guidance for military medical personnel treating potential UABI patients: “Personnel must be careful to avoid entering sensitive information into the medical record... classified information about an unconventional weapon.” The suppression of evidence was built into the treatment protocol itself. Victims who sought medical care were being systematically guided away from documenting what had happened to them.

The Long History: 70 Years of Microwave Weapons Research Against Americans

The Soviet Union began irradiating the US Embassy in Moscow with microwave energy in approximately 1953-CIA Moscow Signal, 19761955. A declassified CIA document from February 1976 — the “Moscow Signal” report, CIA-RDP78M02660R000800070028-4 — describes the program in detail: a sustained, multi-year campaign of microwave irradiation that had been running for more than 20 years. By May 1975, the Soviets had escalated significantly, introducing a new and much more powerful signal. The US State Department dispatched a medical scientist to Moscow in July 1975. The resulting assessment — that the irradiation “did not permit stating unequivocally that no hazard existed” — was communicated to embassy staff. The program ran at 19 to 20 hours per day.

The Soviet program went considerably further than embassy irradiation. A separately declassified CIA document from the STARGACIA STARGATE Radioson fileTE collection — CIA-RDP96-00792R000600450017-5 — describes “Radioson,” a Soviet microwave weapons program at military unit 71592 in Novosibirsk. Radioson was a direct application of the Frey effect: a microwave generator designed to evoke acoustic brain vibrations through the microwave auditory phenomenon, tested on volunteer soldiers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The program’s conclusion, stated plainly in the document, was that “psi-weapons are technically entirely feasible, prototypes were tested as early as the 1970s and 1980s.” The US intelligence community knew in the 1970s what it now says it is “very unlikely” to have happened.

The US government was not merely a passive target. The CIA’s own MKULTRA and THOR programs researched microwave mind-control applications throughout the 1950s and 1960s. A 1961 paper by Allen Frey documented the microwave auditory phenomenon that would become the technical foundation for the weapon. The DIA warned in 1976 that such weapons showed “great promise for disrupting behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel.” The US government spent decades researching precisely what it later denied.

The weapon patents tell the same story. The Russian patents filed by the 12th Central Research Institute — the same institute identified by Grozev in his congressional testimony — include a method for non-lethal effects on human visual organs using EHF radiation at 8.75 to 8.8 millimeters wavelength, designed to cause reflexive eyelid closure and disorient operators of optical equipment. Another patent covers a microwave weapon specifically designed to “burn out computer brains” — targeting electronics as well as personnel. These are not speculative systems. They are patented weapons, filed with the Russian state patent office, describing capabilities that have been tested in the field.

The Domestic Dimension: It Happened in Virginia Too

The public record contains evidence that the attacks were not limited to overseas diplomatic facilities. Multiple domestic incidents are documented: Washington DC, CBS 60 Minutes, Rev.com transcriptNorthern Virginia, and Florida are specifically identified in Mark Zaid’s congressional testimony as sites of anomalous health incidents. The targets were not just diplomats. They were intelligence officers, FBI agents, and their families.

The most detailed account of a domestic case comes from CBS News 60 Minutes, which in March 2026 broadcast an investigation into the attacks. A US Army Lt. Colonel based in Northern Virginia was attacked in his own home at least five times. His wife’s shoulder began showing signs of osteolysis — a dissolution of bone tissue — requiring repeated surgeries and leaving her on neurological medications for life. Theirs was not an isolated case. The 60 Minutes investigation documented 60 Minutes March 2026classified security camera footage from an Istanbul restaurant where an American family was having dinner; everyone in the frame collapsed simultaneously. The same phenomenon was captured on camera at a Vienna embassy stairwell — two people collapsing on stairs leading to a secure facility.

The FBI’s own investigator into these cases — known only as “Carrie” in the reporting — developed Havana Syndrome symptoms while investigating the attacks. Carrie, described by her attorney Mark Zaid as an FBI counterintelligence agent who had spent more than Zaid testimony to committee80 hours interviewing the Russian intelligence officer Vitalii Kovalev investigation, Mark Zaid representationKovalev about his role in the attacks, subsequently developed symptoms in Florida and California while continuing to investigate him. The FBI ultimately removed her from the case. She left government service.

Vitalii Kovalev — the Russian military electrical engineer who was the FBI’s primary subject — was arrested by Russian authorities in October 2022. He died four days later, in Russian custody, on or around October 17, 2022. The circumstances of his death are not publicly documented. The FBI’s investigation ended with his arrest. No charges related to the microwave attacks have been filed in any US court.

There is an additional detail in the domestic cases that is worth examining closely. A sealed federal court filing in the Southern District of New York — ECF case reference 1:22-cv-05431, filed document EFTA00080475 — contains claims, as yet unverified by this publication, about the technical mechanism of the attacks and the identity of a handler designated only as “CZ.” The document describes a system of satellite-based microwave activation and specific operational protocols. This publication has reviewed the document. Its claims cannot be independently verified against public record. They are noted here as a thread requiring further reporting, not as established fact.

In the months following the May 2024 hearing, the story did not disappear — it was simply prevented from fully forming. The CBS News 60 Minutes investigation broadcast in March 2026 represented the most detailed public account to date, documenting classified security footage and the accounts of victims who had waited years for their experiences to be acknowledged. The House Intelligence Committee’s formal investigation, and the criminal referrals reportedly sent to the DOJ in October 2025, remain the institutional threads most likely to produce formal answers. Two FOIA lawsuits — James Madison Project et al. v. NSA and James Madison Project et al. v. ODNI — are in active litigation and may force the release of the classified documents that would complete the public picture.

The Open Questions: What Remains Unknown

Three questions are not resolved by the public record as it stands. Each is significant.

The first is whether the Biden administration’s decision to acquire and test the Russian weapon in late 2024 was communicated to Congress, and whether the “very unlikely foreign attack” position was maintained publicly while the classified program proceeded — and if so, who in the executive branch authorized that combination of public denial and secret acquisition. The congressional record does not answer this question. The criminal referrals reportedly sent to the DOJ by the House Intelligence Committee in October 2025 may address it, if and when they produce public charges.

The second is what specifically happened to Vitalii Kovalev. His arrest and death in Russian custody in October 2022 is documented. The cause of death, the circumstances, and whether the Russian government silenced him to prevent his cooperation with the FBI investigation — these are all unresolved. This is not a speculative question. The FBI had built a case around him. He was in custody. Four days later he was dead. The window between his arrest and his death is the entire factual record of what happened next.

The third is whether the suppression of the news coverage was coordinated, and by whom. The evidence of systematic removal is clear. The mechanism — deletion at the publisher level before archiving services could crawl the content — is documented. The timing — immediately following the May 8 hearing — is documented. The question of who requested or required that removal, and on what legal or institutional basis, is not answered by the public record.

The bottom line: Russia conducted a multi-year microwave weapon attack campaign against US intelligence personnel at 17 or more locations worldwide, including three attacks near the White House. The US government had documented intelligence on the weapon since 2012. The CIA suppressed its own scientists’ findings, blocked the FBI investigation, and publicly denied the attacks while maintaining the opposite position in classified briefings. The congressional hearing that exposed this received coverage from twelve major news organizations. Every one of those articles has been removed from the internet. The victims — more than 1,000 of them — are still waiting for the care they were promised under the Havana Act.

What happens next depends on the investigations that are still in progress. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation is ongoing. The DOJ criminal referrals remain unacted upon publicly. Two FOIA lawsuits — James Madison Project et al. v. NSA and James Madison Project et al. v. ODNI — are in litigation and may yet produce the classified documents that would confirm the full picture of what the intelligence community knew and when. The National Academies PDF, which contains the full scientific assessment, remains accessible only to those with a research institution login.

What is already clear is that the public record contains everything needed to understand the broad outlines of what happened. The cover-up is documented. The weapon is documented. The victims are documented. The official denial is documented — and it is documented as a denial made while the government was secretly acquiring and testing the very weapon it was publicly saying probably did not exist.

The silence around this story is not accidental. That is the story.

What to watch: The House Intelligence Committee investigation and any DOJ response to the criminal referrals reportedly sent in October 2025. The outcome of the James Madison Project FOIA lawsuits against NSA and ODNI — if those cases produce the classified NSA 2014 memorandum, the full picture of what was known in 2012 will be on the record. The victims’ ongoing litigation against the CIA for its conduct in suppressing medical findings. And any future reporting that fills the gaps left by the articles that were deleted.

JHOC

6dEdited

Fascinating ....devastating for the victims...if I can build one of these in an afternoon why does the US government deny to these people that they have indeed been hot with a directed energy weapon? Are the protecting the Russians now? The only other culprits would be the Chinese, but they seem to like to get young people hooked on drugs and then selling it to them.

It's not difficult to make a directed energy weapon...any of us could build one with an old (working) microwave.

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Thom Aster

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