Compelling Investigation Suggests Havana Syndrome Points to Russian Operatives

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Michael Weiss (0:46)

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Michael Weiss, welcome back to Foreign Office. Today's episode is a special one because I'm acting as both host and fellow guest. My other two guests are Christo Grozev, he's the head of investigations at The Insider, and Roman Dobrokhotov, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Insider, and I am the editor of The Insider's English language portal. And today's show is about our big investigative report done in conjunction with 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel into Havana Syndrome and possible connections to Russian intelligence behind what the US government calls anomalous health incidents. And not just any unit of Russian intelligence, but specifically one that should be familiar to listeners of the show, Unit 29155 of the GRU. This is an assassination and sabotage squad responsible for poisoning Sergey and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Emelian Gebrev and a Bulgarian arms dealer in Sofia, and orchestrating a coup in Montenegro and, if you followed the work the insider has done in the past several months, a series of explosions, terrorist attacks, really, of Bulgarian and Czech ammunition and weapons facilities. So 29155 has been rather busy in the last decade. And we're going to talk about our work with 60 Minutes and how we went about uncovering evidence that puts 29155 operatives at the scene of the crime, as it were, two incidents involving Havana Syndrome victims who had positively identified two separate members of 29155 years apart, about eight years apart and a thousand miles apart, one in Tbilisi, Georgia, and the other in Frankfurt, Germany. I want to start with you, Christo.

We've been working on this for about a year ourselves, but 60 Minutes has been doing this for five years. This is the fourth or fifth segment they've done on Havana. This story has kind of taken off like wildfire.

I know that it's been read and digested at very, very high levels at the US government and in the intelligence community. Walk us through a little bit about what we uncovered here, and you in particular in sort of mapping. I mean, you're probably the first person to have identified the existence of this military unit, and we have a database essentially of all the known members, at least up until very recently. So what was our methodology here? What did we do?

Christo Grozev (3:19)

Correct you a little bit because we didn't really work just for a year on this. Roman and I started looking to this probably in 2020 at the latest. It's when a lot of people came forward complaining that they were former operatives from the US government or the CIA. Many of them had left because they were victims or they had family members who had been hit. And they felt that this is not really given sufficient diligence, by their own agency, and they had turned to us as investigative journalists, with some success before that, to look into it, to give it a second look. And we did that, we slow faced it, slow walked it, because it's a very controversial topic. We started from a very skeptical point of view. I will let Roman speak for himself, but I did start as a skeptic thinking, how would this work? And the biggest question for me was not really, how would this work technically? Because we're never fully aware of all the technical developments. And of course, we might be surprised, and we should be surprised, because governments should know better than we do. The biggest question for me was, was there the capability for such a mass global attack by any government? Would any government have the people to send locations where this was happening? And as time went by, we heard about a lot more and more locations. Initially, it was Havana, but then out of the woods, woodwork came Geneva, Vienna, Berlin, Phuket, and I don't know, Belgrade. So who would have the capability to do all of that? So that was kind of the thing that gave us reason to be sceptic. Nobody has that capability.

And if anybody did, we thought it would be the Russians with their unit 29155, which is supported by a lot of locals east of stations, masquerading as military attachés around the world.