The Time Russians Really Did Target Americans With Microwaves

takyon writes:

The Time Russians Really Did Target Americans With Microwaves

A year before his arrival, State Department officials had told embassy staffers and their families that the Soviet Union had been blasting some kind of microwave beam at the embassy for up to 14 hours per day. But American higher-ups said there was little reason for concern. Issuing a "Fact Sheet," [1976] the State Department said that this microwave beam - later dubbed the "Moscow Signal" - was "no cause for concern," as "no causal relationship had been established between these microwave transmissions and any health problems."

There was, in other words, nothing to worry about. As a precaution, American officials erected aluminum "screening" around the embassy - all the better to "reduce the anxiety of employees." But that was it. And so Schumaker went about his work, day in and day out. For years, he and dozens of others operated out of the American embassy, assured that the microwave radiation was perfectly normal.

It was only years later, when Schumaker received a surprise leukemia diagnosis - and after multiple American ambassadors had already died from cancer, with the another diagnosed with a "severe blood disorder" - that Schumaker realized that microwave radiation, and the U.S.'s lackadaisical response, was far more disastrous, and even fatal, than he ever thought. And in recent months, that realization only deepened, for a pair of reasons.

First, a tranche of newly declassified documents confirmed that the Soviets saturated American embassy staffers in decades of elevated microwave radiation - and American higher-ups spent years trying to sweep the entire affair under the rug. And second, recent revelations about the so-called "Havana Syndrome" have given Schumaker and other diplomats who remember the days of Moscow Signal a sense of, as he sees it, "deja vu all over again."

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