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A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee offers a critical look at the CIA’s handling of cases of unexplained health incidents, finding that its approach hampered its ability to deal with alienated staff and employees .
The Friday reporton Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI), formerly known as “Havana Syndrome,” found that “the evolution of the CIA’s organizational position has greatly complicated the CIA’s ability to consistently and transparently facilitate medical care, provide compensation and other benefits, and clearly communicate AHIs to the workforce.”
The intelligence community has assessed that the symptoms from vertigo to tinnitus and cognitive problems experienced by the agents are likely due to other medical problems, environmental exposure and psychosocial factors, not a foreign adversary.
At the same time, the report notes that numerous studies have found “clusters of symptoms and diagnoses that cannot be easily explained” among the CIA’s nearly 100 journalists.
The report’s findings complicate the position of CIA employees, whose access to treatment and compensation is somehow tied to prior beliefs that symptoms may have been the result of an attack.
The report describes an environment of mistrust within the agency, with employees saying they felt pressured to share their medical records more broadly, “and were resistant because they feared the agency would ‘closet’ their information or try to use the records to ‘discredit’ their AHI Reports such as by ‘pinning’ their AHI experience to a minor pre-existing condition.
The CIA said in a statement that it “continues to address all reported potential AHI with the utmost seriousness and compassion.”
The report also found that the CIA consistently challenged employees’ efforts to receive workers’ compensation, saying that as of late last year the agency had not accepted several elements of employees’ requests to give support for his claim and he had not always delivered the position either. all the necessary documents.
“Collectively, this resulted in CIA AHI reporters having lower approval rates for workers’ compensation claims than AHI reporters from other US agencies: only the 21% of CIA AHI applicants had been approved for workers’ compensation by December 31, 2023, compared to 67% of AHI applicants from other US agencies,” the report found.
Some AHI reporters said the inability to obtain workers’ compensation also prevented them from applying for disability benefits, leading some to retire early or “take various types of leave,” including furlough without salary
The report credited the CIA with working faster than other agencies to adopt provisions of the HAVANA Act, including through its extended care program that cleared the way for payments.
But he said the CIA must do more, noting that it halted its own clinical research on AHI, including pre- and post-AHI baseline medical tests.
“As a result, the CIA may be missing important clinical data that could advance its understanding of AHIs,” the report states.
He also said there is a need to increase trust and communication with AHI journalists, many of whom said they had suffered “significant moral damage” and felt they were not believed, while others felt their career was affected after discussing his AHI case.
The report also said that while the reporting of such cases has decreased, the agency must prepare for the potential for increased cases.
“The CIA needs a sustained posture to address these incidents and improve its medical profession. The CIA should be more prepared organizationally for the possibility that a large volume of reports of AHI, or similar types of threats to workforce, could arise in the future and overwhelm the CIA’s ability to respond on a case-by-case basis, among other things, by developing appropriate written policies and comprehensive plans for how it would respond to these threats,” he said.
For its part, the CIA said its commitment to its employees is “firm.”
“During the critical periods covered by this report, the CIA had to design a response to a vexing problem as both our understanding of the problem and the problem itself evolved. … At the same time, the CIA worked with the (intelligence community) to conduct a thorough and rigorous investigation into the possibility that foreign actors were harming US government personnel and their families, while working tirelessly to help agents and their families get the attention and support they rightfully needed and deserved,” an agency spokesman said in a statement.
“In this environment, supporting our officers and their families required us to dynamically adapt our programs and processes to changing needs and circumstances. If, in retrospect, we could have done better is that others assess, but our commitment to making sure our officers and their families had access to the care they needed has never wavered.”
