How widespread can this equipment be though that none has ever been recovered as a weapon of the enemy?
If you have enough resources to start targeting low to mid level staff, then you have to have a lot of practical devices which are mobile.
While it's plausible the US has in fact recovered a whole bunch of them and kept it secret...why? The microwave attack rumor is common which means everyone is looking into whether it can be done. Announcing you found the device and not showing pictures even - but instead nothing. No detectors either and as noted above detecting RF would be extremely cheap - deploy a couple of devices and you've got a direction finder telling you exactly where it's coming from.
Havana syndrome could be a lot of things: the US is a big place, and decades ago food safety standards and additives were very different - MRE composition or catered food service would have had regional characteristics, but so would just random events happening randomly - on a long enough timescale you'd get a cluster of health issues from the people you sent through one part of the world but not another. Once you're into talking about multi-decadal outcomes this gets even fuzzier.
It could be extremely widespread if it is used by intelligence agencies, especially if the attacks are conducted by official embassy staff with diplomatic immunity abroad or by domestic intelligence operatives in the country.
For example, I don't think CIA operatives could easily snatch a car full of FSB agents on the streets of Moscow, confiscate their equipment, and get away with it. The same for Havana. (If they had a way to detect the attacks, they might try, but the point is even then it wouldn't be easy. AFAIK, operatives generally do not attack each other directly on foreign soil.)
Can you please explain in more detail why it makes sense to attack low-level staff? I can’t follow. Is it because low-level staff rotates more often and is only a short time in the country so effects won’t be connected to their stay in Kuba?
Directly attacking the health of US personal would be a hugely provocative act. I’m not saying the Russians wouldn’t do it. There are reports that they paid out bounties in Afghanistan to attack US troops. But launching a campaign to enfeeble the intellect of future high level state department officials in this manner doesn’t make much sense. If you tried this kind of attack on a large scale and targeted a significant number of personnel, you would surely get caught which would lead to severe consequences. If you did it on a small scale that you might get away with, it would still be a risky and expensive undertaking and you’d only end up hurting a small fraction of one percent of possible future leaders. The cost benefit analysis doesn’t make sense to me.
We obviously don’t have enough information to really know what’s going on here but I do thinking some possibilities that don’t make very much sense can be excluded.
Probably a very low percentage of low level staff today will be high level staff 15 years forward - especially if you microwaving them. If that were the adversary's intention then I would expect hundreds or thousands of our staff to be suffering. As is, it looks like only a few people spread across decades. Malfunctioning of a microwave power source is the only thing that makes sense to me.
I’ll take a shot. If it takes years of exposure, or is delayed, to be effective you want to aim for staffers before they are in key/important positions. Maybe staffers in embassy positions track well into higher, more important jobs?
The stereotype for government officials/workers is they stay in that industry. Sure you can’t target specific roles but you can generally weaken an organization or division through such “gray zone” tactics. Again, just trying to add to the discussion, most likely this is not correct.
