Video shows what looks like dead bodies carted out of the White House
Olivia Troye was homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. She had served in the Pentagon, deployed to Iraq, served in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center. At the White House, she worked in the 19th century Eisenhower Executive Office Building beside the West Wing. In the summer of 2019, she was descending stairs, toward the White House, when she felt she had been physically struck.
It appears there are several. A senior member of the National Security Council says he was stricken in November 2020, on the same steps by the West Wing. That former official, whose incident was first reported in the New Yorker, asked us not to name him. But he described the incident to a close colleague, John Bolton, former national security adviser.
John Bolton: They had disorientation and ringing in their ears. And just a general inability to function.
Miles Taylor: It was late one night in April 2018. I’d just become deputy chief of staff of the department, taking on some additional sensitive issues at DHS, and woke up in my apartment that night, a row house on Capitol Hill, to a really strange sound.
More than a fluke, a pattern across two administrations. Recent injuries among U.S. officials were reported in Vienna, Austria—ahead of a trip by the vice president to Vietnam and in India during a visit by the director of the CIA. In 2019, during a visit by President Trump to London, two members of John Bolton’s national security staff became ill in a hotel.
James Benford: I think the best explanation, the most plausible, is that it’s a high-power microwave weapon.
William Burns: Not at all. The intelligence community assesses now that there’s not a single cause that– it would explain the more than 1,000 incidents that have been reported since Havana in 2016. We’ve also not yet been able to link a foreign state actor or an external device or mechanism to any of those cases.
Ericson Report 