Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is pulling the 2023 intelligence community assessment on Havana Syndrome, which concluded a foreign adversary attack was unlikely, while racing to declassify related documents before she leaves office at the end of June.
Gabbard and three other senior intelligence chiefs told the House Intelligence Committee in March that the 2023 assessment produced under Biden DNI Avril Haines should be withdrawn, a remarkable repudiation of the outgoing administration's handling of what the intelligence community calls anomalous health incidents. FBI Director Kash Patel, NSA acting Director Lt. Gen. William Hartman, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. James Adams each answered "yes" when asked under oath whether the prior findings should be retracted, according to Just the News.
The assessment they want pulled was released in March 2023 under Haines, who told Congress at the time that "most IC agencies have now concluded that it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs." The report specifically named Russia as an unlikely culprit, dismissing years of suspicion that a foreign power was running a targeted campaign against American diplomats, spies, and military personnel abroad.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., was blunt about why that conclusion is untenable. "The intelligence community assessment on AHIs was deeply flawed," Crawford said during the hearing, adding that it caused "real serious harm to some of our nation's bravest." Crawford went further, accusing elements inside the intelligence community of having "engaged in a cover-up and manipulated analytical processes to produce a predetermined outcome."
Gabbard's June 30 departure date has added urgency to the declassification effort. An ODNI official confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that "DNI Gabbard is actively working to declassify information about the COVID-19 pandemic and Anomalous Health Incidents before June 30." The push covers documents on both Havana Syndrome and COVID origins, two files where the Biden intelligence apparatus has faced sustained accusations of suppressing unfavorable findings.
On Havana Syndrome specifically, the stakes are not abstract. The condition, first reported in 2016 by a CIA officer in Havana, has since been described by hundreds of American officials posted abroad, with symptoms including severe headaches, brain fog, blurred vision, and vertigo. For years, affected personnel struggled to get official acknowledgment that anything had happened to them at all. The 2023 Haines assessment, in the view of Crawford and the current intelligence leadership, made that worse.
The push to reopen the question of foreign involvement comes alongside new physical evidence. The Defense Department, through a covert procurement involving Homeland Security Investigations, acquired and tested a portable device believed by some investigators to be linked to the attacks, one that generates pulsed radio waves, fits in a backpack, and contains Russian-manufactured components, according to reporting by the Robert Lansing Institute.
Accountability Questions for Haines
The retraction effort is not only about science or tradecraft. Crawford's cover-up allegation points directly at the leadership that produced the 2023 report. Haines, who served as DNI from January 2021 through January 2025, has not publicly responded to the committee's findings. No Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee has publicly defended the assessment or called for its preservation.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, when asked at the March hearing, said he would defer to Gabbard on the retraction question, leaving her the central figure in whatever formal action follows. Whether the ODNI completes the retraction before her exit and what classified material she manages to release in the remaining days of June will determine how much of this record becomes public while she still holds the pen.
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