WTH is Syndrome? Catherine Herridge discusses whether Russia is responsible for covert neurological attacks on US personnel

Episode #112 | July 21, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Catherine Herridge

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: going on this week?

Marc Thiessen: Well, we're talking about Havana Syndrome. So, about five years ago, a bunch of US diplomats in Havana, , all of the sudden started having this pressure in the head, loss of balance, ringing in the ears, all these mysterious neurological symptoms. And they were completely unexplained. And there was speculation, was some sort of weapon being used? This story happened and then it sort of went away for a while.

Marc Thiessen: And then this started happening in other countries. It's happened now in six different countries. Most recently, Catherine Herridge of CBS News has reported that at least two cases have happened near the White House, so it's happening in the United States capital.

Marc Thiessen: And so it seems like the Russians have developed a directed-energy weapon that they are deploying against US diplomats on multiple countries and multiple continents, and including in Washington, DC.

Danielle Pletka: Alright so let's step back a second. For anybody who hasn't been paying close attention to this, this sounds like Dr. Strangelove on steroids. I mean, this is something out of Get Smart.

Danielle Pletka: Marc, you said that these started being reported by our personnel in Havana and what is truly amazing is that for at least three years, if not more, these personnel, including very senior US government officials-these are not young puppies who've just gotten out there and are nervous-these are senior, seasoned, experienced, and well-traveled officials are reporting these symptoms, and for the most part, they are getting the brush-off from their agencies: the State Department, AID, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

2 Danielle Pletka: So they're complaining, and they are being accused of making it up, and, at worst, of suffering from mass hysteria, and they can't get anyone to take them seriously! Can you imagine to yourself something like this happening, and you go to your boss, up there in the chain of command, and they say, "What are you, stupid? What are you, nuts? That's not happening to you." It's heartbreaking.

Marc Thiessen: Well, it sounds like they're getting taken seriously now, and that's in part fact thanks to Catherine's reporting. There are congressional hearings now taken place, Susan Collins is taking a leadership role up on Capitol Hill in addressing this. Whenever Congress gets involved, all the sudden, the administration starts to take things seriously.

Marc Thiessen: Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State, actually testified on this and told the Senate that, he said, "Here's the hard reality right now. We do not know what caused these incidents. We don't know who, if anyone, is actually responsible." I don't know that that's true, that we don't know. The reality is that it seems like most of the victims are related to Russia, are involved in spying on Russia, or have Russia-related portfolios.

Marc Thiessen: And I t's happening in places like Havana, where the Russians have had a long relationship with the Cuban regime, and basically consider it a satellite country. And in other places, it's happened in Moscow, against US officials. If you go and just look at the pool, I think Catherine's reported, there are like 130 individuals who have reported these kinds of attacks.

Marc Thiessen: You can just look at the pool of people and what they do and where they were and draw some pretty good conclusions as to who's behind this. And it seems like it's intentional. It seems like it is directed by Russia or somebody related to Russia. And I don't know that the United States government is making this an issue with Moscow yet.

Danielle Pletka: I don't either, and part of the reason is because this is really in a space that I think we are a little bit confused about, and this is part of the reason why these folks weren't taken seriously. Just to give our listeners a little bit of a taste for this, because when you talk about headaches, dizziness, pressure in your head, it sounds like something that may be an epiphenomenon. In fact, a couple of Canadians reported this to their government, Canadians who were working in Havana, and a Canadian newspaper suggested that with all of the that was going on, and this is obviously before COVID, that maybe it had been the spraying against mosquitoes that was causing this. You can see how people might be frustrated.

Danielle Pletka: But in Pennsylvania, researchers actually tried to dig into this a little better. And I want to read this out to our listeners.

Danielle Pletka: What they did was they took 40 of the diplomats who had reported the symptoms, and then they took 48 healthy volunteers. People who basically roughly matched these guys in age, and ethnicity, and education, to have an apples-to-apple comparison, they gave them all MRIs.

Danielle Pletka: Overall, the diplomats studied had 5% less white-matter volume in their brains

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3 than the healthy volunteers did. And certain parts of their brains, including, in particular, the , which controls voluntary movement, were marked by- and here, I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal coverage of this-"... by notable differences in brain tissue volume and the diffusion of water through the tissues. The diplomats' brains also had less connectivity in the networks responsible for hearing and visualizing and locating objects."

Danielle Pletka: Just a last little word about this, because I think we're going to get to the heart of what is the challenge to us. The doctor who they interviewed says, "Something happened to these brains to cause a difference." This is a radiology professor and one of the authors of the study. She said, "What happened to the brains and what caused that difference, that's not so nd that's our challenge right now.

Marc Thiessen: Well, we know the State Department is finally taking us seriously because Secretary Blinken said that the State Department is now starting baseline concussion testing for all US officials before they head out into the field. If you're a parent who has a kid playing sports, any contact sports, everybody does baseline concussion testing so you can know if you got a concussion on the field. We now have to do this for our diplomats, because our diplomats are in danger of just for being at station. This is a really serious matter.

Marc Thiessen: Joe Biden came to the White House promising to get tough with Russia, right? We've had multiple podcasts about it this where we talked about, well, now, he's caved on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He gave Putin, during the summit... drew a red line around 16 sectors of the economy that were off-limits to cyber- attacks. I don't know, has he given him a list of 16 different US government positions that are off limits for traumatic brain injury attacks? I don't know. But I don't get the sense that the Biden administration is taking this all that seriously or actually ready to impose any consequences for these attacks.

Danielle Pletka: So, look, I want to play people our interview, because we have actually Catherine Herridge, who we've been talking about from CBS who did all this reporting, but I want to put something in people's minds before you listen to the interview.

Danielle Pletka: When you talk about anything like this, it feels a little bit less real, especially when it's a non-visible physical injury, whether it's a mental, psychological, or neurological injury, it seems less real.

Danielle Pletka: Think about it this way, and this is one of the things I mentioned to Catherine: think about some foreign bad guy standing outside our diplomatic mission and shooting at just a bunch of the people who come out. Would that be okay? Would an administration do something about that?

Danielle Pletka: I think the obvious answer to that is: any administration, Joe Biden, , Donald Duck would do something about this. And the question that has arisen in my mind, of course, is, as you say Marc, what the hell are they doing about this now that they figured out that something's up?

Marc Thiessen: Let's find out what the hell is going on, and we've got the perfect person to do

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4 that Dany.

Danielle Pletka: Catherine Herridge is a senior investigative correspondent at CBS news, but for many years, she was at Fox News channel, she actually joined them at their inception, and prior to that, she'd been a London-based correspondent for ABC News. Catherine truly is the gold-standard of national security reporting, the kind of person you'd like to see. And credit where credit is due, the CBS investigative unit that she worked with and her producer Andrew Bast really have done fine, fine work and some very difficult digging to bring you great information on Havana Syndrome.

Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.

Marc Thiessen: Well, Catherine, welcome to the podcast!

Catherine Herridge: Thanks for having me!

Marc Thiessen: So you have been doing some fascinating reporting on what's now being called Havana Syndrome. This is something that started in Havana, Cuba, about five years ago, a mysterious neurological condition that State Department personnel were coming down with. It's now spread to other countries. I think there's 130 suspected cases in six different countries. First of all, just tell us what happened in Cuba? How did this whole thing start?

Catherine Herridge: Well, what we learned in our reporting is that really there was a cluster of cases in 2016 in Cuba. We actually encountered individuals who believed they were targeted by this directed energy attack as early as the . We also encountered another State Department employee who felt that they were targeted in Moscow about a decade ago. So I think the best way to approach it is that we had sort of an uptick or a cluster of cases in 2016 in Cuba.

Catherine Herridge: And there's a lot of mystery around this phenomenon. I like to think of it as a basket of neurological symptoms. They range from loss of balance, to ringing in the ears, chronic headaches, vision problems, memory problems. And really, the most profound is this loss of balance.

Catherine Herridge: I'm going to put on my medical hat here for a second, because what we learned from experts is, losing your balance is one of the most fundamental things for you, and it's like an "all hands on deck" situation for your brain. It starts to pull all the resources together to try and correct that. As it does that, you have these tremendous deficits that are created neurologically, and these are the lasting impacts of these attacks, whether it's State Department, CIA, or the Defense Department.

Danielle Pletka: So Catherine, first of all, congratulations. Your reporting on this has been informative and truly thorough. The first thing I think is useful for people to hear from someone like you is how real this is. When we first heard about this-and I'm sure you've heard this- and there was an article as recently as a couple months ago saying, "Well, this is all... this is garbage. This is a form of hysteria. It's too nebulous. Show me the weapon. How can you be sure this is happening?" Talk a

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5 little bit about what you think and what experts you talked to saw that was persuasive, this just isn't a bunch of people who are listening to each other.

Catherine Herridge: Well, I'll take that in two parts. We went directly to someone who says they were impacted and had a significant paper trail that showed that they were diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury at Walter Reed. He's a former CIA officer, Marc Polymeropoulos. He spent 26 years at the agency, and he says that he was the target of one of these attacks in December of 2017. And just bear with me while I sort of lay out what happened to him.

Catherine Herridge: He was in a job that was clearly a high-priority target for Russian intelligence. He was running these covert operations that stretched all across Europe to the farthest reaches of Russia. So when he went to Moscow in 2017, all eyes of Russian intelligence were on him. And he said to us, "This was not a surprise to me because that's just part of the job." He goes to the gym. A guy shows up in a leather coat, kind of winks at him, like, "I know you're here," this is all very spy world.

Catherine Herridge: Nothing bothered him at all until that evening in his hotel room. And he said he woke and he felt like he was on a carnival ride. He was just spinning, and he was so debilitated that he described having to drag himself along the carpet in the hotel room to the bathroom because he couldn't even stand up. He felt like he kept being pulled down and he felt so nauseated. He said, "Of all of the places that he has been, this was," and he's been all over Afghanistan, the Middle East, fighting the war on terror, "this was truly the most frightening experience of his entire career because he felt he had totally lost control."

Catherine Herridge: So it was that description from someone who has personally had that experience, coupled with-and I always like to go to the documents-coupled the paperwork that he was diagnosed by Walter Reed with a traumatic brain injury that said to me, this is not whipped up hysteria among a group of individuals who think maybe they've been infected with something. This, to me, made it very, very real and concrete.

Marc Thiessen: So this started in Havana, Cuba, which most people think of if you go back to the world as spy novels, as a sort of "no man's land," where all sorts of stuff happens. There's all sorts of nefarious characters in Havana, Cuba that could be doing things. Moscow, very similar, right? But you've reported that there were some suspected cases near the White House, so this is actually not just happening in these far-off places. This has happened to US officials in our nation's capital.

Catherine Herridge: Well, we looked at this issue with our investigative unit here at CBS, and what we learned is that there were suspected cases in over half a dozen countries. So beyond Cuba, Russia and .

Catherine Herridge: But what I found even more interesting, Marc, is that there seemed to be a pattern among the people who say they were affected. Many of them were working directly on Russia-related issues and issues that would thwart or frustrate Russian intentions. And I found that thread one of the most significant. It just wasn't a group of people who ran the gamut from being the IT person, to being the passport person, to being an intelligence operative. They all seemed to have

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6 this common link to Russia.

Danielle Pletka: I have so many questions for you and I don't know where to start. But one of the things that struck me throughout this process is, okay, you've described something that's a little nebulous, I understand. But it seems to me that a lot of the people who've been affected have had a very hard time persuading their agencies and their superiors that this is real. Talk a little bit about what you've discovered about that.

Catherine Herridge: Well, Marc Polymeropoulos told us it took him about three years to get help at Walter Reed, and that when he went back to the CIA medical office after the trip to Moscow, where the incident happened, that they told him they didn't think it was consistent with Havana Syndrome, though all of his symptoms really checked the box.

Catherine Herridge: He finally got in to Walter Reed, where they got them this diagnosis. And he said that while the CIA is far more attuned to the needs of these offers now that they lost a lot of valuable time. When we spoke with medical professionals who were familiar with the type of damage that can be caused, they told us when you have a traumatic brain injury or a neurological injury, the most important thing is to get help quickly, and that is not what happened in Marc's case.

Catherine Herridge: And he showed us- I know it's a podcast so I'll do my best to describe this- he showed us this picture. They do a lot of art therapy to help them sort of retrain their brain and really kind of process what they've been through. It was a large black canvas and it looked like almost a gunshot with blood and red sort of splashed onto the canvas, and it was made, he said, by one of his CIA colleagues, and they call it "The Gunshot." It's like the invisible wound that nobody has been able to recognize.

Catherine Herridge: And he said, and this to me was very profound, all, he, wished that they had been shot and that there was a visible wound so that people would more readily recognize that they were really suffering." And remember, this is happening to people who have made a commitment to serve our country. Right? I mean, they're injured in the service of our country, so you have to consider that layer as well.

Marc Thiessen: Here's the question everybody's wondering, which is: what is this thing that they're using? Right? How are they doing this? I saw one report somewhere that said that it could've been an unintentional byproduct of electronic surveillance of computers and cell phones, and that they didn't realize it was going to have this impact, and now they've discovered that they can weaponize this but that initially it started as an electronic spying effort. There's all sorts of theories out there. What do we know?

Danielle Pletka: We spoke with Professor David Relman. He's a professor out at Stanford and he was one of the leads on the National Academies of Sciences' work on directed energy attacks. And they found that pulsed radio frequency energy was the likely

Catherine Herridge: What I learned is that it really takes a very precise recipe to cause this kind of

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7 damage. It's not accidental. It seems very purposeful. Professor Relman told us that if the energy frequency is too high, it won't penetrate the skull, and it causes the heating of the skin, sort of a burning sensation. This is not what people report. He said if the frequency is too low, then it goes right through the head and it doesn't cause the kind of damage that they're seeing in people like Marc Polymeropoulos, the CIA officer, former officer.

Catherine Herridge: What I learned, and I'm really putting on my science hat now, is that because it's pulsed-just think about it this way-because it's pulsed, you have this rapid heating of the cells of the brain and of the cooling of the cells in the brain. The theory is this rapid heating and cooling sets up pressure waves, and it's those pressure waves that cause the damage.

Catherine Herridge: So to replicate that over several cases, because it seems to be a very precise recipe that says that there's some kind of premeditation involved, right? It's not an accident.

Catherine Herridge: I've heard the explanation that this may be over-collection gone wrong. But based on this idea that it's pulsed, and it's sort of a finely-tuned recipe, to me, that explanation just doesn't sync up. It doesn't begin to explain it.

Catherine Herridge: We kept asking, what does this weapon look like? Right? What does it look like? The closest thing we could get to was this '90s Russian generator, sort of the size of a big conference room. We used that in our report. What we understand is that the most likely version of this weapon is sort of miniaturized, and it's probably about the size of a desktop scanner now, so it's highly mobile.

Catherine Herridge: So to answer your question, what does the weapon look like? I can't say for sure, but from our reporting, it's probably about the size of a desktop scanner. I'll call it the alleged weapon, because of course there are skeptics out there.

Catherine Herridge: And then part two: is it an accident? I don't think it's an accident. Everything suggests that it takes really a finely-tuned recipe of pulsed energy to create the kind of damage that these people say they are experiencing.

Danielle Pletka: So okay, let's set aside any skepticism and let's even set aside any question about the tools and the methodology. We could sit here and speculate until we're blue in the face about what the hell is up. Generally speaking, when our adversaries do things, they do things for a purpose. They have a target, right? Or like the Chinese, and they just want to collect a ton of data so they can use it to eventually compromise you. For the Russians, in terms of espionage and trade craft, but also in terms of national security, this seems like a weirdly omnidirectional attack, kind of like going outside the embassy and just trying to run down whoever walks out the front door. Have you talked to people who've given you a sense of what they think-

Catherine Herridge: What this is all about?

Danielle Pletka: ...the bad guys are thinking here?

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8 Catherine Herridge: The best explanation, and the one that rang true to me, is that it's really a weapon of psychological warfare. What I mean by that is that it's not designed to hurt a lot of people, but it's designed to hurt enough people that it creates a sense of insecurity, and instability, and reservations about taking assignments overseas, reservations about taking assignments that involve Russia. As Marc Polymeropoulos said to us, "Who feels safe going overseas when you don't really understand what this is all about?"

Catherine Herridge: The reason that made the most sense to me is that it's classic gray-zone warfare. That's this battle space between peace and conventional warfare. This is the battle space where the Russians like to play, and where, frankly, they excel. So that is cyber, that is misinformation, disinformation, and I think, potentially, also these directed energy attacks, because there's so much mystery and they're so debilitating.

Catherine Herridge: From our reporting, it's happening to people who seem to have some nexus to Russian intelligence or efforts by the US to thwart their objectives. When you have highly-skilled government personnel having second thoughts about taking these assignments, or concerns about taking these assignments that has a tremendous ripple effect. That is the explanation that made the most sense to our team.

Marc Thiessen: I don't want to put words in your mouth, I've read that some of these attacks took place in China. Would those have been Russian-related in China? Or is the Chinese regime using this weapon as well?

Catherine Herridge: I don't want to give people bad information. I found the China piece a little mysterious, actually. Hard to say whether the Chinese were sort of playing around with this idea as well, or whether, another theory is that there was a concerted effort to sort of experiment with the technology, use Cuba, use China, use other places like a laboratory to perfect the weapon, or to perfect the energy recipe and then bring it here to the United States. If, in fact, these attacks near the White House truly were attacks and not something else.

Marc Thiessen: Is there any way to protect people against this? When I was in the Defense Department, the secretary of defense always had this yellow film on the windows because we knew that the Chinese were trying to read his computer screens and all the rest of it. We have all sorts of counter-measures for all sorts of espionage tools. Is there any way to defend against this?

Danielle Pletka: I mean, so this was exactly my question, and I have to add what it conjured up in my mind as well, and I can really, 100% picture Marc in this as well, is basically our officials all having to wander around with tin foil hats.

Catherine Herridge: I can safely say I don't think it's going to come to that. I think there are two parts to this.

Catherine Herridge: One of the things we're doing through our reporting is that under the new CIA director, and this change in administration, there's essentially been, I want to say a pivot, in the sense that there's a real push right now to try and develop what amounts to almost like an early warning system or a system of sensors that can

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9 help identify the source of a directed energy attack. The reason that matters is it all goes back to the issue of attribution. Right? If we're going to say we think Russian intelligence, and we think Moscow or Putin's government is behind this, then we have to have a lot of confidence about the source of it.

Catherine Herridge: I think that is actually a very significant step forward. Dany or Marc, I can't quite answer whether there's going to be some kind of mechanism that can prevent it. Based on what we learned, it sounds more that there will be a system that can detect it, and once you detect it, then you can take yourself out of that range.

Danielle Pletka: Just to sort of follow-up, because, of course, detection implies that, obviously, we're going to get some kind of a grip on this frequency and on these , which I think sounds pretty credible. We've got great technology that is always advancing in this direction. But it also implies that whoever has this, the Russians, maybe the Chinese, maybe others, maybe the Cubans, even, can really move this around kind of at-will.

Danielle Pletka: I'm still really struck by what you said, which is this is an attempt to knock people back on their feet, right?

Catherine Herridge: Correct.

Danielle Pletka: To give them a sense of insecurity.

Catherine Herridge: Yeah, de-sync them. Yeah.

Danielle Pletka: Right. And I ask myself whether it's enough that we identify this, and more whether we need countermeasures that can block this, can bounce this back on whoever is sending it. I'm probably pushing you beyond what our government is thinking about, but it's truly troubling.

Catherine Herridge: When we were talking to the now retired CIA officer, Marc Polymeropoulos, we said, "What does the hotel room look like?" Right? Like, thinking, okay, so when you travel in places like that, as I have, you suspect that when you stay in a major hotel chain, there may be some surveillance on you, because that's just how it works in those countries. And Marc said, "The thing that stood out to me about the room is that there are mirrors everywhere."

Catherine Herridge: So I did a little bit more digging on that, and an expert in this area told me that his view was that the mirrors were used to bounce the signal off of so it could focus in on the bed. So it's almost like a trap. It felt like a trap, the way it was described to me. Again, it's very pre-meditated.

Catherine Herridge: Senator Collins, Republican of Maine, drafted legislation, which, in this time, it's extraordinary that anything would pass with unanimous support in the Senate, which is designed to give the CIA director and State Department secretary, the ability to provide more medical help and financial help to the people who were affected.

Catherine Herridge: But when we interviewed her, she said, "President Biden really kind of needs to

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10 take it to Vladimir Putin, and needs to make clear that if he has anything to do with this or any knowledge of this, he's got to come clean about this, and that if we don't get the kind of answers we want, there have to be consequences." I took that to mean sanctions, for example. Something really that has some bite to follow.

Catherine Herridge: But I go back to this idea again about psychological warfare. I don't know Marc, if you agree with me, but it's so in the Russian playbook to develop something like this, which really plays with your mind. It undermines confidence in your work, the institutions you're working for, makes you second-guess or hesitate. And it's something that's also at relatively low cost.

Catherine Herridge: That's totally consistent with what we saw with the election interference. Very low cost, but it can have a tremendous impact and ripple effect.

Marc Thiessen: No doubt. It seems like something that Moscow would do. I think your reporting, drawing together the fact that so many of the people who've been targeted were related to Russian affairs or involved in spying on Russia or Russian policy. I would assume that our government knows even in greater detail-

Catherine Herridge: I definitely hope so.

Marc Thiessen: Yeah, in greater detail of how much these people are involved in Russian policy, which would seem to indicate... And this is a regime that uses bioweapons in London, so why would they not use a directed-energy weapon in Washington? It just seems so obvious to me.

Marc Thiessen: Have you gotten any indication of whether... President Biden just met with Vladimir Putin in the summit. Did they discuss it? Did this come up?

Catherine Herridge: I don't know. I don't want to give you my speculation or bad information. I simply don't know the answer to that question, so you have given me something to follow-up on. And I thank you for that.

Marc Thiessen: Excellent.

Catherine Herridge: I don't know the answer to that. But what I would say is just think a moment about what it's like when you really have a piercing headache, okay? I mean, it can be really debilitated. Some of these people describe having a piercing headache for three years, or four years, or five years. And it never, ever lets up. They lose their ability to, sometimes temporarily, to drive. They can't concentrate for long periods of time anymore. They can't work on computers. They end up leaving the job that they've given their life to because they're just not able to function the way that they need to and used to.

Catherine Herridge: And on the outside, maybe they don't look that much different. But on the inside, they're really a shell of their former self. You can think about the ripple effect on the family, the coworkers. All of those things. These are events that have tremendous impact. The numbers may seem relatively small, but the impact is outsized, disproportionate to the numbers.

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11 Danielle Pletka: I'm super grateful to you for having really helped accelerate the seriousness with which this is taken. We've been hearing about this for a long time and it truly is a disgrace, the way that people like Marc and others were dismissed, again, for all the wrong reasons. They need to be taken seriously.

Catherine Herridge: Now they're being listened to, I would say. I think that's one of the positive things. Now they're being listened to. The CIA gave us a statement. They were very publicly recognizing that these people need help and they're committed to helping them. The same thing with the State Department, but that doesn't take away the fact that some of them had to wait years for that recognition. If you have a traumatic brain injury, time is really your enemy in this.

Marc Thiessen: One of the reasons why it's getting taken seriously is in part thanks to your reporting, so thank you for what you've done to uncover this, the details of this, and thanks so much for joining us. We're so grateful.

Catherine Herridge: going to find out the answer to your question.

Marc Thiessen: Awesome! Well, we'll have you back on.

Catherine Herridge: Thanks!

Danielle Pletka: Thanks a ton Catherine. This was terrific. I learned a lot and it's just great. It's exactly what you want out of journalism. I'm delighted that you were able to take the time with us. Thanks a ton.

Marc Thiessen: So, as expected, Catherine is an incredible investigative journalist. I loved working with her at Fox News. It's no surprise to me that she's the one who dug up the most information about this and what's going on.

Marc Thiessen: I'll just go back to the idea that someone could do this to our country and launch 130, at least, known attacks on American diplomats around the world over six years without any response whatsoever from either the previous administration or this one, that we're aware of.

Danielle Pletka: Well, I mean, I do think they're having a hard time getting to the bottom of the technology behind this. Now, obviously, they were wrong not to take people seriously, but understanding, getting a grip on what it is that our adversaries are using to target these diplomats, what it is that they're able to move from country to country to country, apparently with impunity, is a tough question.

Danielle Pletka: And what stays with me, and I said this to Catherine as well, is just this, what she called this gray-zone... We've had colleagues at AEI who've done very, very good work on this sort of gray-zone conflict. But I'm still a little bit at a loss for what kind of retaliatory measures we need to engage in, in order to deter the Russians and whoever else is up to this. What do you think?

Marc Thiessen: Well, we have all sorts of gray-zone capabilities as well. We have great offensive cyber-weapons that we haven't really been using all that effectively to deter them in cyberspace, but theoretically, you could find out what area of the Russian

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12 government is behind this and launch a retaliatory strike of some kind in cyberspace. There's lots of things short of open conflict that allow you to retaliate, or simply sanctions on the entities that are doing this. It's been six years. We should know a lot at this point about it.

Danielle Pletka: So two things. Number one: Joe Biden has said that he does not want to use sanctions as much. That which is, as Thomas Jefferson said, one of the most important tools short of war is economic sanctions. That is, in fact, increasingly being taken off the table.

Danielle Pletka: But number two: one of the things that the Iranian government has perfected over the last four decades is this question of whodunit. Right? Who was responsible? Was it Hezbollah or was it the Iranians? Was it Hamas? Was it the Iranians? Who's targeting us in Iraq? Is it Iran's proxies, or it is Iran?

Danielle Pletka: And the Russians have gotten really good at this, and you saw that with the recent cyber-attacks, with Joe Biden saying, "Well, if we know that the Russian government had anything to do with this," at a certain point, you have to say, "If it has anything to do with your country, we're going to hold you responsible." Otherwise, you send a message to every tin-pot dictator out there that that is the right way to do business with the United States is to threaten us through proxies.

Marc Thiessen: Well, and also, I mean, if someone was shooting bullets at 130 diplomats around the world and injuring them that way, you certainly would be sure we would be responding in some way to that. But somehow, because this is this, why should we make a concession to their gray-zone type of attack, which is as debilitating as being shot. These people are, as Catherine describes, imagine having the worst headache of your entire life and it lasts for three years. This is serious stuff that's being done to these people.

Marc Thiessen: And we owe it to them. We owe it to everybody who serves abroad and who could be targeted in this way to impose consequences on whoever's doing this.

Marc Thiessen: But it also raises another issue, Dany, which is this whole element of surprise and the technologies that we don't know that our adversaries have. The unknown unknowns, as my old boss the late Donald Rumsfeld used to say. This is an unknown unknown. We didn't know that we didn't know that an adversary capability until they unleashed it on us.

Marc Thiessen: We had Admiral Jim Stavridis on the podcast recently talking about his novel, which imagines a Third World War with Beijing in 2034, and that unfolds in ways that are unexpected. There's a lot of things out there that we don't know we don't know, and we need to begin preparing for the unknown unknowns.

Danielle Pletka: Amen to that, Marc, and happy not to end on my usual note, which is, "Well, that was depressing," because I think you've outlined exactly what it is that the United States ought to be moving towards. And, with that, don't hesitate, listeners, please to shoot us any questions you have, complaints, send those to Marc. And don't forget to listen, review, share the podcast with all your friends, your enemies, and your mother-in-law, no matter which she is. Take care.

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13 Marc Thiessen: Bye.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org