The Trump administration has been accused by several US spies and diplomats of failing to thoroughly investigate mysterious illnesses that hurt American officials working in Cuba, China, and Russia between 2016 and 2018, The New York Times (NYT) reports.
"This is a deliberate, high-level cover-up. They have hung us out to dry”, Mark Lenzi, who in 2017 worked for the State Department in China, told the newspaper, adding that he went through symptoms like memory loss while working in China a couple of years ago.
In an apparent reference to Russia, he asserted that senior US officials "know exactly which country" was responsible and that it neither Cuba nor China, but another country "which the secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] and president [Donald Trump] do not want to confront”.
Former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Marc Polymeropoulos, for his part, revealed in an interview with the NYT that he had to finally retire due to protracted migraines that he insisted took place after he had experienced nausea and vertigo in a Moscow hotel room in December 2017. Polymeropoulos reportedly helped the CIA run covert operations in Russia and Europe.
In a separate interview with the news outlet GQ, he accused the CIA of refusing to give him and other affected officers the relevant medical care.
"It's incumbent on them to provide the medical help we require, which does not include telling us that we're all making it up. I want the agency to treat this as a combat injury”, he underlined.
Polymeropoulos urged the CIA to investigate the cases, adding that “the agency is going to have to answer for this”.
Moscow has repeatedly denied allegations of being involved in purported microwave radiation attacks that ostensibly prompted an array of US officials working in Russia as well as Cuba and China in previous years to fall ill with symptoms that included balance- and vision-related problems.