For nearly a decade, U.S. diplomats, spies, and soldiers posted around the world began reporting the same terrifying experience: a sudden, invisible assault with pressure in the skull, a piercing directional sound, debilitating vertigo, vision loss, and neurological damage that didn't heal. They were told it was stress. They were told it was crickets. The CIA told them no foreign adversary was responsible. Many were told, to their faces, that their injuries were made up.

They were lying, the agency said. Or they were broken. Either way, they were on their own.

The Havana Syndrome is the story of what actually happened to them, and who in the U.S. government made sure the truth stayed buried.

Drawing on more than nine years of reporting, secret medical records, whistleblower testimony, and intelligence documents, Rey and Zill de Granados trace the full arc of the phenomenon: from its origins in Cold War Soviet weapons research, to the early attacks in Havana and Guangzhou, to the global spread across more than a dozen countries, to the mounting evidence pointing at an elite Russian intelligence unit known as Unit 29155, a team of assassins already linked to poisonings and political murders across Europe.

The book goes inside CIA headquarters to document how leadership across two administrations ignored the evidence, denied medical care to wounded personnel, and concluded that acknowledging Russia's involvement would amount to a declaration of war, a response the government wasn't willing to make.

At the center of the story are the people who paid the price: "Adam" among the first officers targeted in Cuba; "Poly," a CIA officer whose 36 hours in a Moscow hotel room would become the most terrifying of his career; and Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, the Pentagon investigator who assembled the evidence his own government refused to see.

The Havana Syndrome is the definitive account of a decade-long cover-up, and the story of the Americans who refused to disappear along with the truth.