One winter night, about four years ago, Mark Polymeropolis suddenly woke up feeling sick.

I was a woken, you know, in the middle of the night, but I had just had incredible vertigo

dizziness. I wanted to throw up. Mark was in a Moscow hotel room. He was there on CIA business. He had

just become the agency's number two official for clandestine operations in Europe. And as he

told NPR's Greg Meyery last October, he thought he had come down with maybe food poisoning.

A few months later, he was still having headaches, crippling migraines.

I started this kind of incredible journey of seeing, you know, multiple doctors,

multiple MRIs and CT scans and x-rays. Ultimately, neurologist diagnosed me with what they

call occipital neurology. That diagnosis would explain his migraines, but the root cause was a

mystery. And then even bigger mystery was why that same year other US government employees

around the world were also experiencing the same symptoms. The Trump administration announced

Friday that it is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana.

The same symptoms Mark Polymeropolis came down with in Moscow had also been observed in a group

of US diplomats and intelligence officials in Havana, Cuba. This comes after diplomats and staff

suffered mysterious health attacks that caused minor brain injuries. Cuba has denied.

Havana syndrome as the mystery illness came to be known has since been reported elsewhere

around the world in India, Austria, just last week at the Colombian Embassy in Bogota.

200 Americans have now come forward to report possible symptoms of the mysterious illness

called Havana syndrome. It's serious, it's widespread, and it poses real danger to American diplomats

and intelligence officers around the world. So there are growing suspicions that Russian

intelligence officers are behind a mysterious illness called Havana syndrome.

At least that was one theory that emerged in the years after Mark Polymeropolis fell sick

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