The Foreign Service Journal, May 2022

12 MAY 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Actually, that church was suspect years earlier, during the days of the Soviet Union. When I worked at Embassy Moscow (1988-1991), there was general concern about directed radiation from that building. I was warned about it, and even took some primitive defensive mea- sures. But, as Jim Schumaker suggests, the embassy staff was driven by the great importance of the mission at hand, and we more or less just lived with it. As part of my job in Moscow, I became versed in the mentality of Rus- sian science. While I have great respect for areas of Russian science, I also know it does not place as much value on safety as we do in the United States. I saw this myself, but any cursory review of their space programmakes the point. As I also witnessed, Russian science can too easily move beyond the proven, and launch into taking action on the basis of unproven scientific assertions. My own view is that Havana syndrome and what happened (andmay still be ongoing) at Embassy Moscow are inter- related. Perhaps old operations directed at Embassy Moscowwere a kind of prototype and, I would like to think, not designed to hurt USG personnel, but rather to gather intelligence on us, which was anxiously sought by quite a variety of means. However, as posited above, any pos- sible side effects and safety consider- ations of such an intelligence operation would likely have been downplayed by Soviet or Russian intelligence agen- cies. Perhaps modifications used more recently elsewhere have more nefarious objectives, including intentionally injur- ing embassy personnel, but I simply do not know. I understand why for legal reasons there is a desire to bracket the problemof Havana syndrome and limit it to a specific time period. Having said that, the likely real roots of the problem runmuch deeper. John Blaney Ambassador, retired Arlington, Virginia Another Stellar Edition Congratulations on another stellar edition of the FSJ (January-February 2022) with its plethora of interesting articles. First, James Schumaker’s exposition of the similarity between Moscow Signal and Havana syndrome ( “Before Havana Syndrome, There Was Moscow Signal” ), something so obvious that I have won- dered why the U.S. has tried to keep this secret. It is another frail response to Mos- cow’s aggression, as we are learning today. Second, John Limbert’s fine review of Kai Bird’s book on Jimmy Carter (“ADecent and Honest Man”) hits all the right notes regarding Carter’s misadventure on Iran (where I served as political counselor and acting deputy chief of mission from1976 to 1979) with one important exception. With the benefits of hindsight, Limbert points to Bird’s citation of an entry from Carter’s diary to suggest that everyone got it all wrong. The president’s inaccurate shorthand note was: “Ambassador Sullivan thought we ought to permit Khomeini to take over and that it would lead to democ- racy. Huyser [National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s man in Tehran] thinks it would lead to communism.” In point of fact, Sullivan did not think it had to lead to democracy, any more than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (Brzezin- ski’s counterpoint), who thought, as Sul- livan’s andmy own reports also suggested, that it was difficult to visualize a religious regime directly governing a major country in the 20th century, and there was no viable alternative in any case. Moreover, if General Huyser believed communists would take over, he never said that to me when he told me (in front