The US Department of Defense said it would continue to prioritize “the care of affected personnel” when announcing the compensation, paid under the Havana Act, which became law in 2021.

For many years there has been widespread speculation about what and who is responsible for Havana syndrome.

Some have claimed that the illness is caused by microwaves, prompting further speculation that a foreign power may have used some type of sonar weapon to attack US personnel abroad and their dependents.

“My brain is broken,” former CIA analyst Erika Stith told CBS News in 2022, external.

“We achieved this as a result of serving our country. And we deserve to be taken care of,” he said.

Last year, most U.S. intelligence agencies and departments assumed it was “highly unlikely” that a foreign actor would use “a novel weapon or prototype device to harm” U.S. personnel and their families.

However, a small component of the American intelligence community did not completely dismiss the theory.

The report, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, said that none of the agencies or departments it spoke with “call[ed] question the experiences or suffering” of American workers and their families.

The community believed that they “experienced genuine, sometimes painful and traumatic, physical symptoms and sensory phenomena, and honestly and sincerely reported those events as possible anomalous health incidents.”