Acoustic Geopolitics: Unit 29155, Unit 2245, Baltimore and Santa Claus

Geopolitics today is like an onion being peeled back that makes everybody cry. The recent revelations by no other than the New York Times (normally friendly to the current White House) are part of a tear-jerking tragedy that has evolved into the threat of a nuclear strike. President Putin has said that Russia’s nuclear capability is now “ready,” and his friend Viktor Medvedchuk says a nuclear strike is “most likely” coming. Why is he so determined? Why is it so hard for the White House to reach some kind of a deal over Ukraine, especially since US military leaders keep intimating that Ukraine cannot win against Russia and Western leaders keep hinting that funds for the fight are not going to be easily available going forward?

The West still cannot comprehend that the war in Ukraine might ever happen to them. People also cannot process the idea that we are already in a global conflagration. This is partly because war today involves locations and technologies that are difficult or impossible to see. But, war has never been a visual zone. Luigi Russolo, a sound performance artist from the WWI era, said, “In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. These days, bullets, fighter jets, and hypersonic weapons all fly too fast to see. War is heard, “from noise, the different calibers of grenades and shrapnel’s can be known even before they explode”.

The sound of war is what tells us where the battlefield is. The geography of that battlefield is no longer constrained by nation-state borders. It has extended to non-combatants and to locations inside Western nations. This is evident both by debilitating acoustic sounds and by the sound of silence, which now move together, making for a punctuated, perhaps syncopated story.  We are in an era of acoustic/sonic warfare and silence.

The NYTs writes that there has been “a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.” These were/are listening posts. This sounds like a real problem given the endless denials about any US presence in Ukraine. This network dates at least from the time of the 2014 Maidan coup. The story by Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz begins like a bad horror story, “Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war. But that is above ground….” The implication is that there is more below ground. What matters now is that it seems that the US intelligence community supported, if not created, a Ukrainian commando unit, known as Unit 2245, back in or before 2014. This unit listened to the Russians and “captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)” To remind everyone, the Maidan Revolution happened between November 21, 2013, and February 18, 2014. President Putin’s ally was overthrown, and the Western-friendly government came into power.

It seems that the CIA Station Chief in Kyiv, who would have overseen this unit, was apparently known as “Santa Claus.” This implied that the US brought many gifts to Ukraine. Intriguingly, Sam Leith, the award-winning then literary editor of The Spectator, wrote a piece on December 21st, 2015, for the FT called “Santa Claus reveals himself as a Master of the CIA Playbook.” He did not mention Ukraine. But, reading it now, you get the sense that he and everybody else knew that the US was present and bringing presents to Ukraine. President Putin has consistently said that he felt the need to go to war after the new government began persecuting the Russian population in the newly Western-leaning Ukraine. Irredentism became the trigger for the conflict that threatens to go nuclear today.

On the other side, Russia has Unit 29155. It is devoted to assassinations and undermining the operations of Western nations. It seems to date from about 2014 as well. Sixty Minutes has been tracking the Havana Syndrome story for the last few years and just this week made a pretty convincing case that a Russian chef (why are the key Russians always chefs?) called Vitalii Kovalev was deploying a directed energy weapon in the US. He was caught red-handed, convicted of spying, and returned to Russia, where he was soon found dead, or at least that’s what it is hoped we believe. Kovalev’s father is apparently a founder of the unit and a member of Putin’s inner circle. Unit 29155 is said to have been behind the assassination attempts of Emilian Gebrev, an arms dealer who supplied Russia’s opponents. His weapons stashes were destroyed in explosions in the Czech Republic in 2014 (a lot happened in 2014). Somebody tried to take him out, according to the NYTs, with “a substance resembling the same Novichok nerve agent used against former spies and obstinate critics of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. After the first attempt failed to kill him, they returned and poisoned him again.” This makes sense because it seems, he was said to be the principal weapons supplier to the Ukrainians. The Czech Republic expelled some eighty Russian nationals (read spies) in response to these events. This is about the same time that the US also booted out ten Russian diplomats for hacking into The Pentagon, US Nuclear Labs, and more due to “what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal systems in the past five years” (at that time). More recently, according to The Debrief, the “commander of the “Group for Special Tasks of Unit 29155”, Colonel Ivan Terentiev, got a commendation for his work on “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons in combat activities in urban settings.” Vitalii Kovalev was arrested for speeding and found in possession of this kind of supposed sonic weapon. The hot question now is whether Unit 29155 is behind all the Havana Syndrome attacks US officials are experiencing around the world.

Sixty Minutes makes the case that the American targets were all officials who were especially high-level and specifically dealing with Russia in one way or another. Officially, the State Department and the CIA are nearly silent on the cause. Their position is simply “there’s nothing to see (or hear) here.” No doubt, any admission would bring extraordinary legal liability claims. But, there is something deeper. An admission would mean having to acknowledge that WWIII is already underway and that it already involves “non-combatants.” It would mean admitting that weapons are already being deployed, which the public is not familiar with.

Sonic weapons are not only used by Russia but also by many Western militaries and police departments these days. Sound weapons have been around since Ram horns brought the walls of Jericho down in biblical times. More recently, The US military compelled Manuel Noriega to surrender from the Vatican Embassy in 1990 just by pounding him with high-decibel versions of "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N' Roses, "Wanted Dead Or Alive" by Bon Jovi, “Nowhere to Run” by Martha and the Vandella’s, "Staying Alive" by The Bee Gees and “I Love You" from the children's TV show Barney & Friends (no doubt that last one was the clincher). They picked up this trick from Vietnam, where US forces blasted Wagner from Sikorski’s using a “Curdler” that could deafen a person a short range and induce panic by immersing the jungles in a high-frequency sonic pyramid. The US authorities flushed out the Branch Davidians at Waco by washing them in the intense sound of dentist drills, bagpipes and subliminal messages. However, it was the USS Cole incident in 2000 that led to the development of long-range acoustic devices that could keep humans away from American warships.

We can think about frequency not just as a defense but as offense. This approach had been pioneered by Dr. Zippermeyer, a German Nazi who created a frequency “Windkanon” that could shatter aircraft mid-air, the first thermobaric weapons and, apparently, some sort of "brain-cells destroying weapon." Around 1957, Vladimir Gavreau became an expert in “Sonic Doom” when he and his robotics team accidentally discovered infrasonic resonance. They accidentally nearly pulverized themselves, damaging their organs from the inside. They recovered and created an infrasonic whistle resonance emitting machine that, when launched into a battlefield, killed everybody in it through frequency but without a sound.  In modern times, Israel started using “sound bombs” on Gaza in 2005. They pioneered "Scream" sonic blasters that rely on a “stack of 36 hexagonal horns to blast a concentrated beam of sound at targets as far away as 75 meters”. These devices induce debilitating sonic nausea and involuntary puking.

We are talking about an auditory warzone that exists between perceptible sound - above 20 Hertz and below 20 Kilohertz. This is where the infrasonic and ultrasonic wave phenomena reside. In 2008, Seven-Eleven started using devices known as