Maxwell's Silver Hammer 315
nervous system (stress syndrome) and high blood pressure. This phase
also often includes headache, dizziness, eye pain, sleeplessness, irri-
tability, anxiety, stomach pain, nervous tension, inability to concen-
trate, hair loss, plus an increased incidence of appendicitis, cataracts,
reproductive problems, and cancer. The chronic symptoms are eventu-
ally succeeded by crises of adrenal exhaustion and ischemic heart disease
(blockage of coronary arteries and heart attack).
The Soviet standards were set long before the dangers were this clear,
however. The comparison is instructive. At a 1969 international sym-
posium on microwaves in Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Karel Marha of
Prague's Institute of Industrial Hygiene defended his findings on birth
defects and recommended that the Eastern European standard be adopted
in the West. Replying to objections that the dire predictions hadn't
been proven beyond doubt, he said: "Our standard is not only to prevent
damage but to avoid discomfort in people."
Apparently this concern doesn't include Americans, for the Soviets
have been bombarding our embassy in Moscow with microwaves for
some thirty years. In 1952, at the height of the Cold War, there was a
secret meeting at the Sandia Corporation in New Mexico between U.S.
and U.S.S.R. scientists, allegedly to exchange information on biological
hazards and safety levels. It seems the exchange wasn't completely re-
ciprocal, or perhaps the Americans didn't take seriously what the Rus-
sians told them; there have been other joint "workshops" since then, and
each time the Soviets have sent people who publicly acknowledged the
risks, while the American delegates have always been "no-effect" men.
At any rate, soon after the Sandia meeting, the Soviets began beaming
microwaves at the U.S. embassy from across Tchaikovsky Street, always
staying well within the Schwan limit. In effect, they've been using em-
bassy employees as test subjects for low-level EMR experiments.
The strange thing is that Washington has gone along with it. The
"Moscow signal" was apparently first discovered about 1962, when the
CIA is known to have sought consultation about it. The agency asked
Milton Zaret for information about microwave dangers in that year, and
then hired him in 1965 for advice and research in a secret evaluation of
the signal, called Project Pandora. Nothing was publicly revealed until
1972, when Jack Anderson broke the story, and the U.S. government
told its citizens nothing until 1976, in response to further news stories
in the Boston Globe. According to various sources, the Russians shut off
their transmitter in in 1978 or 1979, but then resumed the irradiation for
several months in 1983.
According to information given Zaret in the 1960s, the Moscow sig-