[belter]

Maybe somebody was playing with the current or future generation of the portable continuous wave generator we know the NSA has...Things got out of hand? Surely there is one deployed in each Embassy?

See as of 57 min and 32 sec:

https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2013/mp4-web/30c3-5713-en-...

Edit: In case you missed the detail...From the slide shown at 58 min and 35 sec notice it says up to...1 Kilowatt

[pjc50]

Do you have a textual reference as well please?

But that would be a plausible reason for why nobody gets to the bottom of this: they do find the source, but are immediately informed that it's a classified US weapon and they're not allowed to talk about it. Including telling their fellow US embassy employees who are experiencing headaches.

[formerly_proven]

It's not uncontroversial at all that microwaving people leads to health problems (the article seems to act like that's a contested idea, it is not). The US also has microwave weapons, not secret at all, even approved for use on humans and apparently also used in the US prison system (did they get the paperwork for use on animals?).

Obviously, any CW-capable transmitter may be used for microwaving things, as long as it is sufficiently robust and outputs enough power somewhere in the GHz-range (preferentially). Within that range, anything works really. Penetration goes way down as you increase frequency, but that doesn't have to be a problem. The US Active Denial System uses 95 GHz radiation (at up to 100 kW) to selectively burn the upper 0.3 mm of skin, because this tends to discourage folks from sticking around, for example. This is also why microwaves are 2.4 GHz (besides this being an ISM band), it gives you just the right penetration depth to be quite useful at evenly cooking stuff.

[belter]

NSA ANT catalog:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog

This is the target of the RF flooding...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog#/media/File:NS...

[KingOfCoders]

That was my idea too, with so many embassies hit, shouldn't it be something in the embassy? (Occams razor)