The US government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, according to a media report.
The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform, The Associated Press has learned.
First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
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Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a US agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under US law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president and congressional notification. Officials at the USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. The Cuban government declined a request for comment.
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said today that it was not a covert program, though "parts of it were done discreetly" in order to protect the people involved.
Shah said on MSNBC that a study by the US Government Accountability Office found the project to be consistent with the law.
"This is simply not a covert effort in any regard," he said.
At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the US Agency for International Development's longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP.
They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a US taxpayer-funded project.
