WASHINGTON (AP) — In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S.
government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret
plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist
government.
McSpedon and his
team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua,
Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could
reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban
government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a
Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit executives who would not be told of
the company’s ties to the U.S. government.
McSpedon didn’t
work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for
International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in
U.S. humanitarian aid.
According to
documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people
involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,”
using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information
and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it
was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.
Documents show the
U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial
content”: news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the
network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands,
operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to
organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might
trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the
balance of power between the state and society.”
At its peak, the
project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions.
But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or
that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it
might be used for political purposes.
“There will be
absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a
2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project’s contractors. “This is
absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the
success of the Mission.”
The program’s
legality is unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal
agency must have a presidential authorization and that Congress should be
notified.
The Obama
administration on Thursday said the program was not covert and that it served
an important purpose by helping information flow more freely to Cubans. Parts
of the program “were done discreetly,” Rajiv Shah, USAID’s top official, said
on MSNBC, in order to protect the people involved.
The administration
also initially said Thursday that it had disclosed the program to Congress —
White House spokesman Jay Carney said it had been “debated in Congress” — but
hours later shifted that to say it had offered to discuss funding for the
program with several congressional committees. “We also offered to brief our
appropriators and our authorizers,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf
said.
Two senior
Democratic lawmakers said they knew nothing about the effort, and the Republican
chairman of a House oversight subcommittee said his panel plans to look into
the initiative next week.
“If you’re going to
do a covert operation like this for a regime change, assuming it ever makes any
sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID,” said Sen. Patrick
Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees
USAID’s budget.
But several other
lawmakers voiced their support for ZunZuneo.
Bob Menendez,
D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said USAID should
be applauded for giving people in Cuba a platform to talk to each other. “The
whole purpose of our democracy programs, whether it be in Cuba or other parts
of the world, is in part to create a free flow of information in closed societies,”
Menendez said.
The Associated
Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project’s
development. The AP independently verified the project’s scope and details in
the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates —
through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with
those directly involved in ZunZuneo.
Taken together,
they tell the story of how agents of the U.S. government, working in deep
secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba.
It all began with a
half million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government.
___
ZunZuneo would seem
to be a throwback from the Cold War, and the decades-long struggle between the
United States and Cuba. It came at a time when the historically sour
relationship between the countries had improved, at least marginally, and Cuba
had made tentative steps toward a more market-based economy.
It is unclear
whether the plan got its start with USAID or Creative Associates International,
a Washington, D.C., for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of
dollars in U.S. contracts. But a “key contact” at Cubacel, the state-owned
cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in
Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAID and Creative Associates “free
of charge,” documents show.
In mid-2009, Noy
Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAID in the
1990s on a program to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little
brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured
the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie
who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz.
“This is very
confidential of course,” Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you
do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send
bulk text messages without the government knowing?
“Can you encrypt it
or something?” she texted.
She was looking for
a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious
little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the
Internet as an Achilles’ heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications
minister had even referred to it as a “wild colt” that “should be tamed.”
Yet in the years
since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to
jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone
use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for
the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained
restricted.
Cubans could text
message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere
$20 a month.
Bernheim told his
sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of
thousands of Cubans— for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that
would be too complicated. They wouldn’t be able to hide the messages from the
Cuban government, which owned Cubacel. But they could disguise who was sending
the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from.
“We could rotate it
from different countries?” Villalobos asked. “Say one message from Nica,
another from Spain, another from Mexico”?
Bernheim could do
that. “But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the
same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone.”
“No hay problema,”
he signed off. No problem.
___
After the chat,
Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister.
(Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the
ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed
up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how
to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger.
Creative Associates
envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be
called “Proyecto ZZ,” or “Project ZZ.” The service would start cautiously and
be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAID saw as the most open to
political change.
“We should
gradually increase the risk,” USAID proposed in a document. It advocated using
“smart mobs” only in “critical/opportunistic situations and not at the
detriment of our core platform-based network.”
USAID’s team of
contractors and subcontractors built a companion website to its text service so
Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for
free. They talked about how to make the website look like a real business.
“Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,” a
proposal suggested.
In multiple
documents, USAID staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs
and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran,
the USAID noted social media’s role following the disputed election of then
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign
policy tool.
USAID documents say
their strategic objective in Cuba was to “push it out of a stalemate through
tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again
toward democratic change.” Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant
breaking the Castros’ grip on power.
USAID divided Cuban
society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side
sat the “democratic movement,” called “still (largely) irrelevant,” and at the
other end were the “hard-core system supporters,” dubbed “Talibanes” in a
derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists.
A key question was
how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection.
Bernheim assured the team that wouldn’t be a problem.
“The Cuban
government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently
lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service,” Bernheim
wrote in a proposal for USAID marked “Sensitive Information.”
ZunZuneo would use
the list of phone numbers to break Cuba’s Internet embargo and not only deliver
information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the
government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let
Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves.
At a strategy
meeting, the company discussed building “user volume as a cover … for
organization,” according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the
“Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may
sign up for service.”
In a play on the
telecommunication minister’s quote, the team dubbed their network the “untamed
colt.”
___
At first, the
ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother,
worked from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative’s
work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from
the U.S. embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in
Washington, according to U.S. officials.
McSpedon worked for
USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created
after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly
changing political environments — without the usual red tape.
In 2009, a report
by congressional researchers warned that OTI’s work “often lends itself to
political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications.” Staffers on
oversight committees complained that USAID was running secret programs and
would not provide details.
“We were told we
couldn’t even be told in broad terms what was happening because ‘people will
die,’” said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations
committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community’s most senior
analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House.
The money that
Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified
project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where
the funds were actually spent.
Tensions with
Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009,
when another USAID program ended in the arrest of the U.S. contractor, Alan
Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand
Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to
governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP.
At some point,
Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI’s secret
operations in Costa Rica. U.S. government officials acknowledged them privately
to Armstrong, but USAID refused to provide operational details.
At an event in
Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware
that by operating secret programs from a third country, it might appear like he
worked for an intelligence agency.
McSpedon, through
USAID, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise.
___
On Sept. 20, 2009,
thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker
Juanes’ “Peace without Borders” concert. It was the largest public gathering in
Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a
giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Miami-based
Juanes promised music aimed at “turning hate into love.”
But for the
ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political
power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim’s firm,
using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called
“blasts,” to test what the Cuban government would do.
The team hired Alen
Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write
Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more
pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music
acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes. Some
100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical
intelligence.
Paula Cambronero, a
researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban
subscribers, including gender, age, “receptiveness” and “political tendencies.”
USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba
programs and “maximize our possibilities to extend our reach.”
Cambronero
concluded that the team had to be careful. “Messages with a humorous
connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create
animosity in the recipients,” she wrote in a report.
Falcon, in an
interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a U.S.
government program, but he had no regrets about his involvement.
“They didn’t tell
me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway,” he said. “In Cuba
they don’t have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit
my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be
against it, whether it’s Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or
Gloria Estefan,” the Cuban American singer.
USAID saw evidence
from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into
ZunZuneo’s servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAID called the
response “timid” and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins
stayed secret.
Even though Cuba
has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world,
the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign,
Cubacel would leave it alone.
Once the network
had critical mass, Creative and USAID documents argued, it would be harder for
the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and
because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages.
In February 2010,
the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six
months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more
attention than the USAID team could control.
___
Saimi Reyes Carmona
was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto
ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service’s novelty, and the price. The
advertisement said “free messages” so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita.
At first, ZunZuneo
was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but
one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded.
“I began sending
one message every day,” she said, the maximum allowed at the start. “I didn’t
have practically any followers.” She was thrilled every time she got a new one.
And then ZunZuneo
exploded in popularity.
“The whole world
wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea
who they are, nor where they came from.”
She let her
followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15
personal messages. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” she told her
boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student.
Before long, Reyes
learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a
user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana’s University of Computer
Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave
them.
“It was such a
marvelous thing,” Guerra said. “So noble.” He and Reyes tried to figure out who
was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but
they found nothing. They were grateful though.
“We always found it
strange, that generosity and kindness,” he said. ZunZuneo was “the fairy
godmother of cellphones.”
___
By early 2010,
Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim’s company wasn’t
sophisticated enough to build, in effect, “a scaled down version of Twitter.”
It turned to
another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc.
Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters
and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in
Haiti.
Eberhard earned
millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring
tones and games. His company’s website describes him as “a visionary within the
global mobile community.”
In July, he flew to
Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a
“below the radar strategy.”
“If it is
discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States
government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we
risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information,
education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people,” Mobile Accord
noted in a memo.
To cover their
tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a
corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was
created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account
at the island’s Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills.
A memo of the
meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from
any U.S. ownership so that the “money trail will not trace back to America.”
But it wasn’t just
the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts,
according to documents and interviews with team members.
Brad Blanken, the
former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but
noted that there were two main criteria for success.
“The biggest
challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers,”
Blanken said. “And then the ability to spoof the network.”
The team of
contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting
an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back
to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data.
Mobile Accord also
sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company
Telefonica, which organizers said would “have knowledge of Cubacel’s network.”
“Understanding the
security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to
avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier,” one Mobile Accord memo read.
Officials at USAID
realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever —
unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard
was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his
company noted the “inherent contradiction” of giving Cubans a platform for
communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact financed by
the U.S. government and influenced by its agenda.
They turned to Jack
Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents
show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a State Department officer who worked on
social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment.
The State
Department under then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was
an important tool in diplomacy. At a 2011 speech at George Washington
University, Clinton said the U.S. helped people in “oppressive Internet
environments get around filters.” In Tunisia, she said people used technology
to “organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement
that led to revolutionary change.”
Ultimately, the
solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its U.S. origins
and raise enough revenue for it to go “independent,” even as it kept its
long-term strategy to bring about “democratic change.”
Eberhard led the
recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the
management of the Spanish company in the dark.
“The ZZ management
team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they
know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord,” the memo said. “There
should be zero doubt in management’s mind and no insecurities or concerns about
United States Government involvement.”
The memo went on to
say that the CEO’s clean conscience would be “particularly critical when
dealing with Cubacel.” Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average
Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a
Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless
CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project.
Mobile Accord
considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front
company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in
Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the
luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile
Accord’s president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said
she couldn’t get a straight answer about what they were looking for.
“They talked to me
about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States,” she told
the AP in an interview from London.
“If I had been
offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have
become apparent to me that something wasn’t right,” she said.
___
By early 2011,
Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord’s failure to make
ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the U.S. government. The operation
had run into an unsolvable problem. USAID was paying tens of thousands of
dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba’s communist telecommunications monopoly routed
through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that
it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or
worse.
In a searing
evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability
because “it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture
forward.”
In a statement
Thursday to the Denver Business Journal, Mobile Accord said, “We provided a
platform for Cuban people to connect with one another. The program ran its
course and was defunded, but it was well-loved by users, and we’re very proud
of the network we built for Cubans to share information about their daily
lives.”
In increasingly
impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue
that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted
advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo
subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance.
By March 2011,
ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned
previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers
at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo’s text messages to less than one percent
of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. Though
one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was
not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching
on and had tried to block the site.
___
Toward the middle
of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only
sporadically.
Then not at all.
ZunZuneo vanished
as mysteriously as it appeared.
By June 2012, users
who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened.
“Where can you pick
up messages from ZunZuneo?” one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. “Why
aren’t I receiving them anymore?”
Users who went to
ZunZuneo’s website were sent to a children’s website with a similar name.
Reyner Aguero, a
25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana’s University of
Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website
through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the
1990s. Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was
blacklisted, he said.
“ZunZuneo, like
everything else they did not control, was a threat,” Aguero said. “Period.”
In incorrect
Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of
problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them.
¡Que viva el
ZunZuneo!” the message said. Long live ZunZuneo!
In February, when
the idea of USAID’s involvement in ZunZuneo was suggested to Saimi Reyes and
her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, they were stunned.
“How was I supposed
to realize that?” Guerra asked. “It’s not like there was a sign saying ‘Welcome
to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAID.”
“Besides, there was
nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or
‘Everyone into the streets,’” he laughed, “I would have said, ‘OK,’ there’s
something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened.”
USAID says the
program ended when the money ran out.
In response,
Josefina Vidal, director of U.S. affairs at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, said late
Thursday that the ZunZuneo program “shows once again that the United States
government has not renounced its plans of subversion against Cuba, which have
as their aim the creation of situations of destabilization in our country to
create changes in the public order and toward which it continues to devote
multimillion-dollar budgets each year.”
“The government of
the United States must respect international law and the goals and principles
of the United Nations charter and, therefore, cease its illegal and clandestine
actions against Cuba, which are rejected by the Cuban people and international
public opinion,” the statement said.
The former web
domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299. The registration for MovilChat,
the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31.
In Cuba, nothing
has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted.
“The moment when
ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum,” Guerra said. “People texted my phone,
‘What is happening with ZunZuneo?’
“In the end, we
never learned what happened,” he said. “We never learned where it came from.”
___
Contributing to
this report were Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur in Washington and AP
writers Andrea Rodriguez and Peter Orsi in Havana. Arce reported from Tegucigalpa,
Honduras.
___
Contact the AP’s
Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations@ap.org. Follow on Twitter:
Butler at http://twitter.com/desmondbutler; Gillum at
http://twitter.com/jackgillum; Arce at http://twitter.com/alberarce.
___
