A “Cuban Twitter” program developed by the U.S. Agency for International Development as a covert way to foment revolution among the country’s youth was racked with problems, the agency’s inspector general found.
The $15.5 million project, along with an HIV/AIDS workshop that was actually a secret way to recruit anti-government activists, was “designed to conceal funding sources,” the watchdog said in a report made public Wednesday.
The pair of covert projects caught national attention after the Associated Press reported on them last year.
But details of the contracts were not made public until the inspector general’s probe uncovered a series of flaws in the controversial projects.
The Twitter-like program, called ZunZuneo, was implemented by a U.S. company called Creative Associates from 2008 to 2012 and involved routing several grants through groups based in Central America, the report said.
For example, a Creative Associates employee informally contacted a family member in the telecommunications business for advice in 2009, but soon offered his company a nearly $100,000 grant to work on ZunZuneo without weighing whether other companies could have done a better job. The inspector general said it constituted a “conflict of interest.”
USAID could not provide any evidence that it had sought legal advice on ZunZuneo.
“For example, they could not provide documentation that there was any legal consideration about using offshore bank accounts, establishing a separate company to conceal the origin of funds, or collecting user demographic data,” the watchdog wrote.
Agency officials involved in the projects did not maintain records of their conversations with Congress about the efforts.
What’s more, the security manager for the project raised concerns that “one grantee may have been giving information to the Cubans.”
Other red flags included the fact that project employees used aliases and that the agency took steps to ensure “the Cuban Government would not find out that the United States supported the project.”
