AN investigative report by the Associated Press (AP) in April has revealed the details of a covert US programme code named the “ZunZuneo project.” The programme, started at the end of the last decade, was aimed at destabilising the Cuban government. According to the report, the project named after a Cuban word for the call of a humming bird, was launched by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to set up a Twitter style social media. The Americans worked through a chain of fake companies and computer servers located in countries like Spain, Costa Rica, Ireland and the UK in order to conceal their identity. The money was being transferred through a bank account opened clandestinely in the Cayman Islands. The phone numbers of the 40,000 Cuban subscribers were acquired from an American “asset” working inside the Cuban government. ULTIMATE AIM: REGIME CHANGE Initially, the text messages on ZunZuneo pertained only to the weather and the sports but gradually began to acquire a political colour. Off colour jokes about the Cuban leadership and the economy became a staple. AP in its investigative report said that the plan was to gradually introduce anti-government political content and then hope that the twitter service would be able to achieve a critical mass that would enable the mobilisation of “flash mobs” during “critical/opportunistic situations.” The conclusion the American news agency has drawn from the documents it has obtained is that the ultimate aim was regime change which was described as a plan “to renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” This is yet another illustration of the ongoing attempts by Washington to destabilise governments that are not subservient to its interests. Though the “ZunZuneo project” was abandoned in 2012 due to lack of funding, there are other ongoing efforts to undermine governments in different parts of the world by different US agencies, using the media as the preferred tool for subversion. The USAID had tried to attract private covert funding from anti-Castro Cuban emigre groups in Havana after funds had dried up for the ZunZuneo project, AP investigative reporting has revealed. The AP reported that the ZunZuneo project “aimed at undermining Cuba’s Communist government,” was overseen by the USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). The OTI is a division of the US State Department that was created after the end of the Cold War to help Washington influence the fast changing political scenario in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world “without the usual red tape.” In Eastern Europe, as recent history has shown, Washington was successful in staging “colour revolutions” in countries like Ukraine and Georgia. It is another matter that these “revolutions” were short lived and eventually boomeranged on the West, the current events in Ukraine being the latest illustration. In Latin America, the US has been working overtime to destabilise the democratically elected governments that have close ties with Cuba and Venezuela. Ecuador and Bolivia have been very high on the American hit list since the elections of Rafael Correa and Evo Morales to the helm of affairs in those two countries. In June 2012, the nine member ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) regional grouping that includes Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Bolivia and Nicaragua expelled the USAID. The regional grouping charged the USAID for interfering in the internal affairs of their countries under the guise of “planning and administering economic and humanitarian assistance” while actually financing non-governmental organisations and actions and projects designed to destabilise the legitimate governments which do not share their common interests. The ALBA has also been quick to condemn the ZunZuneo project, labelling it as “illegal and immoral.” A statement issued by the ALBA said that the “subversive meddling” by the US had “flagrantly violated international law and the sovereignty of Cuba.” MOVES AGAINST VENEZUELA, OTHERS Declassified documents of the OTI have revealed its extensive role in the abortive coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. More recent OTI documents that have been brought under public purview by Wikileaks show that the American interference in the internal affairs of the country continued unabated even after the failed CIA backed coup attempt. A State Department cable of November 2006 clearly spells out the American strategy to counter the popularity of Chavez. American diplomats in the country were told to implement a five point strategy that included penetrating the political base of the ruling party, protecting vital US business interests and isolating Chavez internationally. Among the ways in which the US administration went on implementing the strategy were by providing liberal funding and training facilities for the opposition activists. The cable describes in detail some of the successes it has achieved in the field with the active of cooperation of the NGOs the USAID/OTI has funded. As the Wikileaks cables show, many of the opposition leaders funded by the US State Department are the ones today in the forefront of the agitation in Venezuela that has been going on since late January. Maria Corano Machado, who runs a US funded NGO, has been among the most prominent leaders of the agitation which has claimed the lives of more than 40 people so far. Machado along with another protege of Washington, Leopoldo Lopez had launched the “La Salida” (the exit) campaign with the stated goal of regime change, despite the Venezuelan president having won the election last year and the ruling party routing the opposition in the provincial and municipal polls held late last year. In 2008, the American backed opposition in Bolivia launched a virulent and racist campaign against President Morales. The Bolivian government retaliated by expelling the US ambassador for his failure to disclose the names of the recipients of the largesse USAID had doled out. Most of the money had gone to favoured opposition figures and NGOs. Bolivia and Ecuador have both expelled the USAID from their countries on charges of funding NGOs, opposition groups and peasant organisations for the purpose of destabilising their governments. Meanwhile, the government of Costa Rica has asked the Obama administration to explain the reasons for setting up a secret “Cuban Twitter” network on its territory, despite warning Washington in 2009 that such a move would impact adversely on bilateral relations with Cuba. Costa Rica’s foreign minister, Enrique Castillo, told the media in the late April that it was “inappropriate” on the part of Washington to use his country as a location for the development of a social media network aimed at destabilising a third country. The ZunZuneo team had initially operated out of Central America. The USAID spokesman, Matt Herrick, has however insisted that the Costa Rican government was very much in the loop. He has asserted that the Costa Rican government was “informed on the programme on more than one occasion.” The Costa Rican government, from available information, had stopped cooperating with Washington on the ZunZuneo project since 2009. Two American contractors working on the project were not granted “diplomatic status” by the government in that year. An internal Costa Rican foreign ministry memorandum noted that the project “could create a situation politically inconvenient since it can be interpreted that it could violate the principles of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.” MISUSING INTERNET FOR SURREPTITIOUS ACTIVITIES Congressman Jason Huffetz, the chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said that what the USAID was doing was wrong. “USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognised around the world as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished,” he commented. Senator Patrick Leahy who chairs the Senate Appropriation Subcommittee overseeing the USAID budget, denied assertions that the controversial the USAID programmes were debated in the Congress. “If you are going to do a covert operation like this for regime change, assuming it ever makes any sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID,” Leahy said. The USAID administrator, Rajiv Shah, is continuing to claim that the ZunZuneo project was not a “covert” operation but only a “discreet” programme. The USAID had dispatched an American “contractor,” Alan Gross, to Cuba to discreetly distribute communications equipment to “dissidents” on the island. He was arrested by the Cuban authorities in 2011. Gross is now serving a 15 year jail term for acts committed against the sovereignty and integrity of the Cuban state. His lawyer in the US, Scott Gilbert, accused the USAID of harming the chances of an early judicial reprieve for his client by continuing to run “a covert operation” on the island. The noted investigative journalist, Glen Greenwald, who played a key role in exposing the massive worldwide scooping activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) has described the “Cuban Twitter” scam as a drop in the US Internet propaganda bucket. “These ideas-discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets --- appears repeated throughout the archive of materiel provided by NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden,” Greenwald observed in a recent article. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, described the internet as “a CIA project” during a press conference in the last week of April. He said that the project is still in a “developing stage” and that countries like Russia needed protection from it. Putin explained that the internet “first appeared as a CIA project” and though it later was made available to the open market, the “special services are still at the centre of things.”