In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, former State Department official Mike Benz detailed a covert operation by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during the Obama administration, which involved the creation of a secret Twitter-like social media platform designed to incite political unrest in Cuba.
“This was a scandal during Obama, the Obama USAID era,” Benz said.
“Now, we were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time.”
The operation, known as ZunZuneo, was modeled after Twitter and launched between 2009 and 2014 to target Cuban citizens with initially non-political content like sports, music, and hurricane updates. According to Benz, the aim was to build a user base large enough to later introduce political messages designed to create civil unrest and ultimately spark a “Cuban Spring.”
“This was a Twitter knockoff,” Benz said.
“Zunzini, oh, is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So just it means it’s bird. It was the Twitter bird, the whole thing. But the whole trick about it was, you have to make it look like it’s coming from the Cubans, if you’re going to do this operation.”
Benz explained that USAID funneled money for the project through concealed channels.
“They took funds, millions of dollars, of funds that were concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan,” he said.
“Now, I don’t know if Joe or the audience, if you’ve looked at a map lately, but Pakistan is not exactly a next-door neighbor of Cuba.”
The project was executed by Creative Associates International (CAI), a U.S. government contractor.
According to Benz, CAI set up a complex network of front companies and used Cayman Islands bank accounts to conceal the source of funding.
“They said that these were humanitarian funds for Pakistan, and then they ran that to their contractor, CAI, to quote, set up a Byzantine system of front companies using Cayman Islands bank accounts and recruiting unsuspecting business executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government,” Benz said.
The operation reached around 60,000 subscribers in Cuba. Benz described how the initial content served as a smokescreen for building a surveillance and political targeting network.
“The initiative appears to also have had a surveillance dimension, allowing a, quote, vast database of Cuban zunzinio subscribers, including gender, age and receptiveness and political tendencies, to be built,” he said.
“The data would then be used for micro targeting efforts towards anti and pro-government users in Cuba.”
Benz emphasized that the political content was introduced after enough users had joined, stating, “Once they hit a critical mass, they would create rental riots and they would use this the same way they used it in Egypt and Tunisia to topple those governments under the Obama administration. They would organize smart mobs, rental riots.”
Internal documents revealed by Benz indicated that the program’s end goal was to spark a political movement and challenge the Cuban government’s power structure.
“Documents show the U.S. government plan to build a subscriber base through non-controversial news content… Later, when the network reached a critical mass… operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize, quote, smart mobs… that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAID document put it, quote, renegotiate the balance of power between state and society.”
Benz also addressed the implications of running such operations through USAID rather than the CIA.
“This is classic CIA work,” he said.
“You’re using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You’re marking it for Pakistan… If this gets busted, this is why we task the CIA to do this—plausible deniability… because there’s diplomatic blowback if U.S. fingerprints are revealed.”
While Benz clarified he is not defending the Cuban regime, he stated, “I’m simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House.”
No current U.S. official has commented on Benz’s claims, but his revelations have reignited scrutiny of USAID’s role in foreign influence operations and the use of civilian agencies for covert activity traditionally conducted by intelligence services.
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