Last night I stopped by the Round Robin Bar before meeting Cerise to take in a performance at the Woolly Mammoth Theater. There I saw Cabot, who is with the United States Agency for International Development Office of Transition Initiatives. Now, USAID is associated with the State Department, and everybody knows how those folks can drink, but even for that crowd, Cabot was beyond the pale. He was so tipsy that I was rather surprised he recognized me.
“Collins!” Cabot called, a bit too loudly, as he plunked himself down on the empty chair next to me, “how’s the policy consulting business these days?”
“Pretty good,” I confessed. “Which is to say, the worse things get in this insane world of ours, the more folks need my advice, and things have been remarkably bad lately.”
“Tell me about it,” Cabot moaned as he swallowed a huge gulp of his branch water mint julep, a speciality of the house at the Round Robin. “Damned journalists at the Associated Press just ruined my week, that’s for sure. You heard about them spilling the beans concerning Zunzuneo, I suppose?”
“Ah yes,” I recalled, “the story has been circulating around Washington since Tuesday. The AP story claims that USAID used high-tech contractors, secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and front companies in Spain and Central America to covertly set up a social media network similar to Twitter on the island of Cuba. The AP says the network was named ‘Zunzuneo’ after the Cuban slang word for the sound of a hummingbird’s wings.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “we thought that was a pretty good play on ‘Twitter’ because Cuba’s got lots of hummingbirds.”
“It’s an onomatopoeia, then?” I asked.
“Hey, Collins,” he cautioned, “don’t get the wrong idea, okay? I mean, there was absolutely nothing kinky about it.”
“Oh, no,” I clarified, “the term ‘onomatopoeia’ doesn’t refer to anything… um… naughty, it just means that ‘Zunzuneo’ is a word that imitates a sound, like ‘ding dong’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ or ‘boink’ or…”
“No!” Cabot interjected, “I told you, there was absolutely nothing smutty going on! We started out with messages about soccer, baseball, music, fashion, dating, and the weather – especially hurricane updates… all perfectly innocent stuff, understand? All meant to appeal to the Cuban youth demographic – the same one that loves Twitter here in the States and everywhere else but places like Cuba, actually. Then, after we got established, we started injecting messages intended to create strong political motivation to change the current Cuban government and renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”
“Hold on a second there,” I requested. “Who’s this ‘we’ you keep referring to?”
“Ah, you know,” he shrugged, “us – USAID.”
“USAID was transmitting messages?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” he confirmed.
“Pretending to be Cuban teenagers?” I pressed.
“Um, yeah,” he admitted. “You could say that. One of our operatives… um, I mean, contractors, sort of… obtained a list of the cell phone numbers – free of charge – for about half a million Cubans through a… contact… at Cubacel.”
“That’s Cuba’s state-owned cell phone provider, isn’t it?” I inquired.
“Right, yeah, that’s it,” Cabot affirmed. “He was this really lonely computer geek, and she was very… ah… persuasive.”
“I thought you said nothing smutty happened,” I reminded him.
“I said there was nothing smutty happening on Zunzuneo,” he objected. “I never said there wasn’t some occasional Mata Hari action setting up the operation.”
“And what else,” I prodded, “went into setting up this… operation?”
“Got to hand it to those AP guys,” Cabot remarked as he quaffed down another gulp of branch water mint julep, “they dug up all the dirt about the shell companies and offshore banks we used to hide where the money was coming from…”
“Which was?” I interrupted.
“From…” he hesitated, “um, well, actually, it was funds USAID was supposed to be using for economic development projects in Pakistan. But we decided that Zunzuneo had a higher priority. And those reporters managed to figure out how we used servers and Internet providers all over Europe, Asia, and Central and South America to process Zunzuneo text messages so the Cuban techies couldn’t tell where the ones we were sending were coming from. But those stinkers at the AP managed to crack our front company in Spain and even got one of the people we interviewed to be the CEO to go on the record about it.”
“Really?” I responded. “What were you looking for in a CEO, and what did that person tell the Associated Press?”
“Well,” Cabot explained, “We wanted the Project ZZ management team…”
“The who?” I stopped him. “Which management team?”
“’Project ZZ’ was our, um… code name for Zunzuneo.” Cabot revealed with a slight blush. “To maintain security, you understand. It was essential that nobody in the Spanish front company really know what was going on, see? The CEO we were looking for would have absolutely no knowledge of the true origin of the operation. As far as they would know, the platform was established by a private company here in the US, nothing more. We needed to make sure there would be zero doubt in the Spanish front company management’s mind that there was no US government involvement. And let me tell you, Collins, finding someone that clueless and stupid, who could still pass muster as a credible corporate CEO, was one hell of a lot harder than we thought it would be. That one who talked to the press – she was pretty typical. We flew her in from Dubai to Barcelona and met with her at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We pitched her the job as CEO of a Spanish language instant messaging company, and I think we did it pretty damn well, but she kept asking questions about our business model and financing and stuff like that, and every time we came back with what we thought was a decent answer, she’d give us this really strange, suspicious look. We went through over a dozen candidates and I saw that same look on all their faces, every time they asked a detailed question and we provided an answer. And it’s not like we didn’t keep working on coming up with better answers, because the questions all were pretty much the same, but no matter what we told them, nobody wanted to be CEO of our Spanish front company.”
“So what did you do?” I wondered.
“Well,” Cabot confided, “we spent so much time at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, interviewing CEO candidates, that we made friends with the head door man. After our fourteenth CEO interview went south, we were desperate, so I suggested we quit worrying about the credible CEO resume angle and just pitch the damn job to him. And lo and behold, the damn fool took it!”
“So the CEO of your Spanish front company was a former door man at your hotel?” I sought to confirm, astounded.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “It’s not like anybody noticed. And it turned out he did a nice impersonation of a corporate CEO, too, which I supposed he got from rubbing elbows with them for years being the head door man at a luxury hotel. And most importantly, he never suspected a thing. Unfortunately, even though he was completely clueless, and therefore safe, he couldn’t get Cubacel executives to back Zunzuneo. So we had him negotiate with Cubacel for a bulk rate text messages instead and then started funneling money through the front company to pay for them.”
“USAID paid foreign aid money earmarked for building schools and digging irrigation wells in Pakistani villages to the Cuban Communist state-owned cell phone company?”
“Oh, sure, I know,” Cabot complained, “if you put it that way, it sounds terrible! But you have to realize, Collins, we were serving a higher purpose. Just look at the facts – social media had a huge impact following the disputed Iranian elections of 2009, and what’s more, text messaging mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, plus during the Arab Spring and…”
“What do you mean,” I demanded, “by ‘smart mobs?’”
“Our policy,” Cabot assured me, “was to use them only in critical and/or opportunistic situations – not on a regular basis by any means – hell, doing that would jeopardize our core platform network mission, see? So we were only going to use smart mobs at very special moments. Most of the time, we wanted to concentrate on creating a subtle paradigm shift in the minds of Cuban youth.”
“Are you saying,” I continued, ”that the idea here was to get a significant segment of young Cubans hooked on a social media platform covertly controlled by the United States, and then send them messages from fake users who were really American agents posing as other young Cubans? And that those messages would suggest that those young Cubans live in a cruel dictatorship, that they would be better off if they didn’t, and that they can change their situation? And then, at the right moment, American agents posing as their peers would send them fake messages telling them to take to the streets and overthrow the Castro regime? And are you telling me that it’s not only morally defensible, but legal, for such a covert program to not only be conducted under the guise of foreign aid, but actually funded with money appropriated by Congress to provide foreign aid?”
“Now, now,” Cabot object, “let’s not say ‘covert’ here, okay? Because that’s not the correct term at all – we were being discreet, that’s what we were doing. We had fake user accounts with agents running them through multiple proxy servers, we had an elaborate system of shell corporations and a front company set up in Barcelona. We even had fake banner ads so that users would think Zunzuneo was completely legit! Bottom line, we went to a lot of trouble to establish an aura of reality. All right then, so what we supposed to do, put up a sign on the web site that said, ‘Welcome to Zunzuneo, brought to you by USAID?’ How much user personal data do you think we could collect if we did that?”
“You collected the users’ personal data?” I gasped. “You spied on them?”
“Good enough for Facebook,” Cabot smugly stated after another swig of mint julep, “good enough for Uncle Sam, it seems to me. Besides, we knew that the Cuban government lacked the capacity to effectively monitor and control something like Zunzuneo. So nobody in Cuba suspected a thing.”
“And how much foreign aid money for Pakistan,” I needled, “did you guys blow doing all this?”
“About a million six,” he calmly declared, with the air of a diner cook tossing off an order of bacon and eggs. “No biggie – a rounding error, basically.”
“Okay,” I relented, “let’s say, first, that Zunzuneo was, in fact, a good idea; second, OTI did a great job setting everything up; third, the action was discreet, but not covert; fourth, the action was not only moral but legal, too; fifth, one million six hundred thousand dollars isn’t all that much money by Washington standards; sixth, Zunzuneo offered such great potential benefits for the United States that they outweigh those conferred by building schools, roads and irrigation wells in Pakistan; seventh, that it’s perfectly acceptable to use social media to brainwash foreign teenagers into opposing their national governments and have American agents provoke them to riot against it in the streets; and, eighth, that it’s also perfectly right and moral to steal those kids’ personal information, because after all, Facebook does it to American teenagers and gets away with it, so it must be okay. Fine – then, can you tell me, how come the Castro government in Cuba isn’t toast?”
“Um… well… uh…” Cabot stammered. “Zunzuneo… ah… never got… popular enough.”
“Not popular enough?” I said. “What’s the most users it ever had?”
“About forty thousand,” Cabot revealed.
“Forty thousand?” I laughed. “Holy smokes, Cabot, that means USAID paid forty dollars for every Zunzuneo user! How many did you figure you needed to have your… desired outcomes?”
“About half a million,” he estimated, “at least.”
“So it could have cost as much as twenty million to get that many,” I speculated. “Still, I guess that’s considerably cheaper than the Bay of Pigs invasion. How come you couldn’t talk OTI into finding enough money to get half a million young Cubans hooked on Zunzuneo?”
“We finally realized,” Cabot sighed, “that even at twenty dollars a month, only about forty thousand young Cubans can afford a social media service like Zunzuneo.”
“How ironic,” I noted. “They’re that poor because of the US embargo on Cuba, of course. So you could say it was the US embargo that saved the Castro regime from being toppled by a convert… I mean, discreet social media driven propaganda campaign.”
“Yeah,” Cabot sighed, “that’s sure what it looks like.”
“So maybe,” I suggested, “what the United States needs to do is end the Cuban embargo, let the kids get wealthy enough to afford social media accounts, and then try something… discreet… all over again.”
“Very funny, Collins,” Cabot chuckled as he drained his mint julep glass. “You ought to be a goddamn comedian.”