U.S.: ZunZuneo was not secret, covert or classified — just ‘discreet’

The White House, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development promptly fell into step Thursday (April 3) after the revelation that the USAID had created a program intended to foster unrest in Cuba similar to the discontent that not long ago overthrew governments in the so-called “Arab springs.” [For background, click here.]

The three institutions held news briefings at which they justified USAID’s actions using almost exactly the same terminology.

Typical was the reaction at the State Department, where spokeswoman Marie Harf said that “we were trying to expand the space for Cubans to express themselves. Look,” she said, “we’ve been very clear that we promote freedom of expression in Cuba. That’s not a secret. If anyone thinks that’s a secret, then they haven’t been paying attention to what we’ve been talking about with Cuba over the past decades.”

Part of the USAID’s mission “is freedom of expression and allowing the Cuban people to have platforms,” Harf said. “Again, this was a platform where the Cuban people were allowed to create the content. When it started, the folks who operated it put weather content on it, sports content on it, to get it up and running. But no political content was ever supplied by anyone working on this project or running it. It was the people ñ the Cuban people on the ground who were doing so.”

The program was funded with “a three-year grant totaling 1.2 million,” Harf said, “not that much, actually, in the grand scheme of what we spend here.”

The main thrust of Harf’s presentation was that The Associated Press, which exposed the program, was guilty of “a number of misconceptions about what this program was and was not.” The most important “misconception” was that “there was nothing classified or covert about this program.” The program was, in her words, “discreet” and “discreet does not equal covert.”

“Covert action by definition includes the ability and the need to legally deny it,” she explained, citing Title 50 of the U.S. Code. “That was not the case here. The documents associated with the contracting companies were not classified. If you asked directly the contractors or the people who were aware that we were funding it if they were working for the United States Government, they would have said yes. They would not deny it.”

Another of Harf’s quibbles with the AP story had to do with “the notion that we were somehow trying to foment unrest, that we were trying to advance a specific political agenda or point of view. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We believe that the Cuban people need platforms like this to use themselves to decide what their future will look like, and that’s certainly what we did here.”

“We were trying to expand the space for Cubans to express themselves,” she insisted. “We didn’t monitor or we weren’t able to choose what they said on these platforms. That’s up to them. So this was, like other programs […] a program that, because of the hostile operating environment in Cuba, was done discreetly.”

Why did the State Department undertake it? “Because we have been very clear, as has Congress, that it is important to support the Cuban people, to provide them with platforms for expression,” she explained.

“That’s what we were doing. This was a platform. We were not generating political content of any kind on this platform. We were letting the Cuban people do that themselves. In these kinds of hostile environments, for the safety of the people working on these programs, indeed for them to be effective, we believe we must be discreet in doing so.”

“It wasn’t secret. Secret is a technical term. And it was not classified.”

Another reporter spoke up. The program, he said, “was set up with foreign bank accounts […] with foreign companies overseas. The CEOs who were interviewed about this were not told it was a U.S.-backed project. So help me understand how that is not covert.”

“Well, a bank overseas doesn’t equal covert action. It just doesn’t. It’s a fact,” Harf snapped back. “When we talk about discretion, it’s not just discretion with the people on the ground. It’s discretion about where the funding is coming from, so the Cuban Government won’t shut it down, so they won’t clamp down on average Cubans trying to talk to one another on this.”

“Again, having a bank account overseas doesn’t equal covert action. The documents weren’t classified and the contracts weren’t classified. When companies do covert action or classified undertakings with the United States Government, the contracts are classified. That was not the case here. By definition, this does not meet the covert action definition.”

The operative word was “discretion, absolutely. We know the operating environment in Cuba. We know it requires discretion.”

Asked if Congress had been consulted, Harf said that “key staffers on [four] committees were. We had consultations with them regularly on all of our programs, and obviously, we offer briefings to these four committees when they ask for them. And theyíre very supportive of our efforts in Cuba.”

The four committees, she said were, “on the House and the Senate side, Foreign Ops, and on the House and the Senate side, Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs. So in terms of this specific funding, these are the folks that sign off on it.” The Appropriations Committee was not involved.

Near the end of the press briefing, Harf again summarized the purpose of the program.

“We, through subcontracting partners, some companies, created a platform that’s similar to Twitter, where Cubans could freely express themselves,” she said. “We did not supply political content. We did not drive the political content. Our sole purpose here was to open the space so they could supply their own political content or talk about anything else they wanted.

“And quite frankly, they could have said terrible things about the United States and we would have no way of controlling that. So this was solely for the purpose of creating a platform for Cubans to express themselves, which has long been the policy of the United States, the United States Congress, and many other people in this country.”

Pressed again by a reporter about the definitions of “covert,” “classified” and “discreet,” Harf repeated her response.

“There’s levels here, right? There’s something that we announce with a press release and put on our website. There’s something that is, by definition in the U.S. code, covert or classified. And then there are things in the middle that for a variety of reasons, mainly security, we keep discreet. This was in the middle. So we weren’t putting a press release out, but this contract wasn’t classified. And if someone had pressed the folks working on it, they would have said they worked for the U.S. Government.”

The program wasn’t classified “because there are certain conditions you have to meet for something to be classified. Look, the work we do with certain communities all over the world can put people at risk. There are dangerous places we work in because we think it’s important. People volunteer to work with the United States in many dangerous places. That does put them at risk because they think it’s important. That doesn’t make something classified. There are very specific requirements to meet any one of the classification justifications that you can use to classify something. That’s not necessarily always one of them. So clearly this didn’t meet that.”

[Shown in photo is State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf.]