Nov 10, 2014 5 min read

WASHINGTON – The State Department said Monday it was reviewing some of its secretive democracy-promotion programs in hostile countries, after the Associated Press reported the nation’s global development agency may effectively end risky undercover work in those environments.

The proposed changes follow an AP investigation this year into work by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which established a Twitter-like social network in Cuba and secretly sought to recruit a new generation of dissidents there while hiding ties to the U.S. government. The agency’s proposed changes could move some of that work under America’s diplomatic apparatus.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to elaborate on the proposed changes Monday, saying it was “premature” because of ongoing deliberations. “We continue to believe we need to find creative ways to promote positive change in Cuba, but beyond that, we’re still assessing what any change or what any impact would be,” she said.

USAID’s proposed policy closely mirrors a Senate bill this summer, which would prohibit the agency from spending money on democracy programs in countries that reject the agency’s assistance, where staff wasn’t directly hired and where USAID would have to go to “excessive lengths to protect program beneficiaries and participants.”

In turn, some of USAID’s high-risk democracy efforts would likely be moved under the control of another arm of the State Department, according to government officials familiar with discussions about the policy who were not authorized to talk about the matter publicly. Other programs could shift to the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group that receives money from the U.S. government.

Those changes would have effectively made it impossible for USAID to run programs such as the “Cuban Twitter” project, known as ZunZuneo. In that program, the AP found USAID and its contractor concealed their involvement in the Cuban programs, setting up a front company, routing money through Cayman Islands bank transactions and fashioning elaborate cover stories.

That subterfuge put at risk USAID’s cooperation with foreign governments to deliver aid to the world’s poor. Last month, it pledged more than $140 million to fight Ebola in West Africa.

In a statement late Sunday, USAID said it would continue to carry out democracy programs in “politically restrictive environments” and aim to be transparent. But it said the new rules would balance safety and security risks, which would align with the proposed legislation. The statement said the rules have not been finalized.

“We will also examine risks that might constrain effective implementation of the projects or undermine the safety of our partners, such as programmatic, legal, financial, physical and digital security-related risks,” it said.

The officials said USAID acknowledged changing its democracy-promotion policy after being questioned by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who wrote the agency following the AP’s report in April. Leahy called the program “cockamamie” in a subcommittee hearing.

Both ZunZuneo and a second program to recruit Cuban dissidents were part of a larger, multimillion-dollar effort by USAID to bring about democratic reforms in politically volatile countries. But the officials said they were told USAID concluded some democracy programs in hostile countries were not effective.

“Civil society organizations, and dissidents in countries with repressive governments where human rights are denied, deserve our support,” said Leahy, who chairs the Senate subcommittee on foreign appropriations, in a statement Monday. “But USAID is a development agency, and its programs should be open and transparent, not covert. Nothing illustrates this more tragically than the continued imprisonment of Alan Gross in Cuba.”

It is illegal in Cuba to work with foreign democracy-building programs. Nevertheless, one USAID contract for a Cuban project was signed days after Gross, an American contractor, was arrested in December 2009 for smuggling sensitive technology into the country. Cuba’s highest court denied his appeal, and he remains imprisoned there.

The AP reported that ZunZuneo evaded Cuba’s Internet restrictions by creating a text-messaging service that could be used to organize political demonstrations. It drew tens of thousands of subscribers who were unaware it was backed by the U.S. government. U.S. officials said it ended in late 2012 because funding ran out.

In August, the AP found the agency secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba to provoke political change, using the cover of health and civic initiatives. That program sent Latin youth — often posing as tourists — around the island for wages as low as $5.41 an hour to scout for people they could turn into political activists.

Shortly after the AP revealed the existence of the social media project in April, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked USAID to turn over all records about the program as part of a broader review of the agency’s civil-society efforts. The agency’s inspector general confirmed this summer it was examining the ZunZuneo program.

The USAID programs were also launched around the time newly inaugurated President Barack Obama talked about a “new beginning” with Cuba after decades of mistrust, raising questions about whether the White House had a coherent policy toward the island nation.