B (77:31)
Oh, it is. And you see how it all synchronizes, just like Wisner's Wurlitzer did in, you know, from 1948 through the 1970s, when formally it was supposed to have stopped. But just that's why I say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to usaid. The CIA used to do this work under covert action. But USAID has a couple of cute tricks that make it the central warehouse for all of this. And this is why when we started this conversation, I was saying, you ain't seen nothing yet. This thing is going to get so deep and it's going to connect to so many institutions that everybody thought like in the Truman show, they thought it was their best friend. They thought this thing was totally independent, and these were authentic. Conversations you're having with the cashier. And it turns out, oops, okay, actually you're a part of this USAID sponsored network or the state or DoD or Intel sponsored network, because this is fundamentally covert action that's being done. And when the CIA is subject to restrictions on the kind of COVID activity it can do, every covert action the CIA does, which is our organ for organized political warfare, George Kennan himself, as well as William Casey and Colby and everyone, the express purpose of it was to carry out the subversive side of the political struggle so that we'd have a mechanism for influencing foreign affairs by creating an internal, what looks to be an organic, grassroots, authentic network within the country. But we're actually funding and directing their actions, their actions to be favorable to U.S. interests. But where I'm going with this is USAID. Most of the worst scandals of U.S. statecraft and covert action in the past two decades have actually been from USAID rather than CIA. And there's, there's a reason for this. So after the big scandals against the Democrats and liberals and anti war groups in the 60s and 70s, reforms were put in place. And some of this goes back to the 40s itself. But every covert action the CIA does has to be authorized by the President in what's called a presidential finding to take that covert action. So if the CIA senior leadership, or just a rogue cell that's not even at the top of leadership, but just a rogue desk, a rogue portfolio, a rogue network wants to run a covert action in a region, but they don't think the President will approve, or the President doesn't want to formally sign off on it in case it goes wrong, they can walk right over to USAID who can do the exact same thing the CIA does, except they can call it discrete democracy promotion because it's not technically an intelligence agency, so it's not technically covert action. So it doesn't require executive branch approval or foreknowledge. And they've gotten in trouble in these cases in some pretty incredible ways. Can I show that, please? So let's start with even the whitewashed version. Go to the Wikipedia of Zunzuneo Z u n Z E N E o Z Just on the Wikipedia. And then we can go deeper on this if you want. This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. Now we were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. By the way, I have to say for the record, I'm no fan of the Cuban government and I'm not even weighing in on whether it's the right or wrong thing to do in terms of regime change there or, or liberating people there from autocratic excess by that government. 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. So for example, so this is. I'll show a couple other things in a second here. But, so this is Zenzanillo. So if you just scroll for a second, we'll start with this, right? So. So it was an online social media. Just scroll up one second. We'll start at the top here. It was an online social networking microblogging service created by USAID and marketed to Cuban users. This was a Twitter knockoff. See the background of this is, this is 2009, 2014. That period the State Department and USAID were gangbusters, gung ho on the promise of Arab Spring style social media revolutions to topple other governments. The Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution and a Twitter revolution. USAID pumped $1.2 billion in and we sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to use in order to create the pro democracy, you know, predicate for it. But the problem was at the time, Cuba did not allow US social media in. So they said, hmm, so they're not allowing Twitter in. How can we get a Twitter there, but without calling it Twitter, without making it look like it's coming from the US So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like and retweet button. Zunzonillo is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So 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. So what you'll see is it began running. So this is 2010, this is right during the Arab Spring. And what you'll see is they took funds, millions of dollars of funds that were concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan. Now, I don't know if Joe or the audience, if you've looked at a map lately, but Pakistan is not exactly the next door neighbor of Cuba, right? So, and this is the Wikipedia whitewashing and we can get into the deeper layers of this, but contractors funded by usaid. I should note the main contractor was Creative Associates International, who's a frequent one. It's cai, not CIA, I promise. So they concealed in the budget it from Senate, from Congress, from the White House, National Security Council. They said that these were humanitarian funds for Pakistan and then they ran that to their contractor CAI to 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 US Government. According to the ap, private companies like Creative Associates International designed the network. The idea arose after they were given 500,000 stolen Cuban cell phones that are available on the black market. And then you'll see if you scroll down is okay. The network, dubbed the Cuban Twitter, reached about 60,000 Cuban subscribers. The initiative appears to also have had a surveillance dimension, allowing a quote, vast database of Cuban Zunza NEO subscribers, including gender, age and receptiveness and political tendencies to be built with the Associated Press noting such data could be used in the future for political purposes. By the way, these are all quotes from the internal documents and we can go through that. The data would then be used for micro targeting efforts towards anti and pro government users in Cuba. The developers aimed to at first use non controversial content such as sports and music and hurricane updates. By the way, they used hurricane updates in the internal things. You know, basically a humanitarian front that if you sign up to this app you'll, you'll know about natural disasters in the area. Meanwhile, what was the plan the whole time? Once they built up enough subscribers, they would begin to introduce political messages through social bots and encourage dissent in this, in this astroturfing. There's a great Guardian write up on this. If you, if you go to Guardian Zunzinillo so you can see, see how crazy. Just type in Zunzenillo smart Mobile Guardian. You'll see the internal files explicitly said we're going to lure them in with music, sports and hurricane updates. You have to join. You have to join. You know this, you know Twitter in Cuba. If you want, you know, to be relevant in the culture and see what's trending in sports and music. If you want to be safe in your homes, if you want to know where hurricanes are going, Twitter, Cuban Twitter is the fastest place to get this. It's humanitarian work for, you know, that's we're saving lives by doing this. But the whole point is 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. And if, and if you scroll down, there's some. You know, this is a fantastic article. Highly recommend. There's a lot more there, but. Okay, stop right there. Scroll up a little bit. It. Okay. Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through non controversial news content, news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. This is in the Guardian. Later, when the network reached a critical mass, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize, quote, smart mobs, mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or as one USA document put it, quote, renegotiate the balance of power between state and society. So one more thing. If you want to look up on this, you see how they conceal it. If you just type in USAID Zanzanillo and discrete or discrete action and you'll see how usaid, when this scandal popped off, everyone said, what the hell? How did this happen? This is classic CIA work. You're using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You're saying you're earmarking it for Pakistani aid. This has clear implications for US Statecraft. If this gets busted. This is what the CIA. This is why we task the CIA to do this. Plausible deniability. If something has diplomatic blowback and we don't want US fingerprints on it, we need a formal intelligence agency because there's diplomatic blowback if US fingerprints are revealed. So, yeah, just discreet. Yeah, like discrete. Let's see if you scroll down, that third one might do. But if you scroll down, if you put discrete action, it may be put discrete action or discrete, covert and action. I believe there's a HuffPo one on this. That's. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. When is covert action not covert? When it's discrete usaids. So basically when this. And if you scroll down to the bottom of this, you'll see if you just control F for the word Senate, you'll see. Last week, Elon Musk held an X space directly with Senator Joni Ernst, who has been on this crusade to reform USAID excesses. And there's a really scandalous moment there where Senator Ernst revealed that she was actually threatened by USAID when she tried to get insight into what they were actually doing. Well, if you actually scroll down, if you just do the next, the next one. Basically what USAID said is, well, it's discrete democracy promotion. So it's, you know, we don't need a presidential finding for it. Okay, maybe this is not the. But basically, if you control that for the word staff, that might help it too. But everyone can look this up independently. All this. Okay, is that the only. Okay, maybe it's a different article. But basically Senate staffers and everyone go on YouTube. There was a formal hearing on this for oversight of what happened. And what the staffers said is staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is supposed to be the thing that reins in, that gives the American people oversight and accountability for USAID gone rogue. And what the Senate staffers overseeing USAID said is we had no visibility on this entire operation the entire time because USAID told us if they had to tell us what we were doing, people could die. This is classic CIA stuff. But the Senate was blocked. And I should note again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to usaid. This is why these drug operations and these terrorist operations run primarily through US aid rather than directly at the CIA. The inspector general just two weeks ago put out a report. This is the first time this has been publicly reported. There's been an inspector General at USAID practically from the day it was born. It's supposed to be. This is what Joni Ernst was complaining about. Senator Joni Ernst was complaining about, which was that how can they get away with this? And it's because the Inspector General who's supposed to hold the agency to account from the inside, but it's an independent agency, so there's limited oversight from the outside. If you have a rogue inspector general, they keep the whole op in house. Don't need to tell the executive branch, don't need to tell the Senate or Congress. Run it just like an Ali North Iran Contra style, self sustained, standalone, off the shelf private enterprise to run covert action on taxpayer dime, but not have it go through the formal approval channels. Well, so basically what they were doing here, what the OIG report, the inspector general report just published, the best article on this with the link to it is John Solomon's just the news, you know, publish this a write up on it as well as the source document from the OIG's office. We're just now learning this two weeks ago, despite them doing this activity for 30 years, it turns out there's a get out of sponsoring terrorism free card at usaid which is that USAID cannot directly provide funding to terrorist groups. But their contractors are not required under the grant agreements to go through those OFAC style, those counterterrorism financing. If a bank did it, you would go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not have liberty again for the next 20 years of your life. But if USAID does it, it's completely legal right now. And so this is how you have USAID giving they just last week, $122 million to ISIS. We found they fund all the terrorist groups in Pakistan. They fund the, you know, the terrorist groups in the, in the Sahel, in Africa.