A news agency investigation revealed yesterday that US spooks used a US aid programme to create a “Cuban Twitter” network designed to undermine the island’s government.

Through a long-term campaign, the Associated Press uncovered a project built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks.

The project, which drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to build an audience of mostly young Cubans and push them toward dissent.

Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a US agency with ties to the State Department, nor that US contractors were gathering data about them for political purposes.

Details uncovered contradict the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) long-standing claim that it does not conduct covert actions.

USAID went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington’s ties to the project.

Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in the Cayman Islands to pay the bills so the “money trail will not trace back to America.”

Subscribers’ messages were funnelled through other countries and never through US-based computer servers.

“There will be absolutely no mention of US government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc, one of the project’s creators.

The project, dubbed ZunZuneo, was launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of US contractor Alan Gross.

He was imprisoned after repeatedly travelling to the country on a clandestine USAID mission to expand internet access using sensitive technology available only to governments.

ZunZuneo began in 2009 when Washington-based Creative Associates International illicitly obtained half a million Cuban mobile phone numbers from a Cuban source.

Project organisers used those numbers to start a subscriber base.

ZunZuneo organisers wanted the network to reach critical mass so dissidents could organise “smart mobs” to trigger demonstrations or “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

Organisers created a network that looked like a legitimate business, including the creation of a companion website and marketing campaign.

But behind the scenes, ZunZuneo’s computers were storing and analysing subscribers’ messages and other information, including gender, age, “receptiveness” and “political tendencies.”