114. Intelligence Scoop: How Trump Captured Maduro in Venezuela (Ep 1)

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19:31David:so welcome back so we've discussed the pressure campaign the overt bit i guess which was the military build-up around the shores of venezuela but there was also a secret a CIA intelligence mission that was going on in parallel to that.

19:47Gordon:Well, that's right. And one thing we should say is this operation, Gordon, it's been named Operation Absolute Resolve. The CIA contributed, right? And we'll talk about that here and sort of how the US got an intelligence picture sufficient to conduct the operation that we just saw. But this was a very overt military operation at the end of the day. And I say military operation, it's not even exactly that. I mean, one of the ways, and I think it's a very interesting lens to take here is because the United States is essentially serving a warrant, I guess, right, to Nicolas Maduro or enforcing this indictment.

20:32Gordon:You could look at the entire operation really as a law enforcement action in which Delta Force operators, the Air Force, the Navy are essentially the protection detail for U.S. law enforcement.

20:50David:The Department of Justice guys. For the Department of Justice guys.

20:53Gordon:So it's not, you know, I've been thinking about some of the parallels and we'll see some of the parallels to the operation, which we talked about in great detail on this podcast last year to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. this is not a title 50 cia action this essentially a covert action right this is an an overt mission to enforce u.s law in venezuela using the u.s military and intelligence community we could debate the you know sort of wisdom and legality of this but this is the way it's it's set up

21:31David:really from the beginning all i'd say is i hope i never get served with an indictment by u.s authorities, which involves a bunch of Delta operators coming through the door before I can get out of there. But also, I guess the point is, it is different from any law enforcement issue. And it's the intelligence buildup, which I think is really fascinating, and the way in which they built the picture of Maduro and his movements, which allowed this to happen. Because it was, back to the questions of legality, and the implications are complicated, and we'll get to those. But it was a remarkably successful operation in the narrow terms of getting him at the moment, knowing where he was and being able to do that.

22:14David:And that surely came down to some pretty detailed and pretty remarkable intelligence collection against him.

22:21Gordon:That's right. So in the summertime, so in late July, just after Trump has signed this directive authorizing the Pentagon to go after the drug boats. It seems like in early August, probably, a team of CIA officers slip clandestinely into Venezuela, and their job is to collect information specifically on Maduro himself.

22:47David:And this, we should say, is a team of actual CIA officers going in on the ground. Obviously, they do not have any diplomatic cover. There's no embassy there. They are basically operating under non-official cover. They're NOCs moving around, but acting as a CIA team on the ground over an extended period. That's quite a unusual operation in some ways, isn't it?

23:11Gordon:It is. I have not seen yet. Again, we're recording this a day after the operation. I would guess it was ground branch, probably paramilitary officers who were inserted in. There does seem, and this is another piece of the story. So you have CIA officers on the ground. There is a source. This has, again, come out in the press since the raid. The CIA was running a human source close to Maduro, right? So somebody who's actually in the entourage or around the entourage and who is reporting probably on Maduro's sort of plans and intentions and thinking, but also, and most importantly for this raid, on his pattern of life, right?

23:58Gordon:So where is he spending time? What's his security detail like? Who's driving him? All these kind of very specific nitty-gritty details about the guy's life, this source is reporting. And really importantly, this source is noting that Maduro has been rotating between six and eight locations, bed-down locations, in and around Caracas. And it seems like the CIA, the broader U.S. government, is learning where Maduro intends to stay sort of on a regular basis late in the evening. So they'll get kind of the update on the next day he's going to be here. Because obviously, the security details got to prep and plan for where he's going to be next.

24:41Gordon:And I think I was fascinated by this little detail because we talked in just in our episodes, Gordon, that we aired last week about how technology is kind of changing the nature of the human intelligence game, and how human is sort of less important than it was, but in the right context is still vitally important. And I think here we have a very great example of how important a human intelligence source can be. Because this person, whoever they are, and I hope they maybe get some of that$50 million reward, seems to have played a really vital role in identifying and building this pattern of life that was so critical to the way the operation went down.

25:24David:Yeah. And it's fascinating that it's already come out that the CIA had a source. I mean, I'd have thought this clearly has been briefed or leaked pretty quickly which you'd think perhaps that source might have been extracted because i mean i think it's been said that they were a government official and someone who was close enough physically to maduro or at least to his detailed security arrangements to know where he is going to be day by day i mean that is someone you would think right in his inner circle who they've got to be able to do that i mean and they talk about you know the the stuff we've learned is that the intelligence they were collecting was detailed enough to map his residence, to know what he was eating, and to know what pets he kept.

26:07David:I mean, that's one of the details that's come out. I mean, so it was that kind of really granular detail about the way he lived his life, which you need for this kind of mission. I mean, it's similar when we looked at the, you know, the Mossad assassination of Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian nuclear scientist. It's that kind of intelligence you need, where you're kind of in someone's daily routine if you're going to do this kind of mission, whether it's in that Mossad case, a kind of a kill mission, or in this case, an abduction mission of someone who knows that they're a target. You need really good intelligence to know which of those locations he rotates between that he's going to be at on the night you're going to do it.

26:47David:You need pretty much live real-time intelligence, and they clearly had that.

26:50Gordon:They had that. And as we'll see from the way the rate goes down, I am just guessing here, I do not know. I would wager that Maduro's communications, probably his phone, his wife's phone, some of the electronics that they would have carried would have been compromised. It also, I think, stands to reason that this source or somebody else may have taken a camera or some other device inside the facility that would allow for a really detailed picture of what the place looked like. because as we'll see here, we ended operation, spoiler alert, with I think one US service member slightly injured. At this point in time, it doesn't seem like anyone was critically injured.

27:37Gordon:No fatalities on the US side and up to 80 Venezuelans and Cubans dead. So to enable that kind of operation, I think you're not surprised. Again, this is another distinction from the Bin Laden raid where you had the compound, but you didn't know what it was like on the inside. I think they knew what the inside of this place looked like.

27:59David:Going back to the Bin Laden parallel, they're actually going to build a replica of Maduro's compound, the one that they end up targeting, which is similar to what we know they did with Bin Laden's compound. They build these models. These models seem to be a real feature of the special operations planning so that you can plan where exactly which entrances you're going in through where the exits are and how you'll operate when you get there and that was done I think by this you know team who were going to go in and we should say it was it was a special forces led mission as you said technically in support of the department of justice but the delta force who we've come across before haven't we because we we talked about them in our series on escobar We actually talked to one of the Delta Force operators who'd been on some of the raids hunting Escobar, Joe Vega, we talked to in our declassified club.

28:52David:So we got quite a good sense there of the way these teams can operate and operate undercover and at pace.

28:59Gordon:Well, at some point in the planning process, the planners settled on this installation called Fort Yuna, which is in Caracas. It's a very large military complex. They settled on this as the best spot to apprehend Maduro. Now, on the face of it, a heavily fortified military base in Caracas doesn't seem like the best place to snatch up the Venezuelan president. And so I'm curious to understand kind of as more time goes by why this site was chosen, because it does seem like a couple things dictated the timing of this operation beyond just Trump's agitation at the Maduro dancing videos. One of them was that they wanted Maduro to be at this site.

29:47Gordon:So they wanted a night where he was there. And then two, as we'll see, is going to be the weather and the phases of the moon. But the site is chosen. Delta Force, as you said, Gordon, are going to be the primary escorts for the law enforcement officers who are going to arrest Nicholas Maduro. Also on the ground, according to some reporting, are operators from Task Force Orange, which is a secretive army unit that we've encountered, Gordon, before in our Pablo Escobar series, because it's gone by many different cover names over the course of its history. And when we met this group in the late 80s and early 90s, it was called Centra Spike.

30:30Gordon:And basically what this group seems to have done is to conduct a kind of preparation of the area and sort of the battle space around Caracas. It may have had a local source network. It did things like install jammers and other technical equipment around the capital, including beaconing locations for airstrikes. So a lot of preparation is going on between the CIA teams, this human source around Maduro, Task Force Orange. All of this is building an exceptionally rich intelligence picture of, I think, a couple different things. It's worth kind of expanding on this because the press hasn't really done it yet.

31:14Gordon:And it's the air defense network, right? You need an understanding of how you create space so that you can actually insert the helicopters that will conduct the stature and grab. then you also need knowledge of obviously Maduro and where he's going to be and all the pattern of life stuff. You need some knowledge of the security detail around Maduro, how they operate, who they are, what their shifts are like, how many people. All of this kind of stuff is built up in what I imagine is just absolutely immense detail in the months leading up to the raid.

31:54David:And we should say that by the time you get to December, it looks like they are effectively ready. And the plan seems to be to launch the raid around the kind of Christmas holiday period, where I think the assumption is perhaps defences might be a little bit lower, might be a bit easier to do. And one of the problems, I think, is it actually gets delayed, doesn't it, because of weather. There's some interesting reports already that actually they were ready to go a few days earlier than they went. But there was some pretty bad weather, I think, over Venezuela at that point, which just made the nature of the mission just too risky at that point.

32:32David:So they're going to have to delay it. And you've got a pretty narrow windows based on, I think it's moonlight and weather, where you can run these kinds of operations. I think that was similar, wasn't it, with Bin Laden raid and with some of the other operations that we've talked about?

32:47Gordon:Yeah, exactly. It's fascinating to me how technologically advanced, obviously these operations are. And I mean, I think there's a big story here, Gordon, also of just how good the United States has gotten at conducting these kind of massive operations that involve synchronization between a bunch of different agencies and people and platforms. I mean, it's astounding. And yet they're totally beholden in some ways to the weather and the moon. If it's storming, you'd prefer to not fly aircraft into Caracas in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. And also from the moon, I find this part really fascinating.

33:25Gordon:If there's too much moon, it's kind of like a nightlight. And so it's easier for people to see you coming. And if there's no moon, you don't have enough ambient light to use the night vision goggles that these pilots are probably flying with. So you're beholden to some pretty natural systems before you plan these things.

33:46David:After this delay of a few days, we get to, I guess, US time Friday, the 2nd of January, so just a couple of days ago, when the initial approval, I think, is given, isn't it, to kind of start the operation, although not the final go order, which comes, I think, six hours later, because they've kind of got to make sure that the weather doesn't change, that the conditions are right, that they know exactly where Maduro is. But at that point on Friday, they give the initial go order to go. Of course, it's fascinating, isn't it? Donald Trump is not in the White House. He's not in the Situation Room, which is where you might expect a president to be watching this.

34:26David:But he's in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, and he's having dinner with some aides. Secretary of State Rubio is there. Director of CIA John Ratcliffe is there. and they're kind of they've set up and you know there's pictures of it a kind of mini situation room haven't they with some kind of monitors and with them able to sit around and then it's late that evening when i think 10 30 or so when everything is in place when donald trump can give the final approval for the mission to really start and at that point i mean it is astonishing isn't it david how many aircraft are involved in this mission and the range of them yeah more than

35:03Gordon:150 military aircraft, drones, fighter planes, bombers, electronic warfare jamming platforms, all take off from 20 different military bases and Navy ships and are headed toward Caracas. Now, as we said, the main extraction force, which seemed to primarily be on Chinook helicopters, It's led by Delta Force, as we said, and it includes some special agents from the FBI's hostage rescue team. They begin their flight into Venezuela at about 100 feet above the water and use something called terrain masking to approach downtown Caracas. So they're basically flying very low to avoid being detected by Venezuela's air defense systems.

35:53David:and it's worth saying here that actually the terrain is quite interesting because caracas is beyond the coast but there is a mountain range in between and it's kind of quite dramatic if you see the pictures which of course also is quite important because it gives them that level of you know surprise if in that they can fly low but then once they come over that mountain range this is i think one of the fascinating bits because that's when they've got to do a few things to basically maintain the surprise. And one is to take down the air defense systems, and the other is to take down the power in parts of Caracas.

36:27Gordon:The power bit is another one that I think we've gotten pretty much courtesy of Donald Trump, because he had a great quote. I mean, so the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has given, we should say, I think a very useful briefing about some of the how, you know, and the way that General Dan Cain, as the chairman, described it. He said, you know, the entire supporting air package, all of these 150 plus aircraft are basically working, and this is great language, to quote, layer effects for a single purpose to get the extraction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise.

37:09Gordon:So as part of that, and a bit unclear exactly when this happened, one of those layered effects is that the lights go out in a lot of Caracas. And Trump himself said, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a, quote, certain expertise that we have, which I guess I'm glad we have this expertise. It made me think of of the Abbottabad raid when lights went out allegedly in Abbottabad, Pakistan during the UBL raid, which again, this is kind of fascinating. How does that happen? How does it work? Nobody's going to give us the answers to that, but it seems to go along with these raids.

37:53David:Although I do note that Cyber Command was thanked for its role in the mission. So I think there is at least the possibility there that that could have been a cyber attack on some of the infrastructure which might have been used to take it out. Or of course, it could have been ground operators and sabotage, we don't know. But I think it's interesting that Cyber Command was part of that. And then they take out the air defence systems and some of the telecom systems, which again, it's part of preparing the ground so that you can get those crucial helicopters with the people on board to the Maduro compound without being shot down and without being seen and to operate under darkness.

38:32David:So it's maintaining that surprise. And what is really amazing is that whole layered, as you put it, system worked and continued to allow the surprise as they reach the compound.

38:43Gordon:It seems like it's probably on the final leg of ingress as the Chinooks are sort of moving into position toward that compound where Maduro and his wife are sleeping. that is that's kind of when this very overt suppression of air defense systems begins at least six sites around caracas are hit uh including the main port to the north uh telecommunications installations some other air bases and military infrastructure are all hit if you watch the videos by the way i will say um give you some appreciation for just how terrifying it would be to be in Caracas when this is going on, because in some of these places, it's very, very loud, and you can see a lot of helicopters in the air.

39:27Gordon:So it would be, it seemed like quite a frightening experience. But Delta Force arrives at the compound at just after 2 a.m. local time, and they do a fast rope kind of descent into the compound. So the helicopter is hovering, it hasn't landed. and you have the Delta Force operators who are kind of fast roping down from the back of the helicopter to the ground or to the roof of a building on the compound. And again, we should just emphasize, I mean, this is not Bin Laden's compound in the suburbs of Abbottabad. It is a Venezuelan military base. And Maduro seems to have, given the mentions of sort of steel and hardened doors.

40:14Gordon:I mean, it's not just a normal kind of villa you can walk into. Once on the ground, now again, similar to Abbottabad, as you said, Gordon, a scale replica of this kind of safe house had been constructed in the United States and the Delta operators had trained on it.

40:41Gordon:So They use explosives to breach one of the outer doors. And I think this is a part where there's still not a lot of details that have come out about what transpired between the moment they sort of hit the ground and the moment they actually snatched Maduro. Because I would wager that it's in this sequence that a lot of Maduro's security detail is killed by the Delta Force guys. I think the Venezuelan defense minister has even said that U.S. forces killed a large part of Maduro's security detail, many of whom were probably Cuban officers. And you're right, yeah, that we haven't heard much about that.

41:23David:That's one bit of detail which was not kind of briefed out is the nature and the extent of the firefight that took place at that point. also worth saying that trump and you know is in mar-a-lago watching this play out in real time on tv screens and you know in his interview on fox news he says you know i watched it literally like i was watching a television show and if you would have seen the speed the violence it was an amazing thing i mean it it's fact it's like trump the kind of the tv producer the reality tv star you know he talks about it in that way doesn't he it's like what a spectacle it was and i think he says, you know, I don't think anyone else may ever get to see it, but I saw it.

42:02David:It was an amazing show. But he is watching it as they go in, and it's amazing how quickly they do get to Maduro. But of course, Maduro and his wife, you know, are bound to be alerted, even though they're fundamentally everyone is taken by surprise. But at that point, he's alerted and he tries to get to a safe room. It shows how worried he was about security. Not only is he rotating his locations, but he's got some kind of steel safe room, which is built at this location, which he and his wife are racing to as the Delta Force operators are moving through to get to him.

42:37Gordon:Yeah. And that's, again, where that timeline of it takes three minutes from blowing open the kind of front door to the safe house to getting to Maduro. And I find this part of it fascinating, Gordon, is like, as these guys are practicing, you probably need to have some confidence. that nobody is going to wake up Maduro until you're pretty much in the house, which means you need to know all of the rhythms of kind of the people who are around Maduro while he's sleeping and how they get information to him if he needs to be woken up in the middle of the night because something important is happening.

43:15Gordon:So even down to that level of detail, you probably have some understanding of what that system looks like. So yes, Blow torches and explosives were ready, apparently, because, again, the U.S. knew about this room, right? The U.S. knew this room existed. The Delta Force guys knew this room existed. So they were prepared in case Maduro got into it to breach the door if Maduro made it into the room. He did not. Trump in this news conference said that Maduro was trying to get to a safe place. It was a very thick door, a very heavy door, but he was unable to get to that door. And five minutes after entering the building, Delta Force has Maduro in custody.

44:00Gordon:Presumably he's been, you know, read his rights by maybe the HRT agents who are there, other law enforcement officials. and basically they go out the way they came. So they take Maduro out. Him and his wife are cuffed and they load the couple into helicopters. There is a firefight on the way out. The aircraft strike multiple targets and what they've described as self-defense is the air convoy departs Caracas and then at 4.30 a.m. local time, Maduro and his wife are out at international waters. They're transferred to the USS Iwo Jima, which was stationed about 100 miles off the coast during the operation.

44:45Gordon:They then are transferred from the Iwo Jima to Guantanamo Bay, where the FBI has a government plane waiting to bring them to an airport north of Manhattan. And then eventually, Maduro is taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, Gordon.

45:02David:How disorienting for him. One minute you're asleep in your bed, and then a few hours later, you're in Brooklyn detention center. So, I mean, that's the operation. Worth saying, as you said earlier, no US loss of life, one helicopter hit, but remained operational. Not quite clear on the numbers killed on the Venezuelan side, but still kind of learning about that.

45:25Gordon:It's at least 80 they're saying now, and that number is likely to go up.

45:29David:But I suppose the point as we come to the end of the story of the raid itself is to say, in the narrow sense of a mission, of a raid, it was remarkably successful, wasn't it? Whatever you think of the implications of the galaxy, all the other things, I mean, they did what they aimed to do very successfully and without much of a hitch, I think.

45:49Gordon:A couple of things maybe worth pointing out, Gordon. I mean, one is that, and we'll come to maybe more of the implications around this in the next episode, is that There was zero notification to Congress, right? Nobody in Congress knew, including nobody in the gang of eight, which is the Senate majority and minority leaders, the House Speaker and minority leader, and then the chairs or ranking members of the intel committees. I mean, nobody's notified that this is happening. I do find it interesting, though, that apparently versions of the plan ended up getting leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post beforehand.

46:25Gordon:Both decided not to publish so as to avoid endangering U.S. troops. But we have a situation where it's possible that reporters at the Times of the Post knew, the administration knew, Congress had no idea what was coming.

46:39David:Yeah, which is interesting is that.

46:40Gordon:I would definitely recommend there's a there's a investigative journalist named Jack Murphy who runs a substack called The High Side, which I think is I very much commend to people. And he has written up a great kind of deep dive on the operation. He said an official familiar with the operation said that this is just one stage of a larger plan and that there are further stages that can be executed depending on kind of how things shake out in Venezuela. So I think it's very possible, talk about this more next time too, that we're not done. This is not a one-off.

47:12David:Yeah. Or if it hadn't been successful, they may have had to kind of keep going and escalate further. So David, I guess that's what we know about how the operation itself unfolded. As I said, clearly on one level, it was a success, but there are a lot of questions around it. And in our second episode, we're going to look at some of those. some of what might have really lain behind the decision to go after maduro what the evidence is for this narco-terrorism or how far it's really about oil how far it might be about other kind of geopolitical motives as well and what all of that tells us about not just why it happened but also what might come next including i think what other countries might be worried having seen what the US has done to Venezuela.

48:01David:So join us on Wednesday to hear that, and we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.