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We moved up and down the coast of Trinidad and the fishermen there are super scared because they say they go out at night to fish and then suddenly they'll start hearing Dr. Flying up overhead.
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Fishermen from Trinidad have gone missing at sea. Were they killed by the US Military? Plus, the Trump administration tries to hold together the Gaza deal that the president said would bring eternal peace to the Middle East. This is Sources and Methods from npr. I'm Sacha Pfeiffer in this week for Mary Louise Kelley. Every Thursday here on the podcast, we talk through the week's biggest national security stories with reporters in our newsroom and around the world. Today, Greg Myhre, NPR national security correspondent who this week has been in Israel along with what feels like half the Trump administration. Hi, Greg.
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Yes, I'm a little outnumbered here, but good to be here.
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And Ader Peralta, who just landed in Miami after several days in Trinidad and Tobago, I believe, Ader, in the same neighborhood where the US has been blowing up boats it says are smuggling drugs. Is that right?
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That's right. We were on land and they're blowing them up out at sea.
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But yes, thanks to both of you. And as we clock in Today, it is 1:30 in the afternoon here in D.C. and Greg, 8:30 in Tel Aviv where you are.
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That's right. Yep.
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So let's start with those boat strikes by the US Military. We are now up to nine of them. Originally, there were seven strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Now two in the Pacific Ocean this week. That's according to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. He has called these alleged drug trafficking organizations, organizations, quote, the al Qaeda of our hemisphere, quite interesting. Brings us back to a lot of post 911 memories that we will talk about later. Ader, you went to Trinidad and Tobago to answer a fairly simple question. Who was on those boats that had been blown up by the U.S. what did you find?
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I mean, it's a simple question, but it's really difficult to get answers. Right because they're all these operations are happening out in the open ocean. So there have been no independent witnesses to any of this. And so what we really have is what the United States is telling us. And I went to Trinidad because there was a family of a man called Chad Joseph who believes that Chad Joseph was killed in one of these American airstrikes. And what happened is Chad Joseph, the family told us, had left to Venezuela a few months ago, and then he had told family and friends that he was coming back. And on the same day that he got on a boat back to Trinidad and Tobago, there was an airstrike, and they assume that he's dead.
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They say he just went to Venezuela for work. Did they say what he was doing there?
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They say he's there for work. And we spoke to his aunt yesterday. And, you know, obviously one of the big questions is the US Is accusing these people of being narco traffickers, narco terrorists, as the White House has been calling them. And she says that's nonsense. That's nonsense that they are fishermen. But I think what's difficult is we don't actually know that they were killed out at sea. The family suspects this. They have circumstantial evidence, right? But there's not really any way to tell for sure. And the Trinidadian government has said that no Trinidadians have died in U. S. Airstrikes. And so it leaves the family in a sort of a corner, right? They want the United States to give them answers. They want them to tell them if their. If their family member was killed. But yesterday they held a funeral for him without a body.
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On the assumption that he had died.
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On the assumption that he had died. Some of his friends had recognized the boat in these images. But again, you've seen the images, right? They're these grainy images from a drone flying overhead. So they're sort of putting all of these pieces together.
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And Eyder, we should acknowledge and emphasize, as you've referenced, that maybe some of these people are both fishermen and drug smugglers, Know, maybe they are. It's just that because it can't be independently verified, we just know that boats are being blown up and it's unclear who's on them and what they were doing.
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That's right. And, you know, we also. We moved up and down the coast of Trinidad, right, And. And the fishermen there are super scared because they say they go out at night to fish, and then suddenly they'll start hearing drones flying up overhead and they come back to shore. And what's also interesting, right, is they're analyzing these videos. They're looking at, like, every sort of minute detail of these videos. And one of the things that worried them is, you know, Venezuela is in a deep crisis right now, a deep economic crisis. So you can't find a lot of things in Venezuela, a lot of basics, toilet Paper, shampoo, some food products. So Venezuelans will come to Trinidad, they will buy a whole bunch of stuff. They, they'll pack them up on these boats and head back. It's as little as a 20 minute ride. And when you pack all of these things up, you pack them the same way that you would drugs. And this is what the fishermen were telling you.
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Interesting that they're saying this is a mistaken identity, in a sense, is what they're claiming. This was legit and the government made a decision that it might not have.
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Been or it could be legit is what they're saying. Right? It could be legit.
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The government. Washington, as we've said, is saying that this is about counter narcotics. But last week on this podcast, we talked about the suspicion that many people in Washington have that it's actually about much more than that. And we know that President Trump acknowledged last week that he has authorized CIA action in Venezuela. The US has also been amassing warships off the Venezuelan coast. Eyder, how are people in the Caribbean reading this? What is, what do they think is the larger issue going on here?
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I think everybody in the Caribbean, except for the Trinidadian government, Right. The actual position of the Trinidadian government is that this is an anti narcotics operation. But, you know, you go out into the streets and you talk to analysts and they tell you, no, this is a regime change operation in Venezuela. And one of the things that the.
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US Wants to overthrow Nicolas Maduro, basically.
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That's right. And this isn't the first time, right? I mean, this is, you know, the US back in 2019, you know, was sort of pushing Maduro to leave, you know, through, through, through a series of protests. And they wanted Juan Guaido to be declared the, the legitimate president. They recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela. And so they, they view this as a replay of history. And one of the things that they point to, right, is they say, do you really need submarines with Tomahawk missiles to destroy these little drug boats? Right. It's a lot.
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An intentional show of force.
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That's right, Greg.
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Yeah, Eyder, I'm an O. But from this distance, this talk of CIA involvement in Venezuela, it just sounds so retro. I mean, this is the kind of thing that the CIA was doing in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, undermining governments in Latin America or working to overthrow them. You know, it seemed that pretty much ended with the end of the Cold War 30 plus years ago. Relations generally improved. These kinds of operations faded away. But, you know, what does it feel like. I mean, are people talking about it as being a sort of throwback to a. To an earlier Cold War era?
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I mean, the last sort of big American invasion was 1989, right, in Panama. And then since then, the US has sort of moved into, you know, trying to get their way through economic pressure. Right. And I think that. That, Greg, is the big question, right? Are we really back to, you know, gunboat diplomacy of the late 1800s, early 1900s? And I don't know that we can say for sure that this is really where we are. Right. But you do have warships off the coast of Venezuela.
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We should note that there are certainly plenty of people in Venezuela who would like Maduro out. In fact, the two of you, Greg and Eder, may have heard that on Weekend Edition Sunday. Recently, NPR host Aisha Roscoe interviewed the Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corinna Machado, who's been in hiding since the election last year. She just won the Nobel Peace Prize. So again, Nobel Peace Prize. And yet she basically walked right up to the edge of explicitly calling for US Intervention. Do you want the US to intervene using the military to bring democracy to Venezuela as you are talking about? Look, you cannot have peace without freedom, and you cannot have freedom without strength when you are facing a criminal structure.
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And, you know, Machado has an interest in this. I mean, she was the vice presidential candidate in the elections that happened last year, and Maduro officially wins these elections. But, you know, for the one of the first times probably in history, right, like the opposition here, Machado and her running mate actually managed to collect a vast number of the tallying forms from Venezuela, and they prove that they won't. And, you know, most international observers, you know, say that indeed Maduro lost these elections. And so I think, you know, what Machado is probably thinking is like, this is my chance, right? This is a chance to give Venezuela back a democratically elected government. But I think what's really interesting is that there's slight nuance there. And it's actually, we went to the very tip of Trinidad where you can actually see Venezuela, like from the shore, and there's a lot of Venezuelans there who now work there, right? And they had much the same thing to say, right, which is like, we really don't like this government. But they were hesitant to just outright call for an American invasion because I think they understand what the consequences of conflict are, right? That their families would be affected, that their friends would be affected. And I think, you know, she's stopping just short of that. And I feel like, I felt the same thing on the shores of, on those beaches. Right. Looking out at Venezuela, which is we desperately want change because we desperately want to go back home. Right. But we don't actually know that this is the way to go about it.
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Greg and Ader, let's take a short break. And when we get back, the Trump administration's full court press to try to keep the Gaza peace deal moving forward. That's ahead on Sources and Methods from npr. Every week we bring you as much insight as we can about events unfolding in America's centers of power and their global impact.
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It takes a lot of work, late.
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Nights across time zones, planning, sourcing, checking, taping, editing. Join our supporters who make that work possible with npr. You'll get all episodes sponsor free and unlock access to our archives. Sign up at + NPR I love space, I love physics and I love movies. And when I tell people all three of those things, they often ask me about one specific movie. Interstellar. In the words of a 2013 Facebook relationship status, it's complicated. So on NPR Shortwave podcast, we rewatch Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to separate the science facts from the science fiction. Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. When someone you love is diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness, all you want to do is help. But where do you start? On the Life Kit podcast, we have tips for you.
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Your agenda should be I'm going to.
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Be with you and be totally present to whatever comes up. Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts for different ways to offer support.
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Every day a lot happens in the world of politics. And every day the NPR Politics Podcast is here to make sense of it all. We're your daily companion, giving you the updates and news you need to stay informed. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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So in one hemisphere, the Trump administration may or may not be trying to start a war. And in the other hemisphere, it's going all out to try to make sure that a war stays stopped. And that other hemisphere, Greg, is where you are in Tel Aviv. It's also where Secretary of State Marco Rubio touched down Thursday and Vice President Vance visited earlier this week. A lot of Republican officials there, as we said. Who else has come through?
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Yeah, Steve Witkoff, the president's Middle east envoy and the president's son in law, Jared Kushner. You know, quite a collection who keep passing through. They keep meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's universally known here as Bibi. And so the Israeli media has dubbed this American contingent that keeps coming here and meeting with Netanyahu the BB sitters. So far, it seems to be working. It seems to be an example of President Trump has this reputation of often claiming victory quickly and then moving on and trying to forget about whatever just happened and not follow through. In this case, he does seem to have a very strong commitment to making this ceasefire stick. He certainly claimed credit for it. Now he wants to see that it works.
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You know, Trump has made it very clear that he badly, dearly wants this peace plan to work to hold. He hopes it might win him a Nobel Peace Prize. But anyone who knows the history of the Middle east knows to be skeptical that this will hold. How firm ground is Trump on to make the optimistic claims that he's been making?
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Well, getting the truce after two years of heavy fighting was a serious deal. We shouldn't underplay that, downplay that for any reason. But given his sort of grandiose claims, it does bring memories of George Bush in Iraq way back in 2003, just a few weeks into the war, you may recall, he goes on an aircraft carrier. Officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln speaking beneath a sign of Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And then, of course, an insurgency breaks out. And that insurgency was still burning when Trump took office in 2017. So Trump has firsthand experience. This should be a cautionary tale when dealing with the Middle East. Yet, you know, just last week in Egypt, Trump went there for the signing ceremony. This huge sign is behind him saying peace in the Middle East. And he was also in Israel, and he declared it a historic dawn of the new Middle East. So those are big claims and there's a long way to go to get to that point.
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And we have seen some flare ups of violence since, even though there has been that exchange of hostages and prisoners. Are you able to gauge, Greg, how likely it is that the ceasefire and the peace plan may survive?
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So we're about two weeks in, Sasha, at this point, and it is largely holding, except for one really bad day last Sunday. Addressing this, logically, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have real incentive to make the ceasefire work. Huge majorities among the Israelis and the Palestinians, Palestinians and the Gaza residents in particular, want this war over. And there's really not a lot to be gained militarily. Israel has certainly established its dominance over Hamas, which has been decimated. But this ceasefire calls for a lot of additional things to happen. This is known as phase two. For example, there's no government in Gaza. The security forces right now in the streets of Gaza are effectively Hamas, which has taken retaken control of the streets. Hamas is supposed to give up its weapons at some point, the Israeli troops are supposed to pull back and an international force is supposed to move in. So we have all of these things that still need to be negotiated and that's why these Americans were here trying to set up or nudge this along. But those are going to be the really hard things to work out. So I think it's quite plausible we could see a ceasefire and an end to the shooting. But these other difficult political issues still need to be worked out and that may be a lot harder.
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Greg? I don't know. Like the question that comes into my head, right is I feel like throughout these two years there's like all of these irreconcilable stuff, right, Issues that have come up. Like just a few months ago the White House was like, you know, floating plans of like getting rid of all the Palestinians and like, you know, creating a Gaza Riviera or taking all the weapons away from Hamas. I mean, does, does all of that just kind of melt away and like, or is that just still like hovering?
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Well, it's. A lot of it has fallen away. It was just completely implausible. And as people look at how difficult it is to get things done there, we're not hearing so much about that. For example, the idea that these 2 million Palestinians would leave the territory, that seems to have had just been nixed. There's nobody talking about that anymore. You still hear some ideas about developing the coastline of Gaza, which has basically 25 miles of Mediterranean coast, but that is so far off. As you just look at the challenges of clearing rubble and rebuilding. One idea you are hearing now is that there might be development or rebuilding in the Israeli parts of Gaza, the areas that Israel still controls, and that would be seen as a model and hopefully Palestinians would then go away from Hamas. Very hard to believe that as well. The Gulf countries are probably going to fund this reconstruction. They don't want to be part of something that would look like an Israeli propaganda campaign. So a lot of these things that didn't quite sound right probably aren't going to happen. And it's becoming more real now that you have to deal with these day to day issues.
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Let's take another quick break and then when we get back, who could keep the peace without a government in Gaza? That's ahead on sources and methods from NPR this week on Consider this. ICE detained him for three days and he's a U.S. citizen.
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They didn't say what I was charged with. They never told me I was being arrested. I asked for a lawyer. They just completely ignore it.
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What Democratic lawmakers say they will do in response. Plus fact checking the president's claims about left wing violence, whether it's true, truly rising. This week on Consider this Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I have to ask, with this endless stream of sellable content, do.
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You think Taylor Swift is exploiting her fans?
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No.
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I'm gonna say yes with an asterisk.
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Every pop star exploits their fans.
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Is Taylor Swift exploiting her fans or or is she feeding them?
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Listen to It's Been a Minute on.
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The NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh air. I interviewed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro about his lifelong obsession with Frankenstein and his new adaptation in which the creature is tormented by eternal life.
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I'm a huge fan of death.
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I'm a groupie person. You can find my interview on the FRESH AIR podcast. Greg, earlier you made a comparison to when George W. Bush made his infamous Mission Accomplished speech. There is a big difference between then and now, which is that the US Then had troops on the ground in Iraq. Is there any expectation that the US could eventually have troops on the ground somewhere in Israel or Gaza?
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No. The Trump administration is making very clear that that is not going to happen. Now there are 200 US troops, Israel, and they very quickly put together this civilian military coordination center. I mean, they literally built it down in Southern Israel just 10 miles or so from the Gaza border. And so the Americans will be deeply involved, but as organizers, coordinators, planners, not as troops on the ground. We still don't know who those troops are going to be. And it's clear that even countries that might be willing to provide troops groups don't want to be put in this very difficult position of trying to wrest weapons away from Hamas fighters, that they want to go there and be the sort of neutral force between the two sides, keeping them apart, but not get involved in any of the power dynamics inside Gaza itself. And Sasha, you know, we're still trying to get bits and pieces about what life is like there these days.
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Well, right, because, Greg, you still can't get in there, right? I mean, Israel is still not letting journalists outside. So you have the challenge of trying to understand what's happening when you can't get across that border.
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Right. And we've been very fortunate. We've had just an outstanding Palestinian reporter working with us throughout this two years of war, Anas Baba. And we're getting bits and pieces from him and he's telling us things. For example, there are bulldozers clearing the main roads. More food is getting in, but still not at the levels that were expected. Prices are coming down. For example, a lot of people are staying in the south of Gaza where they have tents and there are aid groups and there is some food. Many of them are from Gaza City, the big city in the north of Gaza. But a lot of people say they just can't return. You've seen all these buildings that have been collapsed by Israeli bombing. A lot of them were multi story apartment buildings just turned into rubble. So you had dozens, maybe even hundreds of people living in these buildings. There's no room for all of them to put up their tents. It's just one big pile of rubble. Another major problem is just all the unexploded ordnance which is all around and there's no one in there, no foreign or international organizations there yet to deal with it. Normally a team would come in, blow up this ordinance in place, but in Gaza, it's just too densely populated. They can't clear enough space. So we're hearing they may try to remove these bombs and take them out of Gaza before detonating them.
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Yeah. Greg and Eyder, as we wind down this show, I want to make a quick plug for our episode earlier this week. For anyone who missed it, the ex CIA Moscow station chief Rob Dannenberg broke down Vladimir Putin's approach to President Trump. Here's a clip from that.
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I think Putin loathes Trump for his success as a capitalist, his ability to dominate headlines around the world. On the other hand, Putin uses flattery effectively as part of his toolkit to try and manipulate the President. Than in the United States.
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You can hear that conversation in the episode just before this one in your feed. And a reminder that the most recent five episodes of our show are always free and available. After that they go into our back catalog, which you can unlock if you are an NPR supporter. And our thanks to those of you who are. We end our show with osint. That is open source intelligence, valuable information hidden in plain sight, waiting to be decoded. The one I want to kick us off with is related to Venezuela and the boats that have been blown up that we've been talking about in recent weeks. There was one vessel where two of the people on it lived. And all the others, they died. And the Trump administration had referred at one point to those two living people on the boats as unlawful enemy combatants. I have for years been covering Guantanamo. And when I heard that term, I thought, oh, my. I mean, that was the term used post 911 War on Terror that enabled the United States to justify indefinite detention, people held at Guantanamo who are still there to this day, who have never been charged. And I did wonder whether we're going back to this post 911 time when if you label somebody or categorize somebody with the right legal term, the usual rules don't apply. And Eyder, what do you have for.
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Us this week, your Osint, you know, the old is New again. The U.S. is proposing to build a radar system at the Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada. Maurice Bishop was the Marxist Leninist prime minister who made Grenada closer to Cuba and the USSR during the Cold War, and the US Ended up invading Grenada. So there's a, there's the country is enthralled by the irony right now of the potential for a US Radar system at this airport.
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And Greg, yours.
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I want to tell you the story about a French cyclist, Sophie Anne Sully. Now, he wanted to set a world's record for the fastest bicycle trip across Europe and Asia. He left from Lisbon on the Atlantic coast in July. His goal was to make it all the way to Vladivostok, Russia, on Russia's Pacific Ocean coast. He went all across Europe, Turkey, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China. He's almost there, more than 6,000 miles. And then he takes a little turn north just so he can go through a bit of Russia for the last hundred plus miles of this, of this incredible journey. Well, you know, if you've ever dealt with Russian border guards, not the friendliest guys in the world, they arrested him back in early September crossing a border without a visa. There are even pictures of him in one of those cages in the Russian courtroom where nobody ever looks innocent. He's still wearing his cycling shoes. The Russians locked him up for seven weeks. Today he got out. He had to admit his guilt, pay a $600 fine. So he's free. No words yet on whether he's flying home or plans to cycle back.
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Ah, stick to the official map, I guess is the lesson there. Be very careful which borders you decide to cross.
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So close.
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So close. That is NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre in Tel Aviv. Greg, thank you.
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My pleasure.
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And NPR international correspondent Eder Peralta, normally based in Mexico City, as he said. But joining us today from Miami via Trinidad and Tobago. Ader, thank you.
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Thank you.
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I'm Sascha Pfeiffer. We're back next week with another episode of Sources and methods from NPR. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of FRESH AIR. Hey, take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us and listen to long form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us.
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And speaks to our times.
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So listen to the FRESH AIR podcast from NPR and whyy. I'm Rachel Martin. If you're tired of small talk, check out the Wild Card Podcast. I invite influential thinkers to open up about the big topics we all think about, but rarely talk about. Tune in this fall to hear Mel Ross, Malala Yousafzai and Brene Brown talk about everything from grief and God to ambition and forgiveness. Watch or listen on the NPR app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story, but right now you probably need more on up first from NPR. We bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the upverse podcast from NPR.