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The Rest Is Classified
114. Intelligence Scoop: How Trump Captured Maduro in Venezuela (Ep 1)
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Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
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And I'm David McClarsky.
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B
And David, we are suspending our regularly scheduled or scheduled programming this week for a two part emergency series on the intelligence story. The implications of that dramatic 2 hour and 20 minute US apprehension mission in Venezuela, I think that's what it was called, which snatched Nicholas Maduro and his wife.
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A
Why the scare quotes around around the title, the title of the mission?
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B
Well, it certainly apprehended Nicolas Maduro from those pictures as well as his wife and brought the Venezuelan leader to New York City to face drugs charges amongst other things. And so we're going to have a deep dive, aren't we David, into that from the kind of Rest is classified perspective, focusing on the the intelligence side and the mission.
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A
That's right. And you know, I think Gordon, we probably should say up front that although there are, there are a lot of questions to ask about this apprehension mission, I think maybe first and foremost is what exactly it should be called. There's big questions about whether it was a good idea, you know, whether it was legal, all of these kinds of things. We're not, at least in this first episode, going to spend really any time on those. Exactly. To your point, I think what we want to do with this is to just explain what happened and how and in particular how the CIA, how Delta Force, friend of the pod, and how kind of the broader US intel and special operations community pulled this off. And then in our next episode, the one that will air this week on Wednesday, we'll look at where we might go from here using the lens of espionage history. So I think fair to say we'll have a rest is classified lens on the really wild operation to capture Maduro.
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B
Yeah, that's right. We should say we're recording this on Sunday, January 4th, so the day after the world learned about this operation to get Maduro. And in the second episode, yeah, we'll go a bit more into the, the justifications behind the mission, what the real motives might have been beyond the public justifications, and explore a little more about what the story tells us about what might come next. But this time we're really going to focus quite tightly on what we know about how the operation itself was carried out. I suppose before we get that, we should just set things up briefly, a few words on why, you know, Venezuela has become such a big issue and it's been growing for months, hasn't it? But it's been clear that the Trump administration had the Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in its sights. You know, we'll look next time, as I said, at drugs, oil, US Influence over the Americas. But a lot of this was about Maduro himself came to power in 2013 after the death of Hugo Chavez, populist figure who himself had come to power in 1999 and clashed with the U.S. so Venezuela and the U.S. have been on this kind of collision course for years. Maduro initially wins an election in 2013, but then tightens his grip on the country, pretty much destroys the country's economy, including the massive oil industry, which it really should have. Again, we'll come back to oil. And then in the following elections, they're seen as rigged, aren't they, where he's no longer recognized by a lot of countries as the legitimate ruler and he's working more closely with America's adversaries including China, Iran and Russia. And. And, of course, these claims that he was this kind of narco terrorist, which is a really interesting phrase, using drugs as a weapon against the US and so this had been building for some time. There'd been indictments against him. The reward, the bounty for him had been increased a few months ago to $50 million. And so we got this sense, didn't we, David, of a pressure campaign building, although I think few expected it to end, you know, in this dramatic way that we saw just a couple of days ago.
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Well, yeah, the narco terrorism. Gordon does recall the series we did middle of last year on Pablo Escobar, who was branded with this title, this kind of nexus of political power and, you know, violence and the narcotics trade that, you know, the Trump administration has sort of brandished against Nicolas Maduro. I mean, it's probably worth starting a little bit of kind of the buildup to how we got here, and in particular, how the US Military and the intelligence community positioned assets for this pressure campaign that culminated in the raid to oust Maduro. So much of the focus to this point, Gordon, had really been on strikes against boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. Last summer, the summer of 2025, Trump signed a secret, supposedly secret directive ordering the Pentagon to carry out military operations against drug cartels and specifically called for maritime strikes. Now, up to this point, there have been 35 such strikes, 115 people killed. It's really been controversial because it's a pretty significant departure from past practice. Right. I mean, typically, the U.S. coast Guard, with assistance from the Navy, would kind of treat maritime drug smuggling in the Caribbean as a law enforcement matter. But this, again, we see these interesting parallels to Escobar in this case. You have the kind of militarization of what had been a law enforcement issue. And we end up with a situation where essentially the military is being used to enforce U.S. law in the Caribbean.
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B
Yeah. And we should say there's a lot of kind of question marks of the legality of those operations. So you're seeing basically counterterrorist tactics used in this context against people where it's not entirely clear what the evidence is of who they are or what kind of threat they pose and whether they pose an imminent threat. And actually, it's one of the reasons that British intelligence and military stopped sharing certain forms of intelligence with their US Partners, which is something pretty unusual, because the Brits kind of felt like we do not want to be complicit in something which our lawyers are not convinced, you know, may be legal. So you can see some of the tensions there over that campaign, even with its closest allies. Although the reality, I think, is that the, the UK has a little bit of intelligence about, since it has some Caribbean rather than Caribbean islands.
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All that juicy drug boat intel that SIS is sitting on, Gordon, they just cut off the spigot.
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B
Yeah, I think it's fair to say. I don't think the Brits, you know, as we'll come to later, this is America's backyard and I think that's where most of the intelligence resides. But yes, you know, there's been this argument that the US is in armed conflict with these drug cartels and therefore they're combatants, like in the war of One Terror. But, but beyond that, they'd also been a big military buildup, hadn't there?
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Well, that's right. And I think the, the, the sort of flash and bang of the drug boat attacks obscured to some degree the massive military buildup that was going on in the Caribbean. And that was very clearly pointed at Venezuela. Right. Because these strikes against drug boats are happening in the context of a massive buildup of U.S. troops. About 15,000 U.S. troops and sailors are deployed to the Caribbean across a network of ships and bases. A naval base in the east of Puerto Rico called Roosevelt Rose is reopened. Late last year, 11 Navy warships were moved into the region, specifically the waters around Venezuela, including the nation's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford. Five destroyers, three amphibious assault ships, two cruisers. In total, the force equated to 25% of all deployed U.S. navy warships. So it's a significant maritime force. Huge number and variety of aircraft, manned and unmanned, are also deployed to the region. And it ends up being, by some estimates, the most significant sort of US military buildup in the region since Operation Uphold Democracy, which was the operation to essentially end a military regime in Haiti that had overthrown a democratically elected government back in 1994. So this is the biggest buildup in the Caribbean in a generation.
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B
Yeah, and I think quite clear that some of this looked like pressure and a very visible display of force to put pressure on Venezuela. But also it's clear now that some of this was platforms being put in place for special operations and others to move from in what happened. And I think it's also clear that this was much more than just about targeting, as you said, those small drug boats, which are just kind of small speedboats. You do not need kind of US aircraft carriers in order to take out those drug boats. So there were other elements as well, like I think there was kind of quasi blockade of some oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuelan ports and a lot going on in the skies and in the seas around. But it was partly a pressure strategy, wasn't it, on the Venezuelan government?
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Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, in retrospect, now you could look at some of the flights that occurred in the sort of weeks and months leading up to the raid, and now look at them through the lens of sort of testing Venezuelan air defense systems and trying to gain an understanding of what the response might be. Now, the maritime conflict finally went on land just a few days ago before the raid to capture Maduro. The Last week of December 2025, the CIA conducted a drone strike, alleged drone strike, I should say, Gordon, against a port in Venezuela. Now, one thing we should note, and I think it's been fascinating looking through everything that's come out the last 24 hours, Gordon, is how much of this story has made it into the press from the mouth of Donald Trump and the senior advisors around him. I mean, so much of this information has just been put out there by the White House. It's really incredible. It's really incredible.
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B
Yeah, I agree, because the mere fact you're talking there, and I noticed you put in the alleged CIA drone strike, but yet the fact is, within days of it happening, it was being effectively made public. And traditionally the CIA would be used for deniable, covert, you know, the clues in the name, covert activities. And instead it was actually being used quite overtly with people talking about the fact the CIA was conducting these operations. I mean, that strike was on a dock where I think it was suspected that a Venezuelan gang was storing narcotics and potentially, you know, trying to move them onto boats. Now, that's the next sign, I guess, of the escalation. And what it does feel like is there was message sending from Washington which was public, there was message sending with the military force. And I think there was also quite a lot of dialogue going on behind the scenes, potentially in which the White House and U.S. officials were basically saying to Maduro, we are going to keep increasing the military pressure on you and you can make this go away by leaving office, by basically going to Turkey, I think was one of the options on the table. And then we'll leave you alone if you just go. But he appears decided basically not to take that opportunity.
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That's right. And Gordon, the other, I guess, slightly bizarre piece that's come out here just in the last day has been, there's, of course, this question of, okay, well, you've been building up this sort of pressure campaign. You have a significant number of military and intelligence assets positioned around Venezuela to do things like hit, you know, critical infrastructure, military installations, things like that. Why, why now? You know, why do this now? And one of the. One of the things that I have seen is leaks coming out of the White House suggesting that Maduro, who had, of course, as you said, sort of turned down these ultimatums, rejected these ultimatums to leave Venezuela, go to Qatar, go to Turkey and sort of pave the way for someone new to take power in Venezuela. He's rejected these. He would do these videos where he'd be on a stage and he would kind of. He'd be dancing, Gordon, he'd be dancing to electronic music and in one, he's got his own voice recorded. MADURO DOES REPEATING IN English no crazy war. And he's kind of doing this weird dance up on stage. And apparently it was very agitating to Donald Trump, who. Who wanted this dancing to stop. And it may have been that the dancing was. Was the last straw.
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B
Did you also see the interview he did in a car? Like, I think his last interview was like he. He was doing an interview in a car, basically saying, I'm not going to take a deal or discussing the possibility of deal. And honestly, when you look at the video of it, the images of it, it looks like you remember carpool karaoke with James Corden, where he sits with, you know, people and sings songs with them. It looks like Maduro was doing an episode of carpool karaoke. I mean, it was just. It was. There was an element of kind of unreal, you know, a kind of unreal absurdity almost as it grew. And. And yet I don't think anyone quite understood how close things were as these odd events were happening to the. What would be Maduro's final moments in office. It's amazing, isn't it? So I guess maybe should we take a break? Then when we come back, we'll actually look at how. How the mission, whatever it is, an apprehension mission, I think is the technical term, capture, kidnapping, whatever you want to call it, how that mission unfolded.
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A
Depending on your point of view.
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B
Yeah, depending on your point of view. But we'll take a break and look at how it unfolded after the break.
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Try Attio for free@attio.com trick hello, it's Gordon here from the Rest is classified. A quick message for American listeners to let you know that news that my new book, the Spy in the Archive, is now finally available to buy in the US it is the story of Vasily Mitrokhin, the man who was the archivist of the kgb, but who went on to steal its deepest secrets. But after shockingly being turned away by the CIA, he ends up in the hands of MI6 and exfiltrated from Russia in a wild, dangerous, almost comic operation. It's also the story of how his attempts to destroy the KGB ultimately failed and how that paved the way for the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return of the KGB men who now rule Russia. That's the Spy in the Archive available from all good bookshops stateside now. So welcome back. So we've discussed the pressure campaign, the overt bit, I guess, which was the military buildup around the shores of Venezuela. But there was also a secret CIA intelligence mission that was going on in parallel to that.
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A
That's right. And you know, one thing we should, we should say is this operation, Gordon, it's, 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, one of the ways, and I think it's a very interesting lens to take here, is because, because the United States is essentially serving a warrant, I guess, right, to Nicolas Maduro or enforcing this indictment, 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 US Law enforcement, the Department of Justice guys, for the Department of Justice guys. So it's not, you know, 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 overt mission to enforce US Law in Venezuela using the US Military and intelligence community. We could debate the sort of wisdom and legality of this, but this is the way it's set up really from the beginning.
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All I'd say is I hope I never get served with an indictment by US 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 a, it is different from any law enforcement issue and it's the intelligence buildup, which I think is really fascinating, you know, and the way in which they built the picture of Maduro and his movements which allowed this to happen. Because it was whatever, you know, back to the questions of legality and you know, the implications are complicated and we'll get to those. But, but it was in a remarkably successful operation in the narrow terms of getting him at the moment, knowing where he was and being able to do that. And, and that surely came down to some pretty, you know, pretty detailed and pretty remarkable intelligence collection against him.
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A
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. Seems like in a, in early August, probably a team of CIA officers slipped clandestinely into Venezuela and their job is to collect information specifically on Maduro himself.
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B
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. You know, they are basically operating under non official cover. They're not, you know, moving around, but acting as a CIA team on the ground over an extended period. So it's quite an, I mean, that's quite a kind of unusual operation in some ways, isn't it?
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A
It is. I have not seen yet. Again, we're recording this, you know, a day after the, 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, you know, CIA officers on the ground. There is a source. This is Again, come out in, 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. 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 US 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. And I think I was fascinated by this little detail because we talked and 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 HUMINT 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, you know, in identifying and building this pattern of life that was so critical to the way the operation went down.
- [24:05]
B
Yeah, and it's fascinating that it's already come out that the CIA had a source. I mean, I'd have thought, you know, 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, that 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. I mean, that's one of the details that 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 Fakhrizade, the Iranian nuclear scientists. 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, you know, in that Mossad case, a kind of, you know, 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 out on the night you're going to do it. You need pretty much live, real time intelligence. And they clearly had that.
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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, you know, 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, with I think one US service member slightly injured. No, at this point in time it doesn't seem like anyone was critically.
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B
Nobody.
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A
No fatalities on the US side and up to 80 Venezuelans and Cubans dead. Right. So to enable that kind of operation, I think you, 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.
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B
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. You know, they build these, I mean, the models, you know, these models seem to be a real feature of, you know, 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 will 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 Delta Force, who we've come across before, haven't we? Because we talked about them in our series on Escobar, and we actually talked to one of the Delta Force operators who'd been on, you know, some of the raids hunting Escobar, Joe Vega, we talked to in our declassified club. So we got quite a good sense there of the way these teams can operate and operate, you know, undercover.
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A
And at pace one, at some point in the planning process, the, the planners settled on this installation called Fort Tiuna, 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, you know, the Venezuelan president. And so I'm curious to understand, kind of, as, you know, 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, so they wanted a night where he was there, and then two, as we'll see, is going to be the weather and, 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, for the law enforcement officers who are going to arrest Nicolas 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. 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 just, it's worth kind of expanding on this because the press doesn't, hasn't really done it yet. And it's, it's the air defense network, right? You need an understanding of how you create space so that you can actually insert, you know, the, the helicopters that will conduct the statue and grab. Then you also need, you need knowledge of obviously, Maduro and where he's going to be and all, you know, all the pattern of life stuff. You need some knowledge of the security detail around Maduro, how they operate, who they are, what kind of, 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.
- [30:34]
B
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 when I think the assumption is perhaps defenses 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. So they're going to have to delay it. And you've got pretty narrow windows based on, I think it's moonlight and weather, which, where you, where you can run these kind of operations. I think that was similar, wasn't it, with Bin Laden raid and with some of the other operations that we talked about?
- [31:28]
A
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, it's, it's astounding. And yet they're totally beholden in some ways to the weather and the moon. If it's storming, you prefer to not fly aircraft into Caracas in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. And also from the moon. I just, I find this part really fascinating. If there's too much moon, it's kind of like a night light, and so it's easier for people to see you coming. And if there's no moon, you don't have enough light, ambient light, to use the night vision goggles that these pilots are probably flying with. So you're beholden to some pretty natural sort of systems before you plan these things.
- [32:27]
B
After this delay of a few days, we get to, I guess, US time Friday 2nd 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're kind of got to make sure that the weather doesn't change, that the conditions are right, that, you know, they know exactly where Maduro is. But at that point on Friday, they, they give the initial go order to go. Of course, it's fascinating, is it? Donald Trump is not in the White House. He's not in the situation room, which is where you might expect, you know, a president to be watching this. But he's in Mar a Lago in Florida, you know, and he's, 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 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 round. 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. I 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?
- [33:43]
A
Yeah, more than 150 military aircraft, drones, fighter planes, bombers, electronic warfare, jamming platforms, all take off from 20 different military bases and Navy ships and, you know, are headed toward, 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 a hundred feet above the water and use something called terrain masking to approach downtown Caraca. So they're basically flying very low to avoid being detected by Venezuela's air defense systems.
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B
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 up 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. The other is to take down the power in parts of Caracas.
- [35:08]
A
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 Kane, as the chairman described it, he said, you know, the entire supporting air package, all of these 150plus aircraft are basically working. And this is, 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. 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, I'm glad, I guess I'm glad we have this expertise. It made me think of Abadabad raid when lights went out allegedly in Abbottabad, Pakistan during the UBL raid, which again is just kind of fascinating. How does that happen? How does it work? Pretty, nobody's going to give us the answers to that. But, you know, it seems to go along with these raids.
- [36:33]
B
Although I do note that Cyber Command was, was thanked for its role in the mission. So I think there is at least the possibility there that that could have been a kind of, you know, a cyber attack on the, some of the infrastructure which might have been used to take out or of course it could have been ground operators and sabotage, we don't know. But I think, you know, it's interesting that Cyber Command was part of that. And then they take out the air defence systems, you know, and some of the telecom systems, which again, it's part of preparing the ground so that you can get, you know, 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. So it's maintaining that surprise. And what is, you know, really amazing is that that whole layered, as you put it, system, you know, worked and continued to allow the surprise as they reach the compound.
- [37:24]
A
It seems like it's probably on the final leg of ingress as the, you know, the Chinooks are sort of moving into position toward that, 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 hitting, including the main port to the north. Telecommunications installations, some other air bases and military infrastructure are all hit. If you watch the videos, by the way, I will say 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 is, it's very, very loud and you can see a lot of helicopters in the air. So it would be, it didn't seem like quite a frightening experience. But Delta Force arrives at the compound at just after 2am 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 know, you have the, 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, you know, 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, you know, a Venezuelan military base. And Maduro seems to have given the mentions of sort of steel and kind of hardened doors. I mean, it's not just a normal kind of villa you can walk into once on the ground. Now, again, you know, similar to Abbottabad, as you said, Gordon, a scale, you know, replica of this kind of safe house had been constructed in the United States and the Delta operators had trained on it. So they move very quickly into and through this building. 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, and the moment they actually snatch 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 mean, because it just, we've even had, I think the Venezuelan defense minister has even said that US Forces killed a large part of Maduro's security detail, many of whom were probably Cuban, Cuban officers.
- [39:59]
B
And you're right. Yeah, that we haven't heard much about that. That's one bit of detail which is not, was not kind of briefed out is the nature of, 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, it was an amazing thing. I mean, it's, 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 it? 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. 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 a kind of 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.
- [41:17]
A
Yeah, and that's again where that timeline of it, 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, no, nobody is going to wake up Maduro until you're pretty much in the house. Which, which, which means you need to know all of the rhythms of kind of the people who are around Maduro while he's sleeping and, 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. So even down to that level of detail, you kind of, you probably have some understanding of what that, what that system looks like. So, yes, blowtorches and explosives were ready, apparently, because again, the US Knew about this room. Right? The US 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, you know, 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, you know, five minutes after entering the building, Delta Force has Maduro in custody. Presumably he's been, you know, read his rights by maybe the HRT agents who were there, other law enforcement officials, and, you know, basically they go out the way they came. So they, they take Maduro out. He's, he's. 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 in what they've described as self defense. Is the air convoy departs Caracas. And then at 4:30am local time, Maduro and his wife are out at international waters. They're transferred to the USS Iwashima, which was stationed about 100 miles off the coast during the operation. 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 Manhattan. And then eventually Maduro's taken to the Metropolitan Detention center in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, New York, Gordon.
- [43:43]
B
How disorienting for him. One minute you're asleep in your bed, you know, and then a few hours later you're in, you're in Brooklyn Detention Center. So, I mean, that's the operation. Worth saying, as you said earlier, no U.S. loss of life. One helicopter hit, but remained operational. Not quite clear on the, on the numbers killed on the Venezuelan side, but still kind of learning about that.
- [44:05]
A
It's at least 80, they're saying now, and that number is likely to, likely to go up.
- [44:10]
B
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, the legality, all the other things, I mean, they did what they aim to do very successfully and without much of a hitch.
- [44:29]
A
I think 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, the chairs are 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. 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.
- [45:20]
B
Yeah, which is interesting, isn't it?
- [45:21]
A
I would definitely recommend there's, 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 we'll talk about this more next time, too, that we're not done, that this is not a one off.
- [45:53]
B
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. So join us on Wednesday to hear that and we'll see you next time.
- [46:47]
A
We'll see you next time.