Trump administration authorizes covert CIA action in Venezuela

The Trump administration secretly authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions in Venezuela, according to US officials, intensifying its campaign against Nicolas Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader.

The authorization is the latest step in the Trump administration’s growing pressure campaign against Venezuela. For weeks, the US military has targeted boats off the Venezuelan coast that it says are carrying drugs, killing 27 people. U.S. officials have made it clear, privately, that the ultimate goal is to remove Mr. Maduro from power.

Mr. Trump acknowledged Wednesday that he had authorized the covert action and said the United States was considering strikes on Venezuelan territory.

“We’re certainly looking at land now, because we have the sea very well under control,” the president told reporters hours after The New York Times reported the secret authorization.

Any strike on Venezuelan territory would constitute a significant escalation. After several collisions with boats, the administration stressed that the operations took place in international waters.

The new authority would allow the CIA to carry out deadly operations in Venezuela and carry out a series of operations in the Caribbean.

The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. It is unclear whether the CIA is considering specific operations in Venezuela.

But the development comes as the U.S. military plots its own possible escalation, drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela.

The scale of the military buildup in the region is considerable: There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops, most in bases in Puerto Rico, but also a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships. In total, the Navy has eight surface warships and one submarine in the Caribbean.

The new authorities, known in intelligence parlance as a presidential discovery, were described by several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the highly classified document.

Mr. Trump this month ordered an end to diplomatic negotiations with Maduro’s government, increasingly frustrated by the Venezuelan leader’s failure to accede to U.S. demands to voluntarily relinquish power and by officials’ persistent insistence on their non-participation in drug trafficking.

The CIA has long had the authority to work with Latin American governments on security issues and intelligence sharing. This allowed the agency to work with Mexican authorities to target drug cartels. But these authorizations do not allow the agency to carry out direct lethal operations.

The Trump administration’s strategy toward Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with the help of John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power.

Mr. Ratcliffe has said little about what his agency is doing in Venezuela. But he promised that the CIA, under his leadership, would become more aggressive. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Ratcliffe said he would make the CIA less risk-averse and more willing to take covert action when ordered by the president, “to go places no one else can go and do things no one else can do.”

The CIA declined to comment.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he had granted the authorization because Venezuela had “emptied its prisons to the United States of America.”

The president appeared to be referring to his administration’s claims that members of the Tren de Aragua prison gang were sent to the United States to commit crimes. In March, Mr. Trump proclaimed that the gang, founded in a Venezuelan prison, was a terrorist organization that was “waging an irregular war” against the United States under orders from the Maduro government.

An intelligence community assessment in February contradicted that assertion, explaining why intelligence agencies did not believe the gang was under the control of the Maduro government, although the FBI partly disagreed. A senior Trump administration official insisted that the assessment be redone. The initial assessment was reaffirmed by the National Intelligence Council. Subsequently, the council’s acting director, Michael Collins, was removed from his position.

The United States offered $50 million for information leading to Mr Maduro’s arrest and conviction on drug trafficking charges in the United States.

Mr. Rubio, who is also Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, has called Mr. Maduro illegitimate, and the Trump administration describes him as a “narcoterrorist.”

Mr Maduro prevented the government democratically elected last year from taking power. But the Trump administration’s accusations that he profited from the narcotics trade and that his country is a major producer of drugs for the United States have been debated.

The administration has claimed in legal documents that Mr. Maduro controlled Tren de Aragua. But an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies contradicts that conclusion.

While the Trump administration has publicly offered relatively thin legal justifications for its campaign, Mr. Trump told Congress that he had decided that the United States was engaged in armed conflict with drug cartels that it considered terrorist organizations. In a statement to Congress late last month, the Trump administration said drug trafficking cartels were “non-state armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

The White House’s findings authorizing covert action are closely guarded secrets. They are often reauthorized from administration to administration, and their precise language is rarely made public. They are also one of the most brutal uses of executive power.

Some members of Congress know about the authorizations, but lawmakers cannot make them public, and it is difficult to oversee possible covert actions.

While U.S. military operations, such as strikes against boats believed to be carrying drugs from Venezuelan territory, are generally made public, covert CIA actions generally remain secret. Some, however, like the CIA operation in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, are quickly made public.

The agency has been intensifying its work in the fight against narcotics for years. Gina Haspel, Mr. Trump’s second CIA director in his first administration, devoted more resources to the drug hunt in Mexico and Latin America. Under William J. Burns, director of the Biden administration, the CIA began flying drones over Mexico, searching for fentanyl labs, operations that Mr. Ratcliffe expanded.

This secret discovery is something of a natural evolution of these anti-drug efforts. But the history of CIA covert actions in Latin America and the Caribbean is mixed, to say the least.

In 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, setting the stage for decades of instability. The CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, and the agency made several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, however, the CIA provided weapons to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic.

The agency also participated in the 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia, the 1973 coup in Chile, and the fight against Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government in the 1980s.