In August, a clandestine team of CIA officers slipped into Venezuela with a plan to collect information on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, whom the Trump administration had labelled a narco-terrorist.
The CIA team moved about Caracas, the capital, remaining undetected for months while it was in the country. Intelligence gathered about the Venezuelan leader’s daily movements — combined with a human source close to Maduro and a fleet of stealth drones flying secretly above — enabled the agency to map out minute details about his routines.
It was a highly dangerous mission. With the US embassy closed, CIA officers could not operate under the cloak of diplomatic cover. But it was highly successful. Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that because of intelligence gathered by the team, the United States knew where Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.
That information was critical to the ensuing military operation — a predawn raid Saturday by elite Army Delta Force commandos, the riskiest US military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011.
The result was a tactically precise and swiftly executed operation that extracted Maduro from his country with no loss of American life, a result heralded by President Donald Trump amid larger questions about the legality and rationale for the US actions in Venezuela.
Trump has justified what was named Operation Absolute Resolve as a strike against drug trafficking. But Venezuela is hardly as big a player in the international drug trade as other countries. Officials had previously told congressional leaders that their objective in Venezuela was not regime change. And Trump has long said he opposes US foreign occupations.
Yet on Saturday, the president proclaimed that US officials were in charge of Venezuela, and that the United States would rebuild the country’s oil infrastructure.
In contrast to messy US interventions of the past — by the military in Panama or the CIA in Cuba — the operation to grab Maduro was virtually flawless, according to multiple officials familiar with the details, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plans.
In the run-up, Delta Force commandos rehearsed the extraction inside a full-scale model of Maduro’s compound that the Joint Special Operations Command had built in Kentucky. They practiced blowing through steel doors at ever faster paces.
The military had been readying for days to execute the mission, waiting for good weather conditions and a time when the risk of civilian casualties would be minimised.
Amid the heightened tensions, Maduro had been rotating between six and eight locations, and the United States did not always learn where he intended to stay until late in the evenings. In order to execute the operation, the US military needed confirmation that Maduro was at the compound they had trained to attack.
In the days before the raid, the United States deployed increasing numbers of Special Operations aircraft, specialized electronic warfare planes, armed Reaper drones, search-and-rescue helicopters and fighter jets to the region — last-minute reinforcements that analysts said indicated the only question was when military action would happen, not if.
It was the latest in a series of moves intended to ratchet up the pressure on Maduro and prepare for the raid to capture him. A week earlier, the CIA had carried out a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela. And for months, the US military has conducted a legally disputed campaign that has destroyed dozens of boats and killed at least 115 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
In recent days, Maduro tried to head off a US raid, offering the United States access to Venezuelan oil, Trump said Saturday. A US official said the deal, offered on Dec. 23, would have had Maduro leave the country for Turkey. But Maduro angrily rejected that plan, the official said. It was clear, the official added, that Maduro was not serious.
The collapse of the talks set the stage for the capture mission.
There was likely little doubt in the Venezuelan government that the United States was coming. But the military took pains to maintain so-called tactical surprise, as it did with its operation over the summer to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Trump had authorised the US military to go ahead as early as Dec. 25, but left the precise timing to Pentagon officials and Special Operations planners to ensure that the attacking force was ready, and that conditions on the ground were optimal.
The U.S. military wanted to conduct the operation during the holiday period because many government officials were on vacation and because significant numbers of Venezuelan military personnel were on leave, according to a US official.
Unseasonably bad weather pushed the operation off by several days. This past week, however, the weather cleared, and military commanders looked at a “rolling window” of targeting opportunities in the days ahead. Trump gave the final go order at 10:46 p.m. Friday.
Had the weather not cleared, the mission could have been pushed off until mid-January, one official said.
The operation officially got underway around 4:30 p.m. Friday, when US officials gave the first set of approvals to launch certain assets into the air. But that did not mean the full mission would be authorized. For the next six hours, officials continued to monitor conditions on the ground, including the weather and Maduro’s whereabouts.
Trump spent the evening on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, where he had dinner with aides and Cabinet secretaries. The president’s aides told him that they would be calling him later that evening, around 10:30 p.m., for the final approval. Trump did so by phone, then joined his senior national security officials in a secure location on the property.
Inside Venezuela, the operation began with a cyber operation that cut power to large swaths of Caracas, shrouding the city in darkness to allow the planes, drones and helicopters to approach undetected.
More than 150 military aircraft, including drones, fighter planes and bombers, took part in the mission, taking off from 20 different military bases and Navy ships.
As the aircraft advanced on Caracas, military and intelligence agencies determined that they had maintained tactical surprise: Maduro had not been warned that the operation was coming.
Early Saturday morning, thunderous explosions boomed across Caracas as US warplanes struck at radar and air defense batteries. While some of the explosions posted on social media looked dramatic, a US official said that they were mostly radar installations and radio transmission towers being taken out.
At least 40 people were killed in Saturday’s attack on Venezuela, including military personnel and civilians, according to a senior Venezuelan official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe preliminary reports.
Later, Caine told reporters that the fighter planes, bombers and drones came into Venezuela to find and destroy the country’s air defenses, to clear a safe pathway for the helicopters carrying Special Operations forces.
Even though Venezuelan air defenses were suppressed, the US helicopters came under fire as they moved in on Maduro’s compound at about 2:01 a.m. local time. Caine said the helicopters responded with “overwhelming force.”
One of the helicopters was hit. Two US officials said that about half a dozen soldiers were injured in the overall operation.
The Delta Force operators assigned to capture Maduro were whisked to their target — on Venezuela’s most fortified military base — by an elite Army Special Operations aviation unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which flies modified MH-60 and MH-47 helicopters.
The 160th, nicknamed the Night Stalkers, specializes in high-risk, low-level and nighttime missions including insertions, extractions and raids. The unit conducted what the Pentagon called training missions near the coast of Venezuela in recent months.
Once on the ground, Delta Force moved quickly through the building to find Maduro. About 1,300 miles away, in a room inside Mar-a-Lago, Trump and key aides watched the raid play out in real time, courtesy of a camera positioned on an aircraft overhead.
As Caine narrated the events on the screen, the president peppered him with questions about how the operation was unfolding.
“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Trump said on Fox & Friends Weekend on Saturday morning.
As the president monitored the raid from Florida, the Delta Force operators used an explosive to enter the building.
The US official said Special Operations forces took three minutes after blowing open the door to move through the building to Maduro’s location.
Trump said that once the Special Operations forces made it through the compound to Maduro’s room, the Venezuelan leader and his wife tried to escape into a steel-reinforced room, but were stopped by US forces.
“He was trying to get to a safe place,” Trump said during the news conference with Caine, adding: “It was a very thick door, a very heavy door. But he was unable to get to that door. He made it to the door, he was unable to close it.”
About five minutes after entering the building, Delta Force reported that they had Maduro in custody.
The military was accompanied by an FBI hostage negotiator in case Maduro had locked himself in a safe room or refused to surrender.
Those negotiations, however, proved unnecessary. Delta operatives swiftly loaded the couple into the helicopters, which had returned to the compound. By 4:29 a.m. Caracas time, Maduro and his wife were transferred to the USS Iwo Jima, a US warship in the Caribbean stationed about 100 miles off the coast of Venezuela during the operation.
The couple was transferred from the Iwo Jima to the US Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, where the FBI had a 757 government plane waiting to bring him to a military-controlled airport north of New York City.
Trump watched until Special Operations forces were out of Venezuela, flying over the ocean, an official said.
Trump said that the United States was prepared to conduct a second wave of attacks against Venezuela, but that he did not think it would be necessary. He issued a warning to other Venezuelan leaders: He would be willing to come after them, as well.