As bitter adversaries, the Trump administration and Maduro regime didn’t agree on, well, anything. Except for the fact that the US government wanted Maduro gone.

After that UN meeting, the Trump administration amped up its efforts around the world to isolate and depose the Venezuelan leader, including by levying additional punishing sanctions against his regime. Much of that diplomatic maneuvering played out in public. But the administration also put into motion another, very much secret prong to the US’s regime-change campaign: a covert CIA-run initiative to help overthrow the Venezuelan strongman.

That campaign would pull off at least one disruptive digital sabotage operation against the Maduro regime in 2019. But the CIA-led initiative—alongside the Trump administration’s wider efforts to get rid of Maduro—would fall well short of its ultimate goal. The story of that secret anti-Maduro effort also lays bare the tensions between an administration with hardliners laser-focused on deposing the Venezuelan autocrat and a CIA deeply reluctant, yet nevertheless obligated, to follow White House orders. It shows the limitations of covert, CIA-assisted regime change schemes, particularly when they are not aligned with larger US foreign policy objectives. And it provides new insights into how a second Trump administration—or a Harris presidency—might still try to dislodge the Venezuelan strongman, whose latest sham reelection in July 2024 has again thrust his country into chaos.

The details of that covert CIA-assisted campaign, told exclusively to WIRED by eight Trump administration and former agency officials with knowledge of the anti-Maduro operation, are reported here for the first time.

  • @[email protected]
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    23 days ago

    Also, the entire coup in Ukraine is funding an insurgency against Russia. Venezuela’s narco gang paid protestors both for Guaido and this year’s opposition is insurgency funding. ISIS-K are US allies, FFS. takes a lot of money.

    • Justin
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      22 days ago

      The democratic government of Ukraine is not an insurgency, and the US did not give them weapons until after their neighbor 10x bigger than them, invaded them in an act of pure imperialism in 2014. Are you saying the US should not fund anti-imperalism?

      • @[email protected]
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        -622 days ago

        One of Trump’s impeachment was based on a weapons gift for Ukraine, that eventually went through. Merkel/Zelensky faked their anti-nazi reforms of Minsk accords in order to give time for Ukraine to get armed in order to provoke the current war. Ukraine is absolutely a puppet insurgency to diminish Russia as part of US’s pure imperialism. It is the saddest most extreme level of disinformation in history that anyone has an opposite impression of reality.