A 2019 US War Game on Venezuela Forecast Chaos After Maduro’s Downfall
Drug cartels, anti-US rebels would fill leadership void, Pentagon study predicted
As a Pentagon consultant during the first Trump administration, Douglas Farah participated in war game exercises contemplating what might happen in Venezuela if president Nicolas Maduro were forced from power.
Although carefully hedged, the conclusions were stark: There would most likely be violent clashes throughout the country—among military units still loyal to the regime, an increasingly powerful drug cartel and, most ominously, two extreme leftist Colombian guerrilla armies, the FARC and the ELN, who have “greatly expanded” their control of huge swaths of western Venezuela. The rebels “have decades of combat experience” and “view the United States as their principal enemy,” Farah wrote in an unclassified report for Pentagon intelligence officials after participating in the Venezuela war games.
In short, there would be “chaos for a sustained period of time with no possibility of ending it,” Farah, the president of IBI Consulting, a security firm that specializes in Latin America, said this week on the SpyTalk podcast, elaborating on his report about the prospects for a post-Maduro Venezuela.
And if the U.S. military were called upon to restore order and maintain the peace, the challenges would be so enormous it would require “tens of thousands” of U.S. troops, added Farah.
“You’re talking a capital city of several million people. You’re talking ports that need to be protected.” And beyond that, “are you going to go into the hinterlands and the Colombian border where you’re going to face [up to] 4,000 heavily armed FARC dissidents who have been fighting for 60 years?”
For the U.S. military to enter Venezuela and “hope to establish territorial control writ large would be probably impossible for what the US has a tolerance for,” Farah told SpyTalk.
Farah’s warnings about the dangerous uncertainties of a post-Maduro Venezuela have taken on new significance in recent weeks as the Trump administration has dramatically ramped up its military build up in the Caribbean, including dispatching the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the country’s largest, and running B-1 and B-52 bomber missions off the Venezuelan coast—as part of a campaign that appears designed to intimidate Maduro and expel him from power.
Iraq Redux?
In many ways, the questions about a post-Maduro Venezuela echo those that were raised by critics on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few questioned then that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, not unlike Maduro today, was an authoritarian thug who maintained power by ruthlessly suppressing dissent. But it’s one thing to get rid of a nasty dictator. It’s quite another, as U.S. officials in Iraq learned to their dismay, to plan for what comes next— the proverbial day after.
To be sure, there is considerable uncertainty about exactly what Trump has in mind in Venezuela, if he has settled on anything. Last week, The Miami Herald reported that Trump was prepared to strike Venezuela “at any moment.” The New York Times reported this week that administration officials were contemplating a range of options that included direct attacks on military units that protect Maduro and seizing the country’s oil fields. That was followed by a Washington Post report that Secretary of State Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a classified briefing for select members of Congress that the administration “is not currently preparing to target Venezuela directly.”
And yet Trump himself, when asked in a CBS Sixty Minutes interview last Sunday if Marduro’s days as president were numbered, responded: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”
Whatever Trump has in mind, the challenges that U.S. officials will face are considerable. Farah knows them well.
A former journalist for the Washington Post among other outlets, he has focused for years on the iron grip that transnational criminal organizations have on countries in Latin America and Africa.He laid them out in regard to Venezuela in his report to Pentagon officials six years ago. The Cartel de los Soles drug cartel, the principal focus of his study, is headed by senior members of the Venezuelan military and controls the country’s ports, which it uses to facilitate cocaine trafficking, Farah wrote in his report, a copy of which he shared with SpyTalk.
At the time of the war games, Pentagon officials were contemplating scenarios based on opposition leader Juan Guaido taking power. In that event, wrote Farah, “we expect a low-intensity armed effort by the Cartel to retain territorial control of key resources such as gold mines and cocaine labs.”
Just how much strategic thinking has gone into how to prepare for such scenarios today, not to mention dealing with virulently anti-American guerrilla armies on the Colombian border (especially now that there is an unfriendly Colombian government) remains just as unclear as Trump’s immediate military plans.
“I’m sure the military is pulling its hair out because they have scenarios planned out and they will do different things,” said Farah. “But everyone’s guessing at what might be ordered. They have no clarity.”
There is, as a possible alternative to direct military action, the prospect of CIA covert operations to destabilize the Maduro regime. Trump last month confirmed he had signed a highly classified “finding” authorizing the CIA to conduct covert actions inside the country.But the scope of those actions is far from clear— and Farah notes U.S. efforts in the past to persuade Maduro intimates to turn on him have proved problematic at best.
Spurned Offer
The Associated Press recently reported on one such effort— an attempt by a top U.S. Homeland Security agent in the Dominican Republic to lure Maduro’s top pilot — offering him the $50 million U.S. bounty for Maduro’s capture — to fly him not to where he was planning to go but to a foreign country where the Venezuelan leader could be arrested and extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. But the pilot ultimately rejected the offer, telling the agent in a text message: “We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth. The last thing we are is traitors.”
One big challenge to any such covert scheme to recruit Maduro defectors: The regime has been protected for years by Cuban counter-intelligence officers who identify potential dissidents and are “really, really good at what they do,” said Farah. “So I think [covert action] would be tough, but not impossible.”
Asked if he believes Maduro is likely to be in power a year from now, his answer was a sobering one.
“I would guess, yes,” he said. “Because all the options to bring him down are so bad.”
You can find the SpyTalk podcast on Simplecast, Apple, Spotify, You Tube or wherever you like to listen.
Great to have informed reporting on the Venezuela story, which is elusive because no one really covers the internal dynamics of the Maduro regime, and much of what is said about Corina Machado and the opposition is wishful thinking. She is in the competition for the weakest Nobel ever. That said, the opposition candidate indeed won the last presidential election— overwhelmingly— and similar to the Panama invasion you can invade the country, control Caracas and the oilfield militarily and install a legitimate new president. I’m afraid that’s a scenario most Venezuelans could get behind. It would be bloody but not much greater than Panama (23 US military dead)— as long as the fighting is limited strictly to the oilfields and controlling the capital.
That is pretty much the US experience in most "interventions" we have conducted. I would be shocked if the regime change would be orderly.