Ghosts of Coups Past Haunt Trump CIA's Venezuela Ops
From Iran to Chile to Iraq, even the most 'successful' regime change ops came with huge risks, unexpected consequences and downsides. Venezuela is no different.
NOW THAT WE’RE ON THE CUSP OF A REGIME CHANGE EFFORT in Venezuela, someone at the CIA ought to dig into the agency’s archives and dust off the file on Operation Ajax, the 1953 plot that toppled Iran’s leftist prime minister.
The agency considered Alax a huge success at the time and for many decades to follow. The coup returned Iran’s pro-American monarch to his throne, its oil to its British and American claimants, and its standing in Washington as a Cold War bastion against the Soviets next door. Its legend dimmed, of course, after Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the shah and made life miserable over the next 46 years for a succession of American presidents, including the present one.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to take a second look. There are some relevant takeaways to be found in its history—and in the official accounts of many other CIA-quarterbacked coups—on what can go wrong, as well as what must go right as covert CIA operatives in Venezuela work beneath President Trump’s ostentatious military campaign to rattle the country’s leftist authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro.
The truth is that the Iran operation nearly failed. First, the secrecy surrounding the coup plot was blown before it was even launched, giving Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh time to beef up the security detail protecting his house. Then the CIA discovered that all but one of the officers it had bribed to join the plot had bowed out, forcing the agency to scramble at the last minute to find others it could enlist. Most importantly, the plot needed the approval of the chronically indecisive and timorous king himself, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who initially refused, fearing his own army wouldn’t support him. It was only after the CIA, in a desperate Hail Mary gamble, rented a huge mob of armed thugs who overpowered Mossadegh’s guards and forced his surrender, that the CIA finally prevailed. All this and more has been marvellously recounted recently in Scott Anderson’s magisterial new book, King of Kings: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.
How will it go in Venezuela? Would Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader now in hiding, accept what could well be a poisoned chalice, a gift of power from the CIA?
Asked on Sunday whether Maduro’s days as president of Venezuela were numbered, Trump told CBS News, “I think so, yeah.” (This, despite his National Intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, saying Friday that the era of “regime change or nation building” is over under the Trump administration.)
Luck and Pluck
The agency’s own internal histories portray Operation Ajax as a high-risk operation that succeeded more by chance than by flawless planning. And make no mistake —the CIA’s current operations in Venezuela deserve the same high-risk profile. Its covert operatives there face a slew of potential dangers, including treacherous Venezuelan partners, the ubiquitous presence of Maduro’s counterintelligence service, and the recurring problem of sloppy tradecraft, to mention just a few. Intelligence veterans warn any one of these could expose the CIA’s agents inside the country, resulting in their arrest, embarrassment for the Trump administration and yet another black eye for the United States in Latin America .
Trump’s determination to drive Maduro from power dates back to his first administration, when he authorized the CIA to meet secretly with mutinous Venezuelan military officers and develop a plan to topple Maduro. But there was a problem: the leader of the military cabal was under U.S. sanctions for corruption. The plans were shelved. Perhaps the Trump administration has done a better job of vetting its plotters this time around.
The president is known for calling audibles. Trump has redefined America’s ages-old “war on drugs” by branding Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and its members as enemy combatants — tactics which the administration argues allows it to take military action against the Maduro regime without the approval of Congress. Nobody can guarantee how it will turn out—especially the day after Maduro is removed from the scene. And even some of “Mr. Trump’s most loyal political backers,” according to The New York Times, have taken to “reminding the president he was elected to end ‘forever wars,’ not incite new ones.’” Meanwhile, the Justice Department has doubled the reward to $50 million for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.
In September, Trump launched a campaign of intimidation and subterfuge against Maduro, accusing him of trafficking cocaine and fentanyl into the United States. To date, U.S. warplanes have destroyed 16 small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the waters off Venezuela’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts and killed 67 people. The administration has ignored a bipartisan request from the Senate Armed Services Committee for evidence to substantiate its charges that the boats were carrying narcotics, saying only that the CIA supplied the classified intelligence for the airstrikes. Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have been shut out of the administration’s briefings on the airstrikes.
Trump’s drug-war rationale is shaky, experts say. Fentanyl is largely produced in Mexico from illegal Chinese precursor chemicals and smuggled into the U.S. from there, not Venezuela. And only a tiny proportion of the Columbian cocaine entering the country transits via Venezuela, they note. The legality of his fishing boat assassinations is also being tested in the courts.
An Armada
The biggest stick that Trump is brandishing is his military buildup in the Caribbean, the largest in the region for decades. At the very least, it’s a powerful psychological warfare tool, designed in part to unsettle ordinary Venezuelans and nudge its key players—generals., colonels and oil barons—into supporting a U.S. intervention.
The Pentagon has positioned some 10,000 U.S. troops in Puerto Rico and dispatched the Navy’s most powerful aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford bristling with 90 combat aircraft, to the Caribbean, accompanied by its battle group of three missile destroyers and one cruiser. The U.S. forces massing off Venezuela’s northern coast also include another three destroyers and an amphibious assault ship with 4,500 Marines on board. In addition, a squadron of advanced F-35 warplanes and another of MQ-9 Grip Reaper drones armed with deadly Hellfire missiles, are standing by at U.S. military bases in Puerto Rico. .
One former senior CIA official who served in Latin America and who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters said the CIA’s covert operations to subvert the Maduro government rely on members of the Venezuelan exile communities in Miami and elsewhere to collect targeting intelligence through their contacts inside their homeland. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Trump administration has now identified Venezuelan military facilities—ports, airports and other installations—allegedly used to smuggle drugs into the United States and Europe.
Experts say Venezuela produces a small amount of cocaine domestically and serves primarily as a transit hub for Colombian cocaine exports. Those exports account for roughly ten percent of Latin America’s cocaine shipments to the United States, but exact figures for its share of total Latin American drug exports are not publicly available.
This former official adds the CIA is also likely providing these contacts with printing presses to produce posters and leaflets, urging street demonstrations and labor strikes, and utilizing both social media and email messages to pressure top military officers to defect — all as part of an anti-Maduro propaganda campaign. A similar ploy was used to secretly boost the fortunes of the anticommunist Solidarity labor movement in Poland in the 1980s. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the CIA sent emails and texts to Iraqi officers or called, urging them to defect or stand down when the invasion began. Dozens complied.
“Pretty much 95% of all this stuff can be done through exiles living abroad with contacts inside,” the former official said. “There isn’t a lot of gain to be had by putting agency staff personnel inside Venezuela, where they could be arrested and paraded in front of television.”
Most importantly, he said the CIA is hoping that the promise of a hefty payment can lure someone close to Maduro to persuade him that his days are numbered and that he’s better off if he flees the country. In that optimistic scenario, Trump could remove Maduro from office without a costly military attack, or even any serious violence. In 1989 a U.S. invasion force drove Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from power by blasting his hideaway with deafening rock and roll. Maduro, though, may well have Muammar Gaddafi’s fate in mind and reject such counsel.
Latin America experts note that Maduro has been able to remain in power for the past 12 years by repressing his opponents while surrounding himself with loyal allies in the military and judiciary whom he has rewarded with lucrative businesses, both private and state-owned, legal and illegal. These cronies are unlikely to support any successor to Maduro unless they can keep their perks, these experts say. And if a new leader refuses, Venezuela could face civil war that could spread to neighboring countries, they warn.
Meanwhile, a recent report by the Stimson Center warned that an escalation to U.S. airstrikes on targets inside Venezuela or a full-fledged U.S. invasion on the country may topple Maduro, but such attacks will only worsen the economic conditions that drive drug trafficking and emigration.
Risky Business
Meanwhile, the tactics that the CIA is employing in Venezuela are very risky in any event, says the former official, who has first hand experience in the coup business. What’s more, he adds, the CIA isn’t very good at recognizing the risks.
“Here’s where the problem starts,” he said. “Exile communities are fraught with peril. They exaggerate their access [to the Maduro regime]. They exaggerate their importance. For every one person who is honest and truthful, you’ll have four or five who are full of shit.”
He continued: “Also, we don’t have a great record of being able to weed them out. Often we go down the road with guys who make claims that aren’t true, and that gets us into trouble. The exile community, the opposition, they have their own agenda, which is not necessarily the same as the U.S. agenda.” A case in point: The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was urged on by Ahmed Chalabi, a corrupt Iraqi banker close to the George W. Bush administration, who turned out to be a secret Iranian agent.
Another major risk for CIA’s covert operations: Maduro’s large and highly effective counterintelligence apparatus, whose spy-hunting agents, trained by the Cubans, have infiltrated many Venezuelan exile groups.
“They are better than we are, better than the CIA, better than the FBI,” the former official said. “I would bet any amount of money that the opposition groups and exile community in the United States are penetrated up the ass, and the Cubans and Maduro know exactly what’s going on. They know how much money is going in there, who’s getting what, and they probably understand as much as 75 percent of the CIA’s plans and intentions.”
Last week, Venezuela announced it had captured a group of mercenaries working for the CIA who were plotting a false flag operation aimed at igniting a military confrontation.
“A false flag attack is underway in waters bordering Trinidad and Tobago or from Trinidadian or Venezuelan territory to generate a full military confrontation with our country,” Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said in a statement, without elaborating. He added the mercenaries were captured “with direct information of the American intelligence agency, CIA.” Rodriquez did not provide any details on whose “false flag” the alleged mercenaries were fighting under.
But behind Trump’s repeated, often lurid claims of Venezuelan drugs and criminal gangs flooding into the United States, the lure of more personal wealth also may be driving him to force Maduro from power. According to the former official, some in the exile opposition community have been encouraging U.S. support for Maduro’s ouster by offering American businesses some of Venezuela’s spoils if they help get rid of him. (Oil was the big prize in the 1953 Iran coup.)
Indeed, the most prominent Venezuelan making this pitch is none other than the country’s opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, now hiding abroad from Maduro’s henchmen in an undisclosed location.
In a February podcast interview with Donald Trump Jr., Machado, who claimed a landslide victory in Venezuela’s 2024 elections, only to see Maduro’s henchmen overturn the vote, promised that if Maduro steps down and she’s allowed to assume the presidency, she will scrap Venezuela’s socialist economy and replace it with a free market system that will provide what she called the “brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people who are going to make a lot of money.”
“Forget about Saudi Arabia,” she said. “We have more oil —infinite potential. And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick the government out of the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all of our industry. Venezuela has huge resources — oil, gas, land, minerals, technology. . .and American companies are in a super strategic position to invest.”
Now that’s the kind of transactional offer —one laden with opportunities for personal gain — that fires Trump’s loins. And if the CIA’s covert operations inside Venezuela don’t succeed in toppling Maduro, there’s always the option of bombing those alleged drug-associated military targets inside Venezuela to underscore Trump’s message that it’s time for Maduro to go. Trump has said he may authorize airstrikes on targets inside Venezuela.
The threat of U.S. military action seemed to grow last week when a top Justice Department lawyer told lawmakers the administration is not constrained by the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which requires Congress to approve ongoing military hostilities, and that the president can continue to order airstrikes against drug traffickers anywhere in Latin America. Trump’s predecessors have routinely violated the law since the Vietnam War.
“I would bet any amount of money that the opposition groups and exile community in the United States are penetrated up the ass, and the Cubans and Maduro know exactly what’s going on.”
The takeaways from Operation Ajax coup are a mixed bag. The 1953 coup gave the United States 25 years of pro-American rule in Iran and a valuable CIA listening post to monitor the neighboring Soviet Union during the Cold War. But the shah’s harsh authoritarian rule, which saw his SAVAK secret police brutally crush all opposition to his modernization schemes, eventually led to a bloody revolution in 1978 and the rise of a radical Islamist government that has plagued the United States ever since.
The CIA’s coups in Guatemala, Chile and South Vietnam, not to mention the failed invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in 1961, produced mass misery and an indelible stain on standing of the agency and the U.S. in general in the international court of opinion.
How will Trump’s overt-covert action operation against Maduro turn out? It’s always Big Casino, these radical regime-change plots. The agency tried once before and failed. Maybe they’ll succeed this time. But they’d better prepare for the regional aftershocks and global opprobrium that will inevitably follow.
SpyTalk Editor-in-Chief Jeff Stein contributed to this report.
Great piece and a great reminder to all that the “best laid plans” often incur generations of dark blowback. And, of course, DJT’s usual approach does not “need no effing plans!”