New in SpyWeek: Startling New Details on Maduro Raid as Trump Hints More Covert Action to Come—Without Tulsi's Help

Gabbard is out of the loop as Trump also eyes Cuba, Iran, even Greenland following masterful Maduro intel op, putting the future of NATO in question.

U.S. spy and communications satellites played a key role in the lightening fast assault on Venezuela and capture of Nicholas Maduro and his wife. (NRO)

Lights Out: “Delta Force didn’t arrive in the dark. The dark arrived first,” writes our SpyTalk colleague Seth Hettena about the Maduro raid on his own special ops-focused Substack, The After-Action Report. Fascinating and comprehensive, Hettena’s story details how U.S. electronic warfare specialists, interconnected with advanced U.S. spy and communications satellites, knocked out everything from city lights to Russian and Chinese missile defenses and radars, enabling the Delta Force team to sweep in and take out Nicholas Maduro and his wife with virtual impunity. Bottom line: the future of war is now.

Sound Weapon and Fury: A MAGA tweeter on X, meanwhile, got a lot of people, including White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, excited about his dodgy report on an unnamed Maduro “security guard” who claimed U.S. raiders killed “hundreds of us” and disabled others with “a very intense sound wave.” He said, “Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move,” adding, “I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.” The super efficient raid has stunned all of Latin America into submission, he also claimed. Sounds like someone has a Havana Syndrome jag. Or was it real? Tweeted Leavitt: “Stop what you’re doing and read this.”

Regime Trim, Not Change: The CIA advised Trump that his plan to “run” Venezuela, possibly for years, would be better off with pliable figures from the ancien regime rather than Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado or other opposition figures, according to the Wall Street Journal. The spy agency reasoned that the likes of Vice President Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, a senior government official who currently serves as head of Venezuela’s National Assembly. could better deal with restive generals, top security officials, powerful drug cartels, business barons and leftist guerillas. Democracy: Out. Strongmen: In.

Also Out, Tulsi: Trump’s director of National Intelligence has been left out of the Venezuela loop since last summer, Trump administration insiders gossiped to The Wall Street Journal. “As President Trump’s national-security team huddled last week to make final preparations for the operation to snatch Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Gabbard was posting social-media photos of herself on a beach in Hawaii, where she grew up, ignorant of the operation’s details,” the paper said. Trump’s move “highlights the increasing isolation and the turbulent tenure of Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, amid her struggle to penetrate the president’s inner circle and influence policies,” the paper added. “She has fallen in and out of favor with Trump, who has grown increasingly reliant on Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe for key intelligence consultations.”

Cuba, See? Trump reportedly now has Havana’s sclerotic communist leadership in his crosshairs. For sure, Cuba’s economy looks worse than ever, with food and jobs increasingly scarce and hopeless younger people fleeing by the hundreds of thousands. But don’t expect the government to collapse in a popular uprising anytime soon, the CIA has cautioned Trump, who last week prematurely claimed “Cuba looks like it is ready to fall” from the loss of Venezuelan oil shipments. People “familiar” with the intelligence told Reuters “the CIA had described Cuba’s economy in very poor terms—although their descriptions differed in degree…Whether or not economic suffering actually leads to government change is unclear—a reality acknowledged in the CIA assessments.”

Don’t miss this week’s SpyTalk podcast, with former senior CIA ops officer Luis Rueda and Peter Eisner, former Caracas bureau chief for The Associated Press, joining me and Michael Isikoff.

Greenland a Pushover?: A former analyst at the Danish Defence Intelligence agency says taking Greenland won’t be so easy with defenses stiffened and NATO allies lining up to defend her. A “quick and dirty job,” seizing the control tower and other strategic sites, might have been easy a year ago, Jacob Kaarsbo wrote on his Substack, but Denmark has ramped up its presence with troops and improved equipment. Then there’s the wicked cold weather and the recent arrival of a German frigate on station nearby—a tripwire if there ever was one. “I hope the Europeans can convince the U.S. that we will indeed shoot back,” he said. “U.S. soldiers would come back to the U.S. in body bags.” Awful wishful thinking in light of Venezuela, maybe, but still …

Jacob Kaarsbo map.

Hunt for the Red Tankers: Seems there’s more than oil at issue in the hunt for Russia’s shadow fleet vessels. It’s become “clear that those old tankers were no longer simply designed to keep the Russian economy afloat, but could be used in active offensive operations conducted by Russia’s intelligence agencies across Europe,” according to a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis. “Russia’s interest in these ships became crystal clear last summer when the Russian Navy began protecting them,” write Russia watchers Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. “By this January, however, ships associated with the shadow fleet were widely suspected of involvement in sabotage operations across Europe, including alleged drone launches against Denmark, Germany, and several other European countries.”

Scandi-Spies: “Russia Uses Fishermen, Tourists for Espionage Near Norwegian Border.” So headlined local SVT News, based on a briefing from Oslo’s military. Sweden, meanwhile, arrested a military cyberwar consultant on suspicion of spying for Russia. Earlier it reported that “Sweden’s domestic security agency is investigating a Russian Orthodox church in Västerås over alleged espionage and other hostile activities possibly linked to Russian intelligence efforts in Sweden.”

Iran-Israel Spy Wars: The IRGC has arrested an unnamed “foreign national” on suspicion of spying for Israel, according to a Jan. 10 report from the Human Rights Activists News Agency. No further details were available. Israel’s Ynet Global news, meanwhile, has published a deep dive on Iran’s espionage network inside the country. ”Since September,” it said, ”Israeli authorities uncovered 35 Iranian espionage cases, charging Israeli citizens recruited by Tehran, from a 13-year-old to IDF soldiers, over attempts to pass sensitive information, sow chaos and carry out failed assassination plots.”

China Hacked Capitol Hill: China’s Ministry of State Security intel hackers “accessed email systems used by congressional staff on powerful House committees, including those overseeing China policy, foreign affairs, intelligence, and defense,” according to the Financial Times. Unanswered: Did they have insider help?

Fidelity, Bravery: The troubled FBI, rocked with MAGA witchunts, firings and forced retirements since Trump devotee and Las Vegas lounge lizard Kash Patel took over, finally has somebody who looks like a pro at the top: Christopher Raia, formerly a top counterterrorism official at headquarters who’s been chief of the New York office for only eight months. Raia replaces the MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino as co-deputy director of the FBI, alongside Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general who was named to the job last August. “A former Coast Guard officer, Raia joined the FBI in 2003 and during the course of his two-decade career has investigated violent crime, drugs and gangs as well as overseen counterterrorism and national security investigations.” (A.P. via ABC)

Ex-TIME Reporter Goes China Sleuth: “Former Time bureau chief David Barboza‘s media and intel company The Wire Digital has lobbied on the U.S. intelligence budget and pitched U.S. agencies on tools for obtaining passwords of Chinese targets,” reports Jack Poulson on his All-Source Intelligence substack.

Double Agent Study: The CIA’s venerable Studies in Intelligence journal, much of it classified for decades, opened up recently on one of the most controversial double agent cases in the agency’s history. Back in May 1987, the KGB dispatched one Aleksandr Vasilyevich “Sasha” Zhomov to the CIA’s Moscow station with an offer to work as a spy. They bit—and GTPROLOGUE, as he was code-named, “became a key disinformation and deception channel for the KGB,” writes Alexander Orleans, a cyber threat intelligence analyst and former U.S. government contractor. ”In a broader historical context, GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans, and Cubans—badly burned the agency.”

Aldrich Ames, Dead at Last: A former CIA colleague of the notorious traitor at agency headquarters, Colin Thompson, recalls his time with Ames before and after he turned coat and began spying for Russia. Only in SpyTalk.