The CIA’s recent drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility keeps President Trump’s options open in the country as he intensifies his pressure campaign, effectively expanding U.S. attacks onto land without committing the U.S. to an invasion of Venezuela.
However, the commander in chief’s disclosure of the covert operations during a radio interview last week also invites safety risks for personnel involved in the action, according to former U.S. officials.
“The purpose of a covert operation is for it to remain classified, so that those who are involved in that kind of operation are protected in terms of doing whatever operation [you’re] trying to accomplish. And when it’s when it’s announced, it basically undermines the covert operation itself, because it then jeopardizes lives,” Leon Panetta, former CIA director and Pentagon chief during the Obama administration, told The Hill in an interview Tuesday.
U.S. personnel reportedly struck a remote dock on the coast of Venezuela, believed to be used by the Venezuelan transnational gang Tren de Aragua to store illicit drugs. The facility was empty at the time and there were no casualties, according to multiple reports.
The attack was led by the CIA under Title 50, which provides a legal framework for U.S. intelligence activities, including covert missions, rather than Title 10, which governs the duties and responsibilities of U.S. armed forces, such as deployments and overt attacks.
Brett McGurk, former President Biden’s top Middle East adviser, suggested that decision may give Trump more leeway as his campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro continues.
“So that might be one reason they chose Title 50 here, because once you strike in Title 10, you’re really in it. You’re in a military conflict with Venezuela, and we’re not quite there yet,” he said Tuesday while on CNN.
Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate and now a law professor at Southwestern Law School, said the operation was “just strategically, policy-wise, a mechanism of escalating pressure on Maduro without sending in troops into Venezuela.”
But she said it was still an act of war — one that she views as illegal.
“The fact that a CIA versus military doesn’t change the fact that this was a direct act of war, and it’s one that was not to repel a sudden attack,” she said.
“It’s clearly unlawful under international law. There was no U.N. Security Council resolution,” she told The Hill on Tuesday. “He violated the territorial integrity of a country.”
However, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the covert action threaded a legal needle, expanding Trump’s attacks onto land without plunging the U.S. into war.
“First, there is a presidential finding that authorizes the CIA to take action against the Maduro regime. A strike by the U.S. military would be an act of war,” he said in an email to The Hill. “The second reason is that the target was the cartels, not the Maduro government. This keeps the focus on drugs, but also warns the Maduro regime that something like this could happen to it.”
Tren de Aragua is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment.
The president first unveiled the attack during an interview with John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby last week, telling the radio hosts “we just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from.”
Trump again discussed the secretive mission on Monday, just ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We hit all the boats, and now we hit the area; it’s the implementation area. That’s where they implement. And that is no longer around,” the president told reporters. He added there was a “major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs” and it took place “along the shore.”
Cancian, of CSIS, said the CIA mostly likely used an MQ-9 Reaper drone, which can carry Hellfire missiles, to conduct the attack.
“There are no reports of boots on the ground and that would be risky in any case,” he told The Hill. “The Reapers have enough range to reach Venezuela from Puerto Rico and that avoids having to get another country’s authorization.”
U.S. Special Operations Command (SoCom) told The Hill on Wednesday that SoCom “did not support this operation to include intel support.”
Trump’s disclosure of the clandestine operation, the first U.S. land strike inside Venezuela since the administration began blowing up alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, adds another dimension to the administration’s pressure salvo against Maduro, whom U.S. officials have called an “illegitimate leader” and head of a drug-trafficking organization.
Maduro has denied those accusations and kept a firm grip on power despite, by all independent accounts, losing an election last year.
Trump has announced a blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers coming in and out of Venezuela, and the U.S. Coast Guard has seized at least two tankers off the coast of Venezuela. On Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced it would slap sanctions on Venezuela-based companies involved in the production and sale of drones.
The administration has also established a massive military presence in the U.S. Southern Command area, deploying more than a dozen warships, F-35 fighter planes, Marines, spy planes and at least one submarine. There are about 15,000 U.S. service members in the region supporting the counternarcotics mission, a U.S. defense official told The Hill on Tuesday.
Brett Bruen, the CEO of the consulting firm Global Situation Room and a former U.S. diplomat during the Obama administration, warned that the disclosure of the strike risks undermining Trump’s goals in Venezuela.
“They cost lives, they limit our ability to gather intelligence in the future,” Bruen told The Hill on Tuesday.
Prior to the dock strike, the U.S. military had been blowing up purported drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific in what the administration bills as an operation to thwart the flow of illicit drugs and protect the U.S. The U.S. military has struck a minimum of 30 boats and killed at least 107 suspected “narco-terrorists” since Sept. 2.
The boat strikes have been panned by Democrats in Congress and some law-of-war experts as extrajudicial killings done with improper legal rationale.
The Venezuelan government has not commented on the CIA’s attack, which came more than two months after Trump confirmed that he greenlighted the intelligence agency to conduct covert actions in Venezuela.
Bruen said that may be in part because of “embarrassment,” but it does not mean Caracas won’t eventually speak out or retaliate.
“So normally, these disclosures, this kind of condemnation, would take time, and perhaps they’ll pursue it through private channels,” he said. “Perhaps they’ll disclose it to other countries so as to enlist their support in condemning this action, because I think we will see condemnation from a number of Latin American leaders, as well as leaders in other countries.”
Maduro did not touch on the CIA dock strike on Monday night and has continued to call for peaceful discussions to resolve tensions with Trump.
The CIA strike will raise new questions about how much Trump intends to engage Congress as he escalates his fight with the Venezuelan strongman.
Panetta said the CIA attack may have straddled the line between escalating pressure and starting a war, but added, “that line becomes pretty thin the more operations you conduct.”
Updated on Dec. 31 at 12:01 p.m. EST