The CIA carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility on the coast of Venezuela, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, marking the first known U.S. attack on a target inside that country.
The drone strike, details of which have not previously been reported, targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the U.S. government said was used by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang to store drugs and transport them on boats for shipping, the sources said. No one was present at the scene at the time of the attack, so there were no casualties, according to sources.
Two sources said US special operations forces provided intelligence support to the operation, highlighting their continued involvement in the region. But Col. Allie Weiskopf, a spokeswoman for U.S. Special Operations Command, denied that, saying “special operations did not support this operation to include intelligence support.”
President Donald Trump appeared to first acknowledge the attack in an interview last week that initially attracted little attention, although he offered few details, including when reporters asked directly about this Monday.
Listen to Trump acknowledge the strike at a port on the Venezuelan coast
The strike could significantly escalate tensions between the United States and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the United States supports. pressure to resign by an aggressive military campaign.
The United States launched strikes destroying more than 30 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean as part of what he described as a counternarcotics campaign, and Trump ordered a blockade of sanctioned tankers come and leave Venezuela. Trump also had repeatedly threatened to carry out strikes inside Venezuela, but until the CIA attack earlier this month, the only known U.S. strikes against Venezuelan targets were on boats suspected of drug trafficking in international waters.
The CIA declined to comment. CNN asked the White House, United States Special Operations Command, and the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Venezuela for comments.
Trump acknowledged in an interview Friday that the United States had destroyed some sort of “large facility where the ships were coming from” as he spoke about his administration's campaign against Venezuela. Asked about it again on Monday, he said the United States attacked “in the dock area where they were loading the drug boats.” But he declined to comment when asked whether the attack was carried out by the military or the CIA.
“So we've hit all boats, and now we've hit the zone,” Trump said Monday. “That’s the implementation zone, that’s where they implement, and that doesn’t exist anymore.”
One of the sources said the strike was successful in that it destroyed the facility and its boats, but called it largely symbolic since it is one of several port facilities used by drug traffickers leaving Venezuela. It also appears to have attracted little to no attention, even within the country, in real time.
Trump earlier this year expanded the CIA's powers to conduct operations in Latin America, including Venezuela, CNN previously reported. But even then, the U.S. military only had legal authority to carry out strikes against suspected traffickers at sea, not on land, as CNN reported.
The Trump administration has offered various justifications for the campaign in Venezuela, which involved a massive buildup of military assets in the Caribbean. Officials have emphasized the counternarcotics imperative, but Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair in an interview, that the boat strikes were aimed at getting Maduro to “cry uncle.” The Venezuelan leader has shown no signs of relinquishing power.
Senior officials have clearly indicated publicly and in briefings to lawmakers, they announced plans to continue targeting suspected drug traffickers using a model similar to that used to kill terrorists during the Global War on Terrorism — a campaign in which the CIA also played a crucial role. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has openly compared drug traffickers to Al Qaeda.
“These narcoterrorists are the Al Qaeda of our hemisphere,” the secretary of state said at the Reagan National Defense Forum earlier this month. “And we are tracking them with the same sophistication and precision that we tracked against Al Qaeda. »
This story has been updated with additional information from U.S. Special Operations Command.
