The agency’s work in Caracas will reportedly follow the Ukraine playbook
The CIA is “quietly working” to set up a permanent presence in Venezuela in order to shape the country’s post-Maduro future, CNN reported on Tuesday. The network’s sources say the CIA plans to run Venezuela like it did Ukraine after 2014.
While the US State Department plans to eventually open an official embassy in Caracas, establishing a CIA “annex” is “priority number one,” an anonymous US source told CNN. Operating out of this outpost, agents will make contact with acting President Delcy Rodriguez’ government and opposition parties, and “target third parties who may be threats,” the source said.
“Before diplomatic channels the annex can help set up liaison channels… that will allow conversations that diplomats cannot have,” a former US official told the network.
The CIA refused to comment, but its presence in Venezuela is no secret. US President Donald Trump authorized the agency to conduct covert operations in Venezuela last October, three months before President Nicolas Maduro was abducted by US special forces.
Following the raid, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was the first senior American official to visit Venezuela to meet with Rodriguez and her military chiefs.
The agency’s work in Venezuela will mirror its “work in Ukraine,” CNN reported. The CIA’s work in Ukraine began in earnest in February 2014, after President Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown in a US-orchestrated coup. According to a New York Times report, the CIA immediately took over management of Ukraine’s secret police agency, the SBU, and its military intelligence agency, the HUR.
The Americans helped the Ukrainians set up paramilitary units, and trained Ukrainian agents on conducting covert operations within Russia under false identities. CIA-trained operatives assassinated two key Donetsk separatist commanders in the following years, and were engaged in a “shadow war” with Russia long before 2022, the Times reported.
By 2022, Ukrainian spies were operating “inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba,” while the CIA had constructed a dozen secret bases along Russia’s western border, according to the report.
