Trump’s Radio Silence — Broken

The President spilled the beans on a big donor's show that it was the CIA — not the military — that targeted Venezuela.

Illustration by Riley Levine

On Monday, CNN reported that the CIA launched a drone strike on a remote port facility in Venezuela earlier this month.

Yet, CNN wasn’t the first place we heard about what appears to be the first U.S. strike inside that nation. The initial hint came from local radio talk show. As a national security professional for almost forty years, I’ve had a lot of trusted sources for sensitive intelligence developments; now I guess I should add WABC New York’s Cats & Cosby radio show. That’s where last Friday, President Trump first disclosed a classified U.S. strike on Venezuela to his big donor buddy and program co-host John Catsimatidis.

The president casually noted to the large metro New York City audience:

“I don’t know if you read or saw, they have a big plant or a big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So, we hit them very hard.”

Catsimatidis is a Republican oil and real estate billionaire worth about $4.5 billion who donated $2.4 million to Trump and Republican candidates last year alone. That’s twice what he gifted in the 2016 election. CIA drone operations cannot legally be publicly disclosed.

Yet, I suppose if you give Trump enough money, he’ll happily reveal what most assuredly was a top-secret intelligence mission. That’s not the first time Trump has disclosed highly classified information, and it likely won’t be the last, given his known proclivity to squirrel away our nation’s secrets in his bathroom and shower. The Pentagon and the White House responded to Trump’s revelation with stone cold silence, likely as they scrambled to assess the damage of a premature disclosure.

There’s far more to this Venezuela strike story than Trump’s sloppy leak and the possibility that it might jeopardize further strike plans. Confirmation of the strike from CNN, and later the New York Times, with added details, raises important questions of who, what, and why.

First, who conducted the strike? It’s important to understand the significance of the CIA and not the military, running this attack. Both the CIA and the U.S. military control fleets of drones. Following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush acknowledged that the war on terror demanded more intelligence on the enemy, and more precise, discreet ways to act – lethally, on that intelligence.

As the U.S. drone program developed, it rapidly became the tool of choice for precision targeting of al-Qaeda leaders with less likelihood of civilian casualties. Under President Obama, drones were extensively used throughout the middle east, but the war against terrorists wasn’t the only battle brewing. A turf war broke out between the CIA and the military as to who should control drones and under what circumstances.

Ultimately, when the departmental drone dust settled, a general division of labor fell into place. That understanding of who should do what, and when, looked something like this: The military drone program would be for publicly acknowledged, large scale battlefield support, reconnaissance, and bold kinetic strikes against big combat targets or facilities within adversarial war theaters, usually where U.S. troops are fighting.

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The CIA drone fleet would be used for classified covert strikes, usually against individual human or small-scale targets, and not necessarily in hostile territory or even in times of war. As for accountability and oversight, the military’s drone program answers to the armed services committees, while the top-secret CIA program must be closely briefed to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

As of this writing, we have no indication that either the of those committees have been briefed on what happened in Venezuela, including whether any of our lawmakers has had the chance to ask hard questions about the intelligence that led to the drone strikes. We’ll likely neither see nor hear much about this and any future strikes because of the CIA’s top-secret involvement — unless, of course, Trump is again a guest on a donor’s radio show.

Second, what was the target of this strike? According to multiple reports, the strike hit a dock on a remote port in east Venezuela, allegedly used by the designated terrorist organization and violent gang known as Tren de Aragua. Reportedly, the dock was not occupied, and no one was killed

Third, why did this really happen? As Trump claimed in his radio disclosure, this dock was supposedly used by the gang to store and launch drug shipments via boats.

There are at least three issues with this account. One, if this strike was about stopping the flow of drugs, we already know that Trump has it wrong when he claims that fentanyl comes from Venezuela. If this strike was about cocaine, experts agree that only a small fraction of cocaine flows from Colombia through Venezuela, and almost none of it comes to the U.S. Two, the targeting of an empty dock where no one was present, seems far more symbolic than actually designed to have any major impact on purported drug flow. In that sense, it’s a bit like the U.S. strikes on small vessels off the coast of Venezuela and in the eastern Pacific.

Three, the designation of Tren de Aragua as a terror organization is confounding. The label simply doesn’t meet our own definition of terrorism, which requires a political ideology that drives violence or threats of violence designed to intimidate or coerce. Is it a violent gang? Yes. Should we dismantle it? Yes. But the terror designation seems more of a thinly veiled rationale for intimidating a foreign country where Trump wants regime change – and oil.

The CIA drone strike may seem insignificant on its own. But it represents the next step toward future strikes against bigger targets within Venezuela, and the possibility of eventual war with a nation that possess the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves, even rivaling America’s and Saudi Arabia’s combined. Trump himself has said, Venezuela stole U.S. land and oil, and he wants it back; but that claim doesn’t hold up under legal scrutiny. The CIA drone strike might have been covert, but Trump’s objective is certainly no secret.

Frank Figliuzzi is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.

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