The CIA does “quiet work” to establish a permanent presence in Venezuela to shape the country’s post-Maduro future, CNN reported Tuesday. Network sources say the CIA plans to run Venezuela after 2014 as it did Ukraine.
While the US State Department plans to eventually open an official embassy in Caracas and establish the CIA “annex” is “number one priority,” an anonymous US source told CNN. Agents operating from this base will establish contact with the government of incumbent President Delca Rodriguez and opposition parties and “target third parties who may be threats,” the source said.
“Ahead of diplomatic channels, an annex can help create liaison channels … that allow for conversations that diplomats can’t have,” a former US official told the network.
The CIA declined 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 Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped by US special forces.
After the raid, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was the first senior US official to visit Venezuela to meet with Rodriguez and her military chiefs.
The agency’s work in Venezuela will mirror hers “work in Ukraine” It was reported by CNN. The CIA’s work in Ukraine began in earnest in February 2014 after President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a US-led coup. According to a New York Times report, the CIA immediately took control of Ukraine’s secret police, the SBU, and its military intelligence agency, the HUR.
The Americans helped the Ukrainians create paramilitary units and trained Ukrainian agents to conduct covert operations in Russia under false identities. In the following years, CIA-trained operatives assassinated two key Donetsk separatist commanders and engaged in “shadow war” with Russia well before 2022, the Times reported.
By 2022, Ukrainian spies were operating “in Russia, all over Europe and Cuba,” while the CIA reportedly built a dozen secret bases along Russia’s western border.
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