CNN
By Kevin Liptak, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Zachary Cohen, Alayna Treene, Kristen Holmes, CNN
(CNN) — It was just like watching television.
Huddled in a draped-off room at Mar-a-Lago around screens set up for his viewing pleasure — including, according to photos released by the White House, a live feed of social media messages on X — President Donald Trump watched and listened as highly trained American Delta Force soldiers rushed into Nicolás Maduro’s home in Caracas, where the Venezuelan leader was sleeping alongside his wife.
Maduro was quickly dragged into custody as he tried to flee to his steel-enforced safe room.
It was the dramatic culmination of a monthslong campaign whose ultimate goal has long been clear to those involved in its planning: to oust Maduro from power. Trump, who at points along the way voiced misgivings about the potential for unintended consequences and the chances the US could be drawn into a prolonged war, put aside any reservations and gave a green light to the operation in the days before Christmas.
It wasn’t until more than a week later that the weather cleared and conditions were right for the heavily-guarded mission. At 10:46 p.m. ET, after making a shopping excursion for marble and onyx and enjoying dinner on the Mar-a-Lago patio, the president gave the final go-ahead.
“Good luck,” Trump told the assemblage of national security officials who had convened at his gilded private club in South Florida, “and Godspeed.”
American helicopters were soon gliding across the sea, 100 feet above the dark water, toward Caracas. A couple of hours later, Maduro was in US custody, handcuffed, dressed in gray sweatpants and wearing blackout goggles, according to a picture Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday morning.
Trump emerged Saturday to declare the United States would now “run” the country for an indeterminate future, offering strikingly little detail and claiming he wasn’t afraid of “boots on the ground.”
For a president whose political movement was fueled, in part, by resentments over two decades of bloody American foreign intervention, it was a remarkable turnabout. The president mostly glossed over the work that may lie ahead, focusing instead on obtaining access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and repeatedly declining to rule out a more robust US military presence if Maduro’s allies refuse to cede power.
In the hours after the strike, sources around Washington, including congressional staffers and allies of the president, privately voiced concerns about the long-term consequences of the action — both in terms of US national security and the potential political fallout for a president with low-approval ratings whose base has shown little appetite for American intervention abroad.
A strike months in the making
At Trump’s side this week in Florida have been the chief architects of the escalating pressure campaign on Maduro, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and senior adviser Stephen Miller, who were seen at dinner with the president hours before the operation began. They joined him again as he proclaimed victory on Saturday.
Preparations for the raid began in mid-December, people familiar with the plans told CNN. But the vision had been planted months earlier. Even before the first US military strike on an alleged drug-carrying boat from Venezuela in early September, the plan to remove Maduro from power was already in motion.
While the US was visibly building up its military assets in the Caribbean, moving warships and other materiel to the region, another buildup was happening in secret. In August, the CIA covertly installed a small team inside Venezuela to track Maduro’s patterns, locations and movements, which helped bolster Saturday’s operation as to his exact whereabouts, including where he would be sleeping, sources familiar with the plans told CNN.
The team found out “how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Saturday.
The assets included a CIA source operating within the Venezuelan government who assisted the United States with tracking Maduro’s location and movements ahead of his capture, one source briefed on the operation told CNN.
The detailed timeline and the revelation that a CIA team has been operating inside Venezuela for so long sheds new light on the administration’s pressure campaign on Maduro for the past several months, even as senior officials publicly stated their goal was not regime change.
Several Democratic members of Congress on Saturday accused Rubio and Hegseth of lying to lawmakers during a Senate briefing last month.
Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey wrote in a post on X that “Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress.”
In October, Trump said he authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation. The CIA declined to comment.
‘Pretty much an ultimatum’
Late last month, the CIA carried out a drone strike on a port facility on the coast of Venezuela, sources familiar with the matter previously told CNN, marking the first known US attack inside that country. The strike targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the US government believed was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to store drugs and move them onto boats for shipping, the sources said.
No one was present at the facility at the time it was struck, so there were no casualties, according to the sources.
Despite the plans being drafted to oust Maduro, many White House officials had continued to hold out hope in recent weeks that the Venezuelan president would voluntarily step down, two senior White House officials told CNN.
During a phone call between Trump and Maduro in November, the American president repeatedly stressed to the Venezuelan leader that “it would be in his best interest” to step down and leave the country, one official said, calling the conversation “pretty much an ultimatum.”
“I want to be clear about one thing: Nicolas Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this,” Rubio said Saturday. “He was provided multiple, very, very, very generous offers and chose instead to act like a wild man, chose instead to play around, and the result is what we saw tonight.”
As recently as the beginning of December, the administration believed it was beginning to see cracks in Maduro’s support system, one of the officials told CNN. As time went by, however, that belief began to dissipate, and planning for the operation began.
Once Trump gave the go-ahead in late December, the operation was disrupted by several factors, including the weather in Venezuela and the president’s decision to strike Nigeria on Christmas, one official said.
Conditions ripen for a strike
Caine said Saturday that “Operation Absolute Resolve” was the culmination of “months” of planning and rehearsals involving 150 aircraft and personnel across military and intelligence agencies.
The troops tapped to participate then had to wait for the ideal conditions, Caine said, and were on standby through the holidays as weather delayed the operation.
“Last night, the weather broke just enough, clearing a path that only the most skilled aviators in the world could maneuver through,” Caine said.
Once Trump gave the go-ahead just before 11 p.m. ET, US military aircraft began taking off from 20 bases in the Western Hemisphere, Caine said. Those aircraft would deliver precision strikes on Venezuelan ground targets, such as air defense systems, and provide cover for the helicopters carrying the extraction team to Caracas. The US also deployed cyberwarfare tactics to help clear a path for its teams operating in the sky and on the ground, Caine said.
The helicopters with the extraction team reached Maduro’s compound at 2 a.m. local time in Caracas, the general said. Upon arrival, the helicopters came under fire and one was hit but remained flyable. The US returned fire in defense, Caine added.
“As the operation unfolded at the compound, our air and ground intelligence teams provided real-time updates to the ground force, ensuring those forces could safely navigate the complex environment without unnecessary risk,” he said.
Caine said Maduro and his wife “gave up” to the US military personnel before being flown out of the country. Maduro and Flores were placed aboard the USS Iwo Jima, which stopped at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.
The base, sometimes referred to as “Gitmo,” is in southeastern Cuba and is home to the notorious detention camp. There, Maduro and his wife were transferred to a plane, which landed at Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York on Saturday evening.
In Venezuela, people were unsure how to react.
Numerous streets in Caracas, where the smell of gunpowder lingered, appeared deserted in the early hours of Saturday. Some people who went out in search of basic necessities, such as diapers, found that most businesses were closed, including pharmacies, supermarkets and gas stations.
‘The speed, the violence’
Trump, vacationing for a long stretch in South Florida, offered little indication he was planning one of the most consequential actions of either of his presidencies. Instead, he went about his usual rhythms: days at the golf course, dinners on the Mar-a-Lago patio, and hosting a New Year’s Eve gala that featured a performance by Vanilla Ice.
In the hours before he gave the final go-ahead, the president met at his golf club with Vice President JD Vance to discuss the strikes, but Vance returned home to Cincinnati after the operation began. Vance joined several late-night meetings via secure video conference with top national security officials leading up to the operation.
A Vance spokesperson said the Trump national security team “was concerned a late-night motorcade movement by the Vice President while the operation was getting underway may tip off the Venezuelans.”
Trump, meanwhile, watched the complex capture play out in real time from a room in Mar-a-Lago alongside military generals.
“If you would have seen what happened, I mean, I watched it literally, like I was watching a television show,” he mused later, calling into Fox News.
“If you would have seen the, the speed, the violence … it was an amazing thing, amazing job that these people did. There’s nobody else could have done anything like it,” Trump added.
He had much less to say about what it might look like for the US to “run” Venezuela, offering vague allusions to a “group” that would govern the 31 million people who live there. And while he seemed confident Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez would “do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodriguez came out two hours afterword to insist her country had been “savagely attacked” by the operation.
It all made for a startlingly unclear picture of what might come next, despite the months of planning that got Trump to Saturday.
Asked by CNN whether he’d taken into consideration the mixed track record of American efforts to oust dictators, the president set himself apart.
“That’s when we had different presidents. But with me that’s not true,” he said. “With me, we’ve had a perfect track record of winning.”
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