Maduro Capture
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John Kiriakou described and analyzed the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a CIA-driven operation with significant implications for international norms around state sovereignty.

Before the capture

The 2002 coup against Chávez

Kiriakou draws an explicit parallel to the 2002 coup that briefly removed Hugo Chávez, in which the U.S. facilitated and aided a military coup: Chávez was taken to a military base where he says he was almost executed, but was restored to power within days because Venezuela retained control of the situation and military factions loyal to him intervened when the public rose up. He argues the Trump administration, wary of a repeat, chose to carry out the Maduro operation itself rather than rely on internal Venezuelan military factions.

The death of Hugo Chávez

He has also said it seems likely to him that the CIA gave Chávez the cancer that killed him, describing methods such as injecting a target with radioactive elements or sewing radioactive lining into car seats as plausible means available to the agency.

The Guaidó plan, 2019

John Kiriakou says Washington's earlier attempt to unseat Maduro previewed the same disregard for Venezuelan sovereignty. He describes John Bolton's 2019 plan to install Juan Guaidó, then a George Washington University graduate student and not an actual electoral candidate, as Venezuela's recognized president, noting most Venezuelans polled did not know who Guaidó was. Kiriakou also recalls Bolton, in a press conference, appearing unaware of a provision in the Venezuelan Constitution stating a president-elect loses claim to office if not sworn in within 30 days of the election, a provision a reporter raised to him directly. He notes that international election observers, including the National Association of Attorneys, the Carter Center, and the UN, had monitored the relevant Venezuelan election and found some problems, but not enough to change its outcome.

The approach to Maduro's pilot

In August 2025, Maduro's personal pilot publicly disclosed that the CIA had attempted to recruit him. The plan offered: fly Maduro to Key West while telling him the destination was Cuba, allowing American forces to detain him upon landing. The pilot refused. Kiriakou noted: "So we all knew and Maduro knew that the CIA was looking to get him. I'm surprised there wasn't more counterintelligence on the Venezuelan side."

Kiriakou has told the story repeatedly, and the offered sum is constant at $50 million while the landing place varies between tellings. In one the pilot was to land in Key West, or, in a separate telling, in Florida generally, rather than wherever Maduro intended to flee, whether Cuba, Russia, or Spain, so that the FBI could seize him on arrival. In December 2025, weeks before the operation, he gave it with the detail that makes it a plan rather than an approach: "the CIA just three or four weeks ago, according to Maduro's private pilot, tried to recruit the pilot, with the idea that were Maduro to run, he would get on the plane, say 'take me to Havana'. Instead the pilot takes him to Key West, and the FBI is there to arrest him and charge him with international narcotics trafficking." In a third he named Miami as the destination: instead of landing in Havana, Maduro would land in Miami thinking it was Havana, be taken off the plane and charged with drug trafficking.

His expectation at the time was flight rather than capture: Maduro "probably has laid plans to leave if he needs to leave quickly," most likely to Havana, possibly Moscow.

The bounty

By comparison, Kiriakou notes the bounty the U.S. offered for Osama bin Laden was only $20 million, versus the $50 million offered for Maduro. He also notes the bounty had a specific timeline: the Biden administration placed the original $25 million reward on Maduro in January 2025, before the Trump administration raised it to $50 million in August 2025.

What overthrowing him would have taken

Kiriakou has set out the mechanics as a checklist, and then removed the decisive item. "To overthrow him, what do you need to do? You need to secure the presidential palace. You need to take over the radio and television stations. You need to control the major intersections in Caracas. But most importantly, you need to have the military on your side, and the Venezuelan military is on the side of President Maduro."

The alternative to a coup, in his description, was the pressure campaign that had already been tried: "we've already essentially told Maduro, just get on your plane and run away. Go to Doha, go to Havana, go to Moscow. Just get on the plane and run away." The purpose of the publicly announced covert action programme, he says, was exactly that, "to put so much pressure on Maduro that he just gets up and runs away", and the approach to the private pilot was the trap set for the moment he did.

On the alternative of killing him, Kiriakou judged the approval machinery prohibitive, and the freelance efforts absurd, a dozen or eighteen mercenaries "washed up on shore" announcing they had come to overthrow Maduro, then arrested and traded back for Venezuelan prisoners.

The indicators to watch

What he told viewers to watch was not American force posture but the Venezuelan officer corps: "we would get a better idea of what the plans are if we were to watch those military leaders closest to him. If we begin to see fissures among the military leadership in Venezuela, then it won't be long for Maduro after that."

His own assessment turned on the American side of the same question. Kiriakou says he did not initially believe the U.S. would attack Venezuela, since no naval assets had been sent; he changed his assessment once the USS Gerald Ford carrier battle group was moved from the Pacific to Venezuela, citing it as a general CIA-era lesson that a moving aircraft carrier battle group signals an imminent attack, a pattern he says would also apply to Iran.

The operation

The asset in the palace

The key enabling intelligence, per a New York Times account Kiriakou cited, came from a CIA asset positioned inside Maduro's presidential palace, a member of Maduro's inner circle who was secretly working for the CIA. When Maduro went to sleep, the asset called: "He went to bed. He's sound asleep. If you're going to do it, do it now." The operation proceeded immediately.

Kiriakou has separately called the operation "very much a CIA coup," citing New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal reporting that the agency had been actively working to recruit someone inside Maduro's inner circle since at least August; the same Times reporting held that the recruited palace source took the $50 million offer, which Kiriakou says is how the U.S. knew Maduro was asleep in his bed despite having changed his sleeping location, just as Saddam Hussein once did, on a nightly basis. Because there was no military resistance during the operation, Kiriakou believes the CIA likely also recruited multiple senior Venezuelan military officials, informants he describes, taken together with the palace source, as "multiple rats."

The night itself

A team of Delta Force commandos entered Venezuela and removed Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their beds in a nighttime operation. Maduro faces thirty years to life in prison if convicted; his wife faces approximately twenty years, likely on conspiracy charges. Delta Force pulled Maduro physically out of bed with no U.S. casualties.

The dead, and Chávez's mausoleum

At least eighty people were killed in the operation, including at least thirty-five Cubans, with no American casualties. Kiriakou believes the bombing of centrally located Venezuelan military bases during the operation was likely more symbolic than militarily necessary, adding that the administration was "very happy" to also kill Cubans in the process. The CIA also destroyed the mausoleum of former president Hugo Chávez, which Kiriakou characterized simply as "just mean", a deliberate act done, in his words, "to put it in their faces."

Paying the source

Kiriakou assessed that the breakthrough came from a large financial reward offered for information leading to Maduro's capture. He described CIA practice in such cases: when a capture is made based on a paid source's tip, the agency pays cash within forty-eight hours. He speculated that a low-level palace employee who received fifty million dollars overnight would be immediately conspicuous, and that the CIA was likely in the process of resettling that person, possibly using the CIA director's statutory authority to declare up to sixteen people per year American citizens. Kiriakou says he has firsthand knowledge that once the U.S. puts a bounty on someone, it pays, he has personally carried $10 million in cash in two gym bags to a bounty meeting, and that the agency has also paid bounties in gold, diamonds, and land.

The CIA's borrowed muscle

Asked how far the agency will go to reach a target, Kiriakou's answer sets no ceiling, "the extent is literally to do anything to to accomplish the mission," whether that is snatching a president or killing an ayatollah, because "it's whatever the president tells you to do. You have to carry it out."

The capability question he answers separately, and the answer is that the CIA does not own it. After 9/11 it began borrowing special forces, Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers, "because the CIA really didn't have that kind of expertise. Not, you know, bear crawling for 3/4 of a mile and, you know, doing these practically inhuman things in training." The seconded operators fell under CIA command for the duration and "then at the end of the operation they would go back to the Pentagon."

Noriega, 1989

In the same appearance, discussing what he calls the CIA's deadliest single day, the 2009 Forward Operating Base Chapman attack, Kiriakou compared the operation to the 1989 capture of Panamanian President Manuel Noriega. In that case, President George H.W. Bush authorized a military invasion of Panama. Noriega fled to the Vatican Embassy. U.S. forces occupied Panama City and set up loudspeakers around the embassy, playing death metal at maximum volume around the clock. The Vatican Ambassador eventually told Noriega he could no longer live under the conditions and asked him to leave. He walked out and was taken into custody. Kiriakou noted the Maduro operation was "much quicker and much more lean." Elsewhere he sharpens the comparison by casualty count: the roughly eighty people killed in the Maduro operation was nowhere near the scale of the 1989 Panama invasion, which killed about a thousand people.

Aftermath

Delcy Rodríguez's reversal

In Venezuela, acting president Delcy Rodríguez first called Maduro's capture "a grave international crime" against its "duly elected president," then two days later said she was in talks with the Trump administration, a reversal Kiriakou reads as showing she is either a U.S. puppet or was intimidated into compliance.

Cuba's fuel cutoff

Kiriakou says Cuba's fuel supply, previously from Russia, and more recently from Venezuela, is now threatened as a downstream consequence of the Maduro operation, leaving Cuban roads nearly empty of cars, with people reduced to walking or bicycling. He predicts Cuba could fall within six months of losing its sole oil source, calling regime change in Cuba a sixty-five-year U.S. goal now closer than ever.

Reaction in Latin America

Despite historical resentment in the region over earlier U.S. interventions such as the United Fruit-era Guatemala coup, Kiriakou says almost everyone he knows in Latin America was thrilled that Maduro was removed, a reaction he had not expected.

The weapon the soldiers described

Asked about reports of Venezuelan soldiers describing headaches and disorientation from a new weapon around the time of Maduro's capture, Kiriakou confirmed the CIA has developed such weapons for decades in close partnership with DARPA, through the Directorate of Science and Technology.

What Kiriakou says it was about

Not drugs

John Kiriakou argues that U.S. pressure on Venezuela rests on a false premise: it is not a meaningful drug threat, as its narcotics transit toward West Africa and Europe, not America. He blames neoconservative holdovers and, above all, Marco Rubio's desire to remove Maduro, with some 20 proposed operations on the table.

Not oil

Kiriakou notes that Venezuela sits "off to the side" of global oil politics because its crude is so heavy and high in sulfur that it can only be refined at specialty plants, almost all in South Florida, and even then only into home heating oil, not gasoline. It is a different foreign-policy question, he says, from OPEC and the petrodollar. He has made the same point elsewhere: he does not believe the operation was about oil at all, given that the U.S. is sitting on its own "ocean" of shale oil and does not need Venezuela's especially dirty crude.

Not a Hezbollah base

He has separately dismissed a Washington Post claim that Venezuela hosts a Hezbollah/Iranian base, saying the site in question is in fact a bicycle factory that has operated there, with Iranian involvement, for twenty years.

Why invasion was never on the table

He also argues the U.S. literally cannot invade and occupy Venezuela, since it is roughly the size of Germany, France, and Austria combined and almost entirely jungle.

The precedent

"If the Americans do it, it must be okay for everybody else"

Kiriakou expressed concern about the broader international implications: what the United States did to Maduro, it implicitly authorized other countries to do to their adversaries. His examples: Xi Jinping could snatch the president of Taiwan; Vladimir Putin could snatch Volodymyr Zelensky. "If the Americans do it, it must be okay for everybody else to do it, too." He reads the operation as a marker of American imperial desperation, arguing that Washington is resorting to these tactics precisely because it recognizes China's economic rise and the relative decline of U.S. global dominance.

A signal to Beijing and Moscow

John Kiriakou reads the seizure of Maduro as a spheres-of-influence signal: taking Venezuela tells China "we'll concede Taiwan is yours" and Russia "Ukraine is yours", as the world "regionalizes" and great powers circle their own hemispheres. A general standing with Trump after the capture, he notes, told the cameras they could do it "anytime, anywhere."

Kiriakou had separately forecast rising pressure on Taiwan along the same regional-power logic: he says he predicted China would "move on" Taiwan, not invade it, starting around October 2023, escalating once the KMT took control of Taiwan's legislature in January 2024.

The superpower response that did not come

In the event, he says the predicted superpower pushback did not materialize: China's single aircraft carrier was never diverted to the Caribbean, and Chinese officials merely called the operation "unfortunate," while Russia's response was limited to a stated disagreement.

The boat strikes as a test

He separately calls the U.S. bombing of fishing boats near Venezuela a clear war crime, and believes it functioned as a live test of whether Washington could act with impunity, absent pushback from Russia, China, or Congress.

As a benchmark for the Netanyahu polling

Kiriakou used the Maduro numbers as the yardstick for how far American opinion on Israel had moved, noting that support for arresting Benjamin Netanyahu was "significantly higher than the share of Americans who supported the arrest of Nicholas Maduro", see Netanyahu arrest poll.

See also

- CIA
- Extraordinary Rendition
- Havana Syndrome
- John Kiriakou
