Asked who would govern Venezuela the day after Nicolás Maduro was removed, John Kiriakou answered first by ruling people out — “it”s not going to be Juan Guaidó, whom nobody had ever heard of; it”s not going to be this woman that just won the Nobel Peace Prize of all things” — and then by setting out why the question was academic.[1][2]
The checklist
“This is a lesson that we just seem to never learn. It”s easy to overthrow a government. I mean, they actually teach you at West Point the modus operandi by which you can overthrow a government. You have to take control of the presidential palace and either arrest, kill or exile the leader. You have to take control of the radio and television stations. You have to take control of the major intersections in the capital. And you have to have the support of the military.”[2][3]
Where it fails
“Well, we don”t have the support of the Venezuelan military. Maduro has the support of the Venezuelan military. So what does that mean? Does that mean we have to send in ground troops and fight a hot war on the ground in Venezuela, when the Venezuelans are no threat to us? I just don”t see any upside.”[3][4]
Applied to Caracas
Asked in December 2025 what the agency would be doing in Venezuela, Kiriakou restated the checklist in the form it takes when speed matters and the country’s centre of gravity is a single city. “To effect a coup, if you want it to be quick — and it’s a place like Venezuela where everything that’s important is going to take place in the capital — you have to control the radio and television stations, you have to surround the presidential palace, and you have to control the major intersections in the city. Once that happens, all the other dominoes begin to fall.”[5]
The precedent he names is European: “so it would be like overthrowing the Greek government in 1967. You don’t have to attack and invade and occupy the entire country. You just need the center of the city, along with the presidential palace and the parliament. I think that’s the plan in this case.”[5]
The caution he attaches immediately afterwards is that taking a capital is not the same as holding a country: after twenty years and a trillion dollars, Hamid Karzai was “little more than the mayor of Kabul.”[6]