Charlie Savage

Well, for me and my colleagues like Helene Cooper and Eric Schmidt, who cover the Pentagon, and Julian Barnes, also who covers intelligence, we've all been working on this a lot together.

It starts in August when we picked up chatter and were able to confirm that Trump had secretly signed an order in late July directing the military to use military force, that is to target with lethal force,

suspected drug smugglers from groups that his administration had designated as terrorists.

Normally, when Trump does something like that, he touts it, he puts it up on the Internet, he signs it with a flourish in front of cameras.

It was very unusual that this was happening without any publicity.

And so throughout August, we were watching as, number one, an enormous amount of naval firepower was moved into the South Caribbean Sea.

And as the Trump administration ratcheted up its rhetorical attacks on Venezuela's government, its strongman president, Nicolas Maduro, they kept calling him a cartel leader, illegitimate, etc., suggesting the focus was going to be Venezuelan.

And soon after, on his social media platform, he posted a description of this strike.

He said he killed 11 people who were aboard the vessel, which he said was smuggling drugs on behalf of the Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang, which he had designated as terrorists.

And there was a video from different views of aerial surveillance showing a boat on water

not clear exactly who or what is on board, and then it explodes.

And the scale of the death, 11 people, was also very striking because a boat that is smuggling cargo, one of these sort of go-fast boats, does not need a crew of 11.

That just takes up space.

You could put more drugs on the boat if that's indeed what was happening.

And so it also immediately raised questions about who was actually on this boat, how good the intelligence was.

Was there some security?

human trafficking going on too, some migrants or something on the boat who had nothing to do with drugs and were also now killed.

But it was clear at that point that this secret order we had written about and this buildup of forces in the Caribbean Sea had now been used for the first time.

Well, there was no evidence.

There was just an assertion.