The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | January 10th, 2026: Former CIA Caracas Chief Explains What's Next For Venezuela & Iran’s Regime On The Brink
10 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the PDB Situation Report. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage, and it is a fascinating world stage at the moment. All right, let's get briefed. First up, less than a week ago, U.S. Special Forces, working alongside the CIA, carried out a highly coordinated operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from power and bring him to the U.S. to face federal charges.
The mission followed months of intelligence preparation, surveillance, and focused on speed and surprise and precision, avoiding a broader military confrontation. Now, attention is turning to what comes next. That's the big question. The stability of Venezuela, the fate of its security services and military, and how rival powers respond to a sudden vacuum in Caracas.
for insight on the operation and its implications. Let me bring in Rick De La Torre, a retired CIA operations officer and former chief of station in Caracas. Rick, thank you very much, man, for joining us here on The Situation Report. Good to see you, brother. Let's start with a really sort of 30,000-foot question. What do you make of what's happening in Venezuela? You like that?
See how specific that is? Yeah, yeah. So much to work with there. I think ultimately, we're certainly heading in the right direction, right? You, as everyone knows, a lot of times we are far more ahead of the curve than policymakers are.
Chapter 2: What happened during the U.S. operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power?
For years, we have been tracking the illicit drug sales, the criminal behavior. like human rights violations coming out of Venezuela. And it's only been recently that we've actually been able to get an administration that not only understood the issues properly, but also had the courage to act on it. And that's ultimately what we're seeing play out now.
You know, I regret now not staying in just, you know, a year or two longer and being back in that helm, right? You know, we tend to have that looking back fondly moment and we kind of wish we were there.
But I'm really happy with the little I contributed because if you look at the special operations officers, the rest of everyone back at headquarters in the main building and all the great work that they've done and the folks working in the field, it really warms my heart that for the first time in a long time that people of Venezuela are going to have an opportunity to get their democracy back, to get themselves realigned again with the rest of the world.
Now, not to get into too much granular detail, but how long were you on the ground for in Caracas? I think on that one, my engagement in Caracas was a little unique, right? Because by that time, the embassy had been closed. So we were working in different sectors from different locations, but still overseeing and managing the operations and activities within that country.
And certainly continuing to engage the Maduro regime wherever we had to, whenever we were requested by headquarters. Let me ask you, hey, since you brought him up, Maduro, I mean, let's talk about him. He's been in the news. Yeah. What is your... What is your assessment of the past week or so? I mean, I think clearly there was that moment. Maduro's been captured, right?
And I think a lot of people, their minds went to, well, that's fantastic. Now we've got a whole new day. It's going to be a new government.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications for Venezuela's stability post-Maduro?
There's democracy and stability and huzzah. And then in fairly short order, it's like, okay, now we've got Delcy Rodriguez, the VP. Now she's the president. Cabello's there. We've got all the same cats. So is this more of just a reshuffling of the deck chairs? Or do you think this pretends an actual transition and change that means a better future for Venezuelan people, better ties with the U.S.?
How do you assess all of this? That's a great question. And it's one that at first, it took me a little while to kind of understand it. And I spoke with some friends over at State Department. In fact, earlier today, I had lunch with one of them. And I also spoke with a retired three-star Marine general who just recently retired out of the soft comp spaces.
And the way they explained it to me, and it made sense then to me that it's like, look, We just took Maduro out, right?
Chapter 4: What insights does Rick de la Torre provide about the CIA's involvement?
We've got him. He's under arrest. But the situation on the ground in Venezuela hasn't really changed, right? People still need water. People still need security, right? They still have to move on the next day and the day after. Of course, nothing would make us happier than to have, you know, someone else in those positions.
Certainly someone maybe from the Venezuelan exiled community or, you know, the exiled dissident community. But the problem is that they're exiled, right? You know, all the dissidents are not in Venezuela. They're outside Venezuela. And a third of the entire population of Venezuela, over 9 million of it, Venezuelans don't live in Venezuela. So what do you do? Like, you got to deal with something.
So I think in this case, what they're doing is they're pinching their noses. They're dealing with Delphi in the interim capacity that they can until the situation improves. and gets into something that could be a little bit more permanent with, you know, with the people that should be running Venezuela.
So what's that going to look like from, you know, everything I've heard from the administration and everything they seem to be putting out and it makes sense to me is, you know, get the security situation under control first, right? Once that's done, then let's open the doors so that the dissident community, the exile community can start returning, start investing, start setting their things up.
and then move into that election process. And that shouldn't be in short order. That shouldn't be a very long-term kind of thing. So, what do you think that span of time will be? I think things continue to move smoothly and there isn't, you know, there aren't the types of setbacks that would cause some people to pause.
That could be, you know, as early as three, six, nine months kind of timeframe. We're still dealing with a country where there's still a lot of question marks regarding the institutions, their capabilities, and how they do things. We're talking about a country where your loyalty to the corrupt regime is what got you promoted and allowed you to run these organizations.
So the corruption runs deep. I mean, it runs really deep. So just taking out a figurehead in a major agency or department and replacing it with someone else isn't going to move that needle forward. So this kind of thing makes sense. As we move towards elections, And this makes sense too, right? And this gets into technicalities. Maria Carino Machado was elected vice president, not president.
And the reason why she couldn't run for president was because all the tricks that Maduro played so that she couldn't get on the ballot. So she got elected as vice president on her ticket. Well, okay. So if we put her as president now, you know this, every critic out there, every country out there is going to turn around and they're going to say, oh, she's illegitimate.
She's a puppet of the Yankee imperialists and the whole thing. She got 80% of the vote. I'm confident this time around she'll get 95% of the vote. And the remaining 5% that don't vote for her is because they didn't know how to fill out the ballot box or something. So she's going to win that.
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Chapter 5: How are protests in Iran evolving from economic grievances to regime defiance?
So this wasn't so much that Maduro tolerated or worked with, say, Hamas or Hezbollah. He rolled out the red carpet. I mean, dating back to as early as the late 90s, this is under Chavez and continued, right? They had no problem issuing Venezuelan passports to Iranian terrorists, you know, and giving them docs that then they could use to come here.
Of course, now over the years, the strength of a Venezuelan passport probably, you know, doesn't get you much. But, you know, that gets you the right mindset. There's been a lot of now in open sources kind of reporting which I do encourage people to read that as early, you know, Maduro would fund and invite and interact with a lot of a lot of the far left fanatical groups here in our own country.
And he would provide them with access and training and support, which then spills into our own streets back here. So when it comes to to to China and Russia on the Russian side. I mean, can you imagine, Mike, if I would have told you 10 years ago that we would have had Spetsnaz running around in our hemisphere, right? You know, you would have said I was on drugs, right?
You would have said you're crazy.
Chapter 6: What does Behnam Ben Taleblu say about the Iranian regime's response to protests?
But that's exactly what we were at, what was going on. You know, they were setting up communication equipment and satellites and arms sales with the Venezuelans. They were using this as a launching pad. But as well, it became that, like an aircraft carrier in our own hemisphere where the Chinese, the Russians, and others could then export their chaos to other places. And they did that.
I suspect now with Maduro in custody and as his friendship with the DOJ will grow, he'll be providing probably some really good information as to the organizations and individuals he's provided money to, not just in Latin America, but perhaps even here in the United States.
It will be really interesting to see to what degree he's willing to, and we may not see it, but to what degree he's willing to cooperate.
Chapter 7: What are the potential outcomes for Iran following the current protests?
They used to say the same thing about El Chapo, remember? You know, from the cartel in Mexico, and then he started singing like a bird. So, you know, and this may be the case with him or with his wife. The Russians were really focused on the military. You know, they had, the Russians, think about this. We had Russian destroyers helping Maduro patrol the Caribbean on Carter Darkbotics operations.
I mean, it's just, it's insane, right? It's insane. Think about that, right? So the Chinese, obviously, with all the debt that the Venezuelans owe the Chinese, you take all the oil out and give it to the Chinese, give it to the, that's how he paid his bills, it was with oil. And then half of that oil that they'd pump out, of course, they sell on the black market for themselves.
And then the other half, They'd give it to our adversaries. So this was, from head to toe, a complete criminal enterprise. You talked about the counter-narcotics angle. And of course, this whole thing, the early stages of the deployment out there, the military deployment by the US, it was all pegged towards counter-narcotics operations, obviously.
And then we were targeting these various boats coming out, and that made the headlines repeatedly. So if you could, can you talk about this, the Cartel de los Sols? Because there's some confusion, I think, out there, right? Some people talk about it as if it is a, it's like the Los Zetas, or it's a Sinaloa cartel. It's a very organized structure.
Other people talk about it and say, nah, it's sort of a loose arrangement, an affiliation aided and abetted by all the people within the top of the the Venezuelan regime. Other people say, I've had conversations where people have said, oh, no, no, the cartel de los solos, that's a made-up thing by the CIA to justify our actions in Venezuela. Yeah, yeah.
So, well, I can tell you it's not a made-up thing. It is as real as it gets. If you look at Venezuela, right, along its Colombian border, and most of, you know, if you drew a line right down the middle of Venezuela from north to south, Everything left, everything west of that is just Amazon jungle, right? There's nothing, you know, it's just thick, deep jungle.
It's places where, you know, regular services and law enforcement, it just doesn't exist out there. These are small tribes. Some of them don't even speak Spanish. They speak indigenous languages. You know, this is like real Amazon area.
What started to happen in, like, the early 2000s, when Colombia started to get really, really tough on FARC and ELN and other terrorists that they were dealing with, those folks that started moving across the border into Venezuela, where they felt pretty safe, right? They're across the border. Colombians can't really get to them there. And, you know, under Chavez and Maduro,
They're going to leave us alone. What Maduro did was he incorporated it into his defense strategy. He anticipated that if anybody was ever going to go after them, they'd go after him through Colombia, because Colombia up until a couple of years ago was rather adversarial towards Venezuela, and rightfully so, right?
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be drawn from Venezuela's situation for Iran's future?
Yeah, great. You're you're you're you're our number two guy now, right? This is different, right? These are folks that they remember what democracy was. They remember what rule of law was, right? Now they've got this level of corruption. The average conscript in the Venezuelan military barely gets paid. Usually they don't get paid. So sometimes they have to turn to corruption.
when they'd rather be back home in their villages just doing regular things, right, that they'd want to be with their families. They don't want to be out in the middle of the jungle. So, the will to fight or the will to support this rough structure isn't really there. But you were correct. You have a hard human rights violating regime at the top that makes sure everyone else would fall in line.
So those guys, that inner circle, that inner circle around Maduro, the ones that were benefiting from this and have, you know, multi-billion dollar bank accounts and foreign banks, those are the ones, of course, that are really scared. And they shouldn't be. They shouldn't be very scared.
I think we may be looking at three scenarios, and I shared this today with someone at State, and it was one scenario is the Diosdado Cabellos and the Vladimiro Padrinos and these guys, they're going to try to get somehow to Cuba or Moscow and just put Venezuela behind them, right? Whether Cuba or Moscow wants to accept them and deal with that, that's a whole other story, and I don't know.
The other option, too, is they may want to try to mount up some sort of military resistance or strike back against Delcy right now. And I don't think this administration will allow that. That's a predator moment, if I can ever think of one, right? Yeah. And then, you know, I think those are two very viable options.
A third option is that they're going to convert somehow and sing, you know, the glories of whatever. And I was innocent. I was only following orders. That's not going to go very far, as you know, right? You know, we've got a pretty good book on them. Right now, DOJ, I suspect, is going through what they can and can't use and what they're going to introduce in trials.
But these guys really do have blood on their hands. There's no doubt about that. They have innocent blood on their hands. A lot of them were proud of it. They've been kidnapping Americans for a very long time, using them as bait to get us to a negotiation table to give them better deals. That stuff is ending now.
So I'm not exactly sure what, you know, what light at the end of the tunnel these guys see for themselves. I really don't. The options are closing for them. And there's going to come a time where they're going to have to face justice. Yeah. Well, or in a desire to have some sort of relatively peaceful transition, the US offers some sort of amnesty plan or an off-ramp, the exile concept.
I am busy writing a TV series about an assisted living facility in Moscow where Bashar Assad and Khamenei and Cabello and Padrino, they're all there. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And they get let argue over the cornflakes. I've got a bunch more questions. I wanted to talk and get your assessment of where this leaves Cuba.
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