Chapter 1: How did the US intervention in Venezuela come to be?
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Chapter 2: What were the key details of Operation Absolute Resolve?
And I'm David McCloskey. And this is the second, David, in our emergency series looking at that US mission that took out Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Our first episode, we looked at the operation itself and we recorded that on Sunday, January the 4th. We're recording this Monday, January the 5th, so about kind of 15, 18 hours later, really just a couple of days after the first news broke.
And in that first episode, we looked at how the operation itself unfolded, how the US pulled off this, you know, really surprising move of being able to capture the sitting leader of Venezuela. And I guess this time we're going to step back a bit and look at the whys. But there are a few more details emerging, aren't there, David, about the operation itself just in the last few hours.
Gordon, I'm furious. It's Monday morning. It's actually quite early in my time, but I'm already furious with you. Why? I had a quote from the Jack Ryan Amazon series about Venezuela that you hacked out of our notes.
You had a long quote from a fictional TV series with someone talking about Venezuela. And I was like, hang on a sec.
Chapter 3: What role do drugs play in the US justification for intervention?
The fact is better than the fiction, which is maybe should be my general kind of battle cry about you fiction writers. Except when it comes to my novels. We don't need spy fiction. We don't need thrillers. We've got the real life stuff going on.
Yeah, exactly. Been ruined by reality. No, but it was a great, it was a very illustrative John Krasinski quote for the Jack Ryan series. They called it, Gordon, five years ago, six years ago, I think, maybe when they ran the second season of Jack Ryan and it was all set in Venezuela. And I actually distinctly remember watching it
with my wife and commenting that there's no way that the agency would just be able to fly helicopters sort of willy-nilly through Venezuela, because they're just sort of taken off and landing and, you know, violating Venezuelan airspace at will. And then look, you know, six, seven years later, I'm totally wrong.
But you're right, Gordon, we do have some updates, I guess, some things that have come in over the past 12 to 15 hours on the raid that I think
don't materially change the story from the first episode in the series about exactly how Operation Absolute Resolve went down, but do add some detail to it that I think puts a point on really the incredible intelligence picture that the White House, the CIA, Delta Force, all of the different agencies involved in planning and participating in this operation had at their fingertips.
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Chapter 4: How significant is oil in the context of US interests in Venezuela?
So some of the things that have come out, I do want to actually hat tip, there's a great journalist named Jack Murphy, who's got a sub stack called the high side, what he has revealed in an update to some of the stuff he was putting out as the operation was going on, is that CIA ground branch officers, and we talked in the first episode, Gordon, about that team that was on the ground.
They were on the ground in August in Venezuela, The planning for the operation didn't really start in full force until September. One of the things that does seem to be more and more clear, and again, I think we'll get more information on this in the coming days, but the role that recent defectors play
really high level defectors from Venezuela played in helping build source networks on the ground that the agency and Delta Force were able to leverage. Because it seems like there was a defector, a guy who had actually run one of Venezuela's intelligence agencies, Someone who would run a state-run oil company.
And again, they played a role in kind of activating local source networks that played a role in the operation. I also think, Gordon, another interesting piece of this is the role that military, I guess you'd call them defectors in place, played in this operation.
These are kind of officers who would have been frustrated with Maduro and might have played a role in helping the Americans kind of conduct the operation. Yeah.
I think one of the things that we may learn more about in the days and weeks to come is how far there were back-channeled secret contacts with people in the Maduro regime, supposed regime loyalists, in which the US is reaching out to them and saying, if we remove him, will you play ball? How will you operate?
I think there was a lot of that going on quietly, maybe even at some of the highest levels. which may have assisted this operation.
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Chapter 5: What historical precedents inform the US approach to Venezuela?
But yeah, I think that will take a bit of time to fully emerge, but it's very interesting.
The other piece that I found interesting, I guess, not a surprise given the fact that no Americans died and not a piece of equipment was lost, was that the US gained total control, according to a source involved in the planning, total control over Venezuelan government and military communication systems throughout the mission. So what happened to the electrical grid in Caracas?
What seems to happen to the sort of the communication system that the military was using? It seems like the Americans had it completely wired. The last little bit I found interesting is that Maduro apparently has been videotaped constantly since his capture. And the idea there was to avoid any allegations that he is being tortured or sort of mishandled.
And the thinking around even things like, you know, why is he not in kind of an orange jumpsuit? You know, he's just in that kind of gray tracksuit. Why is he being flown out of Guantanamo in a 757 as opposed to the Gulfstream planes that would be used when American forces render cartel members? He's being given the head of state treatment, Gordon, for a future felon.
Although I hear that Brooklyn detention center ain't the place to be and not the place to wake up. So I'm not sure it's that good the treatment.
So those, I mean, just, you know, again, I think, you know, more will obviously come out in the next few days and weeks. But just a few kind of updates to the story we told on the pod on Monday on the raid.
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Chapter 6: How does the Monroe Doctrine relate to current US policy?
But I think the focus of this episode, Gordon, is not how the raid went down. It's this massive question of why the US did it, why Trump did it in the first place.
That's right. And I think it is important to answer that because I think it also takes you to what is the US strategy and what might it do next? So it's a kind of answer with big consequences. I think maybe the easiest way to break it up is into three areas, drugs, oil, and raw power.
That's the subtitle to your next book, right, Gordon?
Oil, drugs, and raw power.
The Gordon Carrera story. It could be the autobiography, maybe.
The autobiography, yeah. But yes, technically, this was a law enforcement operation with the military acting in support of... DOJ and DEA to bring him to justice. I think it's worth maybe looking at the drugs first because I think it is the overt or part of the overt justification.
President Trump described Maduro as the kingpin of a vast criminal network trafficking drugs into the US, flooding the US
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Chapter 7: What might be the consequences of US actions in Venezuela?
with lethal poison which was killing thousands of people. So the claim here is that Maduro was a narco-terrorist head of state conspiring to smuggle drugs into the US and over the summer the bounty on him stemming from existing charges was doubled to 50 million dollars.
Now the first charges were actually laid in 2020 against Maduro but we've just had this superseding indictment which is the basis of the charges that are actually going to be laid what he's appearing in court for today on this Monday as we speak. And I think it's interesting, isn't it?
If we look at some of what's being alleged that he's done to support that claim, I mean, it goes back through his backstory. So it says, when he was a member of the National Assembly, Maduro moved loads of cocaine under the protection of law enforcement.
As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maduro provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela. And that then, as he becomes head of state when he succeeds Hugo Chavez, that he presides over this kind of
narco-terrorist state which is also partnering with what are called, by the US, narco-terrorist groups from Colombia, the FARC, the ELN, the Sinaloa Cartel, a whole range of different criminal and drug networks. I think the most interesting bit, though, is that there is this idea that he sits atop something called the Cartel de la Soles.
Have I pronounced that right? How was that? I think it was not. I mean, I don't speak Spanish.
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Chapter 8: What implications does this have for US relations with China and Russia?
Listeners to the pod will know that. But I think that was not... You could do better.
Cartel of the Sons. Let's just call it the Cartel of the Sons because I think that might be easier. Yeah. This is, I think, the central claim. And it's quite important, isn't it, in the build-up to what happened. And it's interesting, the Cartel of the Suns, it's actually a reference to the Sun insignia, which is affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officers.
So the idea is that this is a cartel which operates within the state, within high-ranking military officers.
Which is convenient. That is convenient if you're looking for a good reason to sort of depose somebody, to perfectly align the cartel, the criminal organization with the official state apparatus.
Right. you could say that it was very convenient, I think. If you want to kind of claim that there's a narco-terrorist head of state, then claiming there is a narco group which is aligned perfectly with the state is one way of doing that. And I mean, the reality is when you kind of look at this Cartel of the Sons, it's not a cartel in the way that some of the other cartels are.
It's not really a terrorist organisation in the way it's been defined, even though the US has designated it as a terrorist organisation. It is a group, but it's a group of corrupt officials linked to the drug trade. It's a corrupt group rather than a traditional criminal cartel Or a terrorist group.
And so I think, you know, already there, you've got a sense in which, you know, the reality has been stretched and the labels have been used of narco terrorist groups to fit the desire to kind of carry out a certain activity and have a legal justification for it.
Well, I mean, the other claim then is that this group, the Cartel of the Sons, is trafficking huge amounts of cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S. Right. So there's this this claim, I believe. I don't think it's in the most recent indictment, but the language from the 2020 trial. indictment basically alleged that Maduro was flooding, intentionally flooding the U.S.
with drugs and using drugs as a weapon. And it was that logic that ended up with, you know, the claim that he was he was a narco terrorist.
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