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Following U.S. coup in Venezuela, the CIA’s former station chief is advertising support for corporate exploitation of the country’s oil

The CIA’s former Venezuela chief of station, Enrique de la Torre, advertised that his lobbying firm, Tower Strategy, is supporting clients “rebuilding the country’s energy sector.”

Jack Poulson, Jan 04, 2026, https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/following-us-coup-in-venezuela-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1269175&post_id=183365776&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8cf96&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in and spend billions of dollars and fix the oil infrastructure — the badly broken oil infrastructure — and start making money for the country,” U.S. President Donald Trump declared on Saturday morning. The remarks followed a raid by the U.S. military’s elite commando team, Delta Force, which kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia, using what Trump described as cover of darkness implied to have been provided by a U.S. cyberattack.

“It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off, due to a certain expertise we have,” Trump stated, before adding that, “It was dark, and it was deadly.” A series of photos from the “deadly” raid was quickly published by the wire service Reuters.

A special operations source was summarized by the investigative journalism outlet The High Side as stating that a “local source network … helped install jammers and other technical equipment on the ground, including beacons for airstrikes.” “The operational preparation of the battlespace was conducted by Task Force Orange, which throughout its history has been known by a host of cover names, including the U.S. Army Office of Military Support, Titan Zeus and the Intelligence Support Activity,” reported The High Side.

“We’re ready to stage a much larger second attack,” continued the U.S. president, before adding that, “we have a much bigger wave that we probably won’t have to do.”

A recent CIA chief of station in Venezuela, Enrique de la Torre, quickly took to the professional networking site LinkedIn to claim that his newly formed lobbying firm with former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela James B. Story, Tower Strategy, was “already working with clients focused on democratic recovery, restored U.S. engagement, and the serious work of rebuilding the country’s energy sector.”

Tower Strategy has so-far publicly disclosed representing four companies: the controversial treasure-hunting company Odyssey Marine Exploration, the Singapore-based and Tether-affiliated cryptocurrency company Bitdeer, the solar supply chain company T1 Energy, and the international solar power export company UGT Renewables / Sun Africa.

De la Torre spent roughly the first ten months of 2025 working for the lobbying and foreign influence firm Continental Strategy, which is run by Carlos Trujillo, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States with close ties to U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio. The former CIA station chief’s partner at Tower Strategy, Ambassador Story, further launched the consulting firm Global Frontier Advisors alongside former Pentagon artificial intelligence chief Michael S. Groen in late July, with partner David Kol noted in the press release to be the CEO of Zodiac Gold Inc.

Former CIA director Michael R. Pompeo similarly told the media platform Fox & Friends on Monday that the U.S. Government’s seizures of Venezuela-linked oil tankers was the “right course of action” and that, in the event of the overthrow of the Maduro government, “American companies can come in and sell their products — Schlumberger, Halliburton, Chevron — all of our big energy companies can go down to Venezuela and build out an economic capitalist model.”

Trump further declared in his Saturday press conference that, “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” further stating that the members of his administration standing behind him in the press conference would be designated to lead the country in the short term. Venezuelan president Delcy Rodriguez, who was today sworn in as the new leader of the country following the U.S. kidnapping of President Maduro, was claimed by Trump to have effectively agreed to concede to U.S. demands in a recent conversation with U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Trump described his government as having “superseded” the longstanding U.S. policy of dominating the politics of the Western Hemisphere, known as the Monroe Doctrine, by “a lot.” “They now call it the Donroe Doctrine,” Trump stated, in reference to the now-popular phrase.

The U.S. Government’s claim to legal legitimacy of the kidnapping and broader coup have centered upon allegations that Maduro and his administration have been engaged in large-scale cocaine trafficking meant to destabilize the United States. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) jacket was partially visible in the background of a photograph published by Trump on his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday, showing a blindfolded Maduro aboard the U.S. warship Iwo Jima.

Several U.S. State Department-backed media and lobbying organizations helped amplify the impact of unilateral U.S. sanctions over the past several years, effectively providing a form of international legal top cover for the Trump administration’s coup this morning. The most notable were perhaps Transparency International through its Venezuelan branch, the National Endowment for Democracy-backed media platform Connectas, and the CIA-affiliated think-tank Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS).

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva condemned the unilateral U.S. kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader as having crossed “an unacceptable line,” while UN ⁠Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the U.S. raid as setting “a dangerous ​precedent.”

Jack Poulson

Jan 04, 2026

January 6, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, SOUTH AMERICA, USA