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CIA Played Instrumental Role in Maduro Kidnapping.

In reality, while U.S. and British companies were involved in early oil exploration in Venezuela, Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela, pursuant to the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.

Venezuela’s socialist government, meanwhile, has used oil revenues to adopt social programs for the poor and to develop Venezuela’s economy, accounting for its electoral successes.

The financial elite the CIA serves is now salivating over the prospects of U.S. corporations retaking control of Venezuela’s oil industry

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Substack, Jan 05, 2026

The Trump administration welcomed the New Year by ordering a brazen Special Forces raid into Venezuela that resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was brought to the U.S. to face charges for alleged drug trafficking.

Called Operation Absolute Resolve, the kidnapping had been preceded by months of terrorist activities that included bombing a Venezuelan oil tanker and fishing vessels, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 civilians.

On January 3, The New York Times reported that a CIA source within the Venezuelan government had monitored Maduro’s location in the days and moments before his capture, tipping off the Special Forces about his whereabouts. The CIA also produced the intelligence that led to Maduro’s capture with a fleet of stealth drones.

According to a person familiar with the agency’s work, the CIA was able to recruit informants in Maduro’s inner circle because of the $50 million bounty placed on Maduro’s head.

Donald Trump watched the Operation Absolute Resolve from Mar-O-Lago with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. [Source: yahoo.com]

Beginning in August, the informants worked clandestinely to provide the CIA with information about Maduro’s “pattern of life” and daily movements.

The CIA had Maduro so precisely monitored that even his pets were known to U.S. intelligence agents, according to General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former CIA associate director for military affairs.

In late December, the CIA used an armed drone to conduct a strike on a dock that U.S. officials claimed was being used by a Venezuelan gang to load drugs onto boats.

These actions fulfilled a promise of CIA Director John Ratcliffe in his confirmation hearing that he would lead a more aggressive CIA willing to conduct large-scale covert operations.

Despite claiming to be doing battle with the “deep state,” President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to take more aggressive action last fall and openly authorized CIA operations in Venezuela when the CIA normally operates covertly.

To the Victor Go the Spoils

The symbiotic relationship between the CIA and the financial elite intent on profiting from regime change are epitomized by the CIA’s former Venezuelan station chief, Enrique de la Torre, who advertised immediately after Maduro’s kidnapping that his lobbying firm, Tower Strategy,^[1] was supporting clients intent on “rebuilding Venezuela’s energy sector.”

De la Torre published a blog post in late November entitled “The Case for Ending Maduro’s Rule………………

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez (1998-2013) and then Maduro (2013-present) had in fact been designed to establish Venezuela’s economic sovereignty, empower the poor and Indigenous people, and revitalize the legacy of Latin America’s great liberator, Simón Bolívar.

It was opposed by the U.S. financial elite precisely because it threatened to inspire other Latin American and Third World countries to take control over their own economies and limit the influence of American corporations.

Donald Trump echoed de la Torre in stating after the announcement of Maduro’s capture that “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.”^[2]

Similarly, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo told Fox & Friends last week 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.”

These latter comments combined with de la Torre’s action make clear the agenda behind Operation Absolute Resolve.

Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, openly proclaimed that Venezuela’s oil belongs to Washington, describing the nationalization of Venezuela’s petroleum industry as “theft.”

According to Miller, “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”

In reality, while U.S. and British companies were involved in early oil exploration in Venezuela, Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela, pursuant to the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.

The Venezuelan government never actually denied the U.S. access to its oil and, as late as 2017, remained the U.S.’s third-largest foreign supplier of energy.^[3]

Venezuela’s socialist government, meanwhile, has used oil revenues to adopt social programs for the poor and to develop Venezuela’s economy, accounting for its electoral successes.

During his presidency from 1998 to 2013, Hugo Chávez cut poverty by 20% and extreme poverty by 30%.

Literacy rates in this period also increased, child malnutrition rates declined dramatically, millions of hectares of state-owned land were distributed, and Venezuela’s UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of national income (GDP), access to education, and child mortality—rose from seventh in the region to fourth.^[4]

Maduro was continuing the same trajectory as Chávez, though Venezuela’s economy was undermined during his presidency by declining world oil prices, internal corruption typical of South and North American countries and harsh U.S. sanctions imposed by the Obama, Trump I and Biden administrations, whose purpose was to set the groundwork for regime change.^[5]

Long War Against Venezuela’s Left

In Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century, I detail how the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations set the groundwork for today’s foreign policy by providing significant police aid to help prop up centrist governments in Venezuela that carried out a dirty war against left-wing movements.

The latter sought to nationalize Creole Petroleum Company, Venezuela’s largest oil company, which was largely controlled by the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil empire.

Run under the cover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA-led Office of Public Safety (OPS) provided riot-control gear and other repressive police instruments and assisted Venezuelan police in compiling blacklists of left-wing “subversives.”

The OPS’s support for hard-line police tactics was apparent in its push to eliminate the requirement that a policeman who killed a suspect be arrested, paving the way for death-squad activity.

Showing where their true priorities rested, OPS police advisers met monthly with security officials of Creole Petroleum and the major foreign mining companies in Venezuela to discuss “insurgency problems.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://jeremykuzmarov.substack.com/p/cia-played-instrumental-role-in-maduro?publication_id=2091638&post_id=183483325&isFreemail=true&r=3alev&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

January 8, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA