CNN: CIA conducts first known US drone strike inside Venezuela

The CIA carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility along Venezuela’s coastline, sources familiar with the operation told CNN, marking the first known US attack on a target inside Venezuelan territory.

The previously unreported strike targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that US authorities believed was being used by the criminal group Tren de Aragua to store narcotics and transfer them onto boats for onward shipment, the sources said. No personnel were present at the facility at the time of the strike, and there were no casualties.

Two sources said US Special Operations Forces provided intelligence support for the operation, highlighting their continued involvement in the region. However, this account was disputed by Colonel Allie Weiskopf, a spokesperson for US Special Operations Command, who denied any role, stating: “Special Operations did not support this operation to include intel support.”

President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge the strike publicly for the first time in an interview last week, though the comments initially attracted little attention and included few specifics. 

The strike has the potential to significantly heighten tensions between Washington and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the US has been pressuring to step down amid an increasingly aggressive military campaign.

As part of what it has described as a counter-narcotics effort, the US has carried out strikes that destroyed more than 30 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. Trump has also ordered a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers travelling to and from Venezuela. While Trump had repeatedly threatened to authorise strikes inside Venezuela, prior to the CIA operation earlier this month, the only known US attacks involving Venezuelan targets had been directed at suspected drug-trafficking vessels operating in international waters.

In an interview on December 26, Trump said the US had taken out some type of “big facility where ships come from” while discussing his administration’s campaign against Venezuela. Asked again on Monday, he said the US struck “in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” but declined to say whether the attack had been carried out by the military or the CIA.

“So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” Trump said on Monday. “It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

One source described the strike as operationally successful, saying it destroyed both the facility and the boats associated with it. At the same time, the source characterised the action as largely symbolic, noting that the dock was just one of many port facilities used by drug traffickers departing Venezuela. The operation also appeared to generate little immediate attention, even within Venezuela itself.

Earlier this year, Trump expanded the CIA’s authorities to conduct operations in Latin America, including inside Venezuela, as CNN has previously reported. Even with that expansion, the US military retained legal authority only to strike suspected traffickers at sea, not land-based targets.

The Trump administration has offered differing rationales for its campaign against Venezuela, which has involved a significant buildup of US military assets in the Caribbean. While officials have publicly framed the effort as a counter-narcotics operation, Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair that the strikes on boats were intended to pressure Maduro into backing down. Despite that strategy, Maduro has shown no indication that he intends to relinquish power.

Senior US officials have made clear, both publicly and in briefings to lawmakers, that they plan to continue targeting suspected drug smugglers using an approach similar to that employed during the global war on terror, in which the CIA played a central role. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has openly drawn comparisons between drug traffickers and al Qaeda.

“These narcoterrorists are the al Qaeda of our hemisphere,” Hegseth said earlier this month at the Reagan National Defence Forum. “And we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al Qaeda.”

By Tamilla Hasanova