Inside the U.S. Operation to Oust Venezuela’s President

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroweff. This is a special episode of The Daily. It began with early morning strikes across Caracas and ended with a dramatic capture of Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro. Maduro was handcuffed, blindfolded, put on a US warship, and brought to The US to face drug charges. Today, my colleague Eric Schmidt tells the story of how the operation unfolded and what comes next. It's Sunday, January 4. Eric, happy New Year. Thank you for being here for this special Sunday episode. Thank you. I wanna just start with an observation, which is that even though we have been bracing for something like this, what we've just witnessed may be the most audacious exercise of American power in a generation. President Trump has captured and removed a sitting foreign leader. Nothing close to this has happened in something like twenty five years. It is truly historic. That's absolutely true, and it's here we have been watching this pressure campaign build on president Maduro at Venezuela for the last several months. But to go in with special operations forces in the dead of night and seize the leader of a country is really extraordinary. You have to go back to 1989 when the US military carried out an operation, a similar operation to go after then the president of Panama, Manuel Noriega. Yep. Much larger force went in on the ground and ended up spending quite a bit of time there because it wasn't an in and out operation like this was. So you're right, this really is, in your words, audacious. So I wanna talk about the operation that led to this, an operation they called Absolute Resolve. Talk to me about the planning that went into and the execution of this operation. What do we know? So the planning for this operation really goes back several months to the summertime. This is when the administration is first considering what they called phase one, which would have been to strike boats trafficking what they believe were narcotics going to The United States in The Caribbean and later the Eastern Pacific. But there was also a phase two that was less well known, but through our reporting revealed that the administration was considering a follow on phase that would use the army's Delta Force to conduct land strikes and ultimately an operation to oust president Maduro of Venezuela. About a month later in August, the CIA infiltrated clandestine team of officers into Venezuela to start getting a bead on Maduro, and their job was really interesting. It was as spies, they had to keep a very low profile, but they were trying to figure out kind of what the spy agencies called their pattern of life. How does Maduro move around? Where does he eat every day? You know, what kind of pets does he have? You wanna get an idea of the daily routine that your target, your potential target has. And so, here …