Dec. 30, 2025, 6:59 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump bragged this week about the United States’ first reported land strike on Venezuela, letting slip a CIA-led operation in what retired intelligence experts branded an unusual move.
The U.S. has made covert incursions into Latin America before, but it’s rare for a U.S. official, let alone the president, to acknowledge it publicly, former CIA and military intelligence officials told USA TODAY. The CIA has historically carried out covert operations to avoid the public knowing about them.
Mentioning the strike, as Trump did twice this week, sends a “serious message to (President Nicolás) Maduro” that “the U.S. can reach down and touch him when it chooses to,” according to Rick de la Torre, a former CIA Latin America station chief.
Trump first mentioned the strike in a Dec. 26 interview on WABC radio, when he said that the U.S. had “knocked out” a “big facility where the ships come from” two days prior, without mentioning where the strike took place. Pressed about it by reporters at a Dec. 29 event at Mar-a-Lago with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said the U.S. had struck a “dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.”
“We hit all the boats, and now we hit the implementation area,” he said.
First CNN, and then The New York Times, reported later that day that the CIA carried out a drone strike in December on a dock in Venezuela that the U.S. suspected was being used by the gang Tren de Aragua to load drugs onto boats. The Trump administration has designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization.
U.S. government agencies have not confirmed whether the operation took place. The CIA declined to comment, and the Pentagon referred questions to the White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump discusses other covert operations in South America
This month wasn’t the first time Trump has publicly discussed CIA actions in Venezuela. He notified reporters in October that he had authorized the CIA to operate in the country.
The Trump administration has played out in public much of its campaign to force Maduro out of power. Retired intelligence officials characterized these announcements as a psychological operation meant to signal to the Venezuelan leader and his circle that the U.S. has them surrounded.
Bird’s-eye video footage of the more than two dozen U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed more than a hundred people has been shared on official administration and military social media accounts. The videos show the boats being consumed by smoke and fire.
The exception is a video that lawmakers say shows a second strike on a boat on Sept. 2, which killed two survivors after their shipmates were killed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the unedited video would not be released to the public, despite requests from Democratic lawmakers who viewed it and called the second strike disturbing and morally unjustifiable.
Trump officials also posted on social media videos of the seizures of two oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela earlier this month. The first video showed U.S. personnel dropping down from a helicopter and storming the vessel. The second seven-plus-minute video, posted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, showed a helicopter descending on the tanker from multiple angles.
‘Shadows and mirrors’
Retired CIA and military intelligence officials told USA TODAY that Trump’s public announcements of covert actions in Venezuela are likely meant to telegraph to Maduro and his circle that the U.S. is prepared to escalate the conflict.
“It’s all shadows and mirrors,” said de la Torre, the former Latin American station chief.
Still, de la Torre said he is unclear what was gained by Trump’s most recent announcement. Maduro must already “suspect that there are U.S. special forces or (intelligence) community partners actively conducting operations against him and his regime,” he said.
Christopher Costa, a retired military intelligence officer and senior counterterrorism official during Trump’s first term, said it was the president’s “prerogative” to announce the operation.
“It continues to be another way of communicating to Maduro – it’s time to step down,” Costa, now the executive director of the International Spy Museum, added.
Costa said government agencies would not likely confirm Trump’s announcement of the strike because it falls under the president’s legal authorities to order covert, or secret, operations – unlike traditional military operations carried out by the Defense Department.
“Covert action is considered the third option” in Trump’s arsenal, alongside diplomacy and military action, he said.
Seth Krummrich, a retired Army colonel who served in special operations and is now a vice president at security firm Global Guardian, said it was “truly unique” for a president to announce covert operations.
Covert operations don’t carry the same oversight requirements as traditional military operations. They are triggered through a directive called a “presidential finding” and are reported through the intelligence committees in Congress. They also carry plausible deniability, meaning the U.S. government is not legally required to acknowledge it was involved if they come to light.
Krummrich said Trump’s choice was remarkable: “The whole point of (these covert) CIA authorities is to be unattributable.”
