The Dog That Didn't Bark in the Maduro Op

Cuban intelligence runs Venezuela's security apparatus. Where was it when the U.S. snatched the Venezuelan strongman?

A stunning two and half-hour attack on Venezuela in the early hours of January 3 crippled the nation’s air defenses, damaged several military installations, blacked out Caracas with cyberwarfare, and culminated in a CIA and JSOC raid to capture and exfiltrate Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their fortified compound – a replica of which the American commandos apparently spent weeks storming in dress rehearsal for the operation. This followed months of enormous military buildup in the Caribbean, featuring 15,000 U.S. troops, and a series of legally dubious U.S. attacks on boats alleged to be trafficking narcotics.

There were shots fired yesterday, but no American fatalities. The Venezuelans say at least 40 people were killed in the attack, a mix of military personnel and civilians. By all outward appearances, the operation, codenamed Absolute Resolve, was carried off flawlessly, although details so far have been carefully leaked to the press, and only raise more questions than answers.

For a start, the New York Times reported the CIA had a collection of officers working inside Venezuela since August, who somehow went undetected. Maduro’s whereabouts and pattern-of-life movements in the days leading up to his capture were passed to the Agency by a “source within the Venezuelan government,” which could either be a long-cultivated one, or someone looking to cash in on the $50 million bounty on Maduro.

At his press conference heralding the mission Saturday afternoon, President Trump said, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” and indicated that his Secretary of State and acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio would be among the proconsular authorities overseeing this process. Because evidently Rubio hasn’t got enough portfolios to keep him busy.

More intriguing is who the U.S. sees as a worthy interim head of state. It isn’t Edmundo González, the opposition leader in exile in Spain who Washington and many European countries recognize as the legitimate president of the country following Maduro’s falsification of the national election result in 2024. Nor is it recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, who was barred from running on the same ballot Gonzalez subsequently did. Machado won the Nobel bauble Trump made no secret of coveting in 2025, and as compensation offered flattery and adulation of the U.S. commander-in-chief. She endorsed U.S. military intervention and went so far as to echo Trump’s lie that the 2020 U.S. presidential contest was rigged against him, an especially embarrassing claim from an actual victim of an equivalent injustice. Yet Trump dismissed her as a “nice woman” but one lacking the “respect” of the Venezuelan people to serve in any leadership capacity.

Instead, the White House has selected Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, a hardline exponent of the chavismo ideology which has ruled Venezuela for a quarter century, as Maduro’s temporary successor. Machiavellian and ruthless, but with a reputation for technocratic management, Rodríguez is the daughter of Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a Marxist guerrilla who was tortured and died in prison in 1976 following his orchestration of the kidnapping of William F. Niehous, an American business executive. Her revolutionary zealotry is said to have been a byproduct of her father’s martyrdom and the lifelong asthma she developed after being tear gassed by the Venezuelan secret police while visiting him in his cell. Rodríguez, who also serves as Venezuela’s oil minister, was even rumored to have been in Moscow during Maduro’s exfiltration.

Nevertheless, Trump explained at his press conference that she had already been sworn in as president and had spoken to Rubio at length. Anti-American firebrand though she may be, Rodríguez is now meant to be a pliant tool of the imperialist aggressor she detests. “She, I think, was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice,” Trump said. “She is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. Very simple.”

Except not really.

In a recorded speech, Rodríguez appeared alongside Venezuelan military and civilian officials (suggesting she was still in Caracas) and denounced Absolute Resolve as “barbaric,” an “illegal and illegitimate kidnapping.” Though that hardly lowered her stock with the kidnappers.

Rubio downplayed the speech as performative bluster, saying, “We’re going to make decisions based on their actions and their deeds in the days and weeks to come.”

The Times added more detail to the curious calm that has settled upon MAGA in deciding their Paul Bremer in the Americas is a native socialist apparatchik:

The people involved in the discussions said intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country.

“I’ve been watching her career for a long time, so I have some sense of who she is and what she’s about,” said one senior U.S. official, referring to Ms. Rodríguez.

“I’m not claiming that she’s the permanent solution to the country’s problems, but she’s certainly someone we think we can work at a much more professional level than we were able to do with him,” the official added, referring to Mr. Maduro.

No hint was given as to who these “intermediaries” might have been. The Miami Herald reported in October that Rodríguez was using the Qatari royal family to make overtures to the administration for “Madurismo without Maduro,” with Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who heads the Venezuelan parliament, but these overtures were rebuffed. Maduro was meant to be allowed to remain in Venezuela, and all U.S. charges against him would be dropped; the Herald made clear Rubio wasn’t satisfied with that outcome.

Perhaps the most telling detail in Rodríguez’s biography is her closeness to Cuba’s Dirección de Inteligencia (DI) intelligence service, one of the most formidable in the Western Hemisphere, or any other hemisphere for that matter. The DI sees her as “as a reliable ideological ally and a guardian of Cuban strategic interests within the regime,” according to Venezuelan opposition figures cited by the Wall Street Journal. Her proximity to Havana only heightens the strangeness of her anointment by the Trump administration.

That’s because the DI does more than treat Venezuela as its playground in South America; it is singularly responsible for safeguarding Maduro’s dictatorship from exactly the sort of military intervention that America just successfully executed.

In 2010, Cuban General Ramiro Valdés, the Czechoslovak-trained Communist who built the DI, came to Caracas at the invitation of Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor and the architect of the Bolivarian socialist regime, to serve as a government consultant, ostensibly to help solve Venezuela’s electricity crisis. In reality, Valdés began constructing a DI-run deep state within Venezuela, one which has only grown in depth and scope in the decade-and-a-half since. Thousands of Cubans, including doctors and healthcare workers, were given positions in state institutions and compensated in millions of barrels per year in highly subsidized oil —100,000 barrels a day at the height of the exchange — which Caracas sent to its embargoed and isolated ally.

In 2019, Trump’s then-National Security Adviser John Bolton suggested that the presence of as many as 25,000 Cuban security forces were what prevented the head of Venezuela’s opposition at the time, Juan Guaidó, from rallying the country’s military to mount a putsch against Maduro. Others dispute the quotient is quite that high.

And of course Cuba has denied having any troops or spies in Venezuela – all of its nationals there are private citizens, it insists, and almost all are engaged in medical work. But Lt. Col. Carlos Jose Montiel Lopez, a defector from Venezuela’s army, told the Washington Post in 2019 that all of his superiors were Cuban, as were the training manuals his military engineers used to excavate underground tunnels in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. “They were dressed in civilian clothing, but we would call them by their military rank: mi comandante, mi general,” Montiel said.

A reason for the seamless manner in which plainclothes members of the Cuban military and DI could have blended into Venezuela may lie in the origin of Castro’s security apparatus. A creature of the Soviet KGB, the DI (formerly DGI) has long distinguished itself as a Moscow-aligned service in the third word by its use of “illegals,” or operatives with false identities and nationalities who work abroad absent any diplomatic cover. Fidel Castro relied heavily on illegals in trying to establish guerrilla bases across Latin America in the mid-60s – often against the wishes of those countries’ Communist parties and of Moscow.

According to Vasili Mitrokhin, the former KGB archivist, and Christopher Andrew, a British intelligence historian, “Cuban illegals were trained far more rapidly than their KGB counterparts: partly because the DGI was less thorough and paid less attention to devising secure ‘legends’, partly because it was far easier for a Cuban to assume another Latin American nationality than for a Russian to pose as a west European. Instead of going directly to their Latin American destinations, most Cuban illegals were deployed via Czechoslovakia. According to statistics kept by the Czechoslovak StB (and handed over by it to the KGB), from 1962 to 1966 a total of 650 Cuban illegals passed through Czechoslovakia. The great majority carried Venezuelan, Dominican, Argentinian or Colombian passports and identity documents. In most cases the documents were genuine save for the substitution of a photograph of the illegal for that of the original owner.”

Rubio, the son of anti-Communist Cuban emigres, is not only aware of this penetration, but has repeatedly characterized the DI as the central nervous system of SEBIN, Venezuela’s own spy service. The Cubans, Rubio said at yesterday’s presser, “basically colonize [Venezuela] from a security standpoint,” even though Havana is “run by incompetent, senile men — and in some cases, not senile, but incompetent nonetheless.”

“It was Cubans that guarded Maduro,” Rubio added on “Meet the Press” this morning. “He was not guarded by Venezuelan bodyguards. In terms of their internal intelligence – who spies on who inside to make sure there are no traitors – those are all Cubans.”

And yet, Maduro and Flores were still snatched in the dead of night and brought to New York to face newly unsealed charges on narcoterrorism.

Thirty-two Cubans were killed in Absolute Resolve, the Cuban state television announced this evening, all from the military or Interior Ministry, and all presumably in Maduro’s security detail. (So much for the medical workers alibi.)

But this fact, assuming it’s true, only begs the larger questions of how this op went down. How did one of the region’s shrewdest intelligence and counterintelligence agencies miss the presence of CIA assets half a year on their “colonized” turf? The DI is also known for having eyes and ears inside the United States. It ran Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and a career foreign service officer, for 40 years before his unmasking and arrest by the FBI in 2023.

Yet for some as yet unexplained reason the DI failed to warn Maduro of a mole in his midst, or protect him from an Abbottabad-style ambush on steroids, one telegraphed for months with a conspicuous American armada in the neighborhood and a CIA drone strike on a Venezuelan port in December.

Were the Cubans really “incompetent,” as Rubio suggested, or were they somehow made to accept their client’s violent removal with the promise of regime continuity led by someone they know well and trust? Might Rodríguez’s transitional stewardship have been part of a quiet deal brokered between Washington and Havana, now on notice that it will have to deal with an administration for which shoring up American interests in the Western Hemisphere with gunboat diplomacy and kinetic operations is codified as a national security strategy? A former U.S. intelligence officer with experience in Latin America told me, “Even if we didn’t expressly tell the Cubans what was going to happen, they’d likely still know.”

“If I lived in Havana,” Rubio said before the TV cameras yesterday, “and I was in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit.”

It’s likely that message had been conveyed in advance of the Black Hawks descending on Miraflores Palace.

Notes: This post has been updated since it was published.