Around late January 2019, exact date unknown, the Trump White House tasked the CIA with forcing a regime change in Venezuela and ousting authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.
The CIA got to work, assembling a Venezuela Task Force and laying the groundwork to hack Venezuelan government agencies to collect intelligence before deciding next steps.
According to sources speaking with Wired in 2024, when this story broke, the task force fell short. No other intelligence or law enforcement agencies were prioritizing Venezuela at the time, and most refused to cut resources for other initiatives to assist the spy agency.
Very quickly, the task force ran into roadblocks. It had to fight—sometimes unsuccessfully—for access to important resources, like elite CIA and NSA hacking teams. Those teams usually worked on higher-profile targets, according to a former agency official. In fact, when officials in the administration asked to have NSA hacking resources redirected to Venezuela, a former Trump-era official said top Pentagon officials “pushed back hard.”
Wired
The CIA’s most significant outcome was launching a cyberattack against the system that disburses payments to Venezuelan military members, disrupting their compensation. The attack was intended to turn troops against Maduro. It took months to accomplish without assistance from other agencies.
The agency also funded an anti-Maduro influence campaign on social media, funded “pro-democracy” leadership trainings, and provided support for Venezuelan activist groups.
When asked for comment, John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser at the time of the operation, complained that the CIA is too “bureaucratic” and needs to be more like Israel’s Mossad, “more capable of carrying out clandestine operations.
In October 2025, Trump again authorizes CIA operations in Venezuela, and the Pentagon is leading the charge.
The CIA has a history of overthrowing or at least interfering in governments in the region, including in Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile, and the Dominican Republic.
Venezuela has huge gold and petroleum reserves. Capitalist powers like the United States have lost access to those resources since Maduro’s government steered the country towards geopolitical independence.
