The CIA launched a drone strike on a port facility on the Venezuelan coast used by drug traffickers, President Donald Trump confirmed Monday. It is the first U.S. strike on Venezuelan soil in the administration’s aggressive counter-narcotics campaign.
Trump first hinted at the strike Friday during a radio interview.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or a big facility where they send the … where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out,” Trump said. “So we hit them very hard.”
The drone targeted a dock on the Venezuelan coast that U.S. intelligence said was being used by the Venezuelan narco-terrorist gang Tren de Aragua to store dangerous drugs and move them onto boats for shipping, according to sources familiar with the operation.
Trump provided additional details Monday and officially confirmed the drone strike.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump said. “They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area. That’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.”
When reporters asked whether the U.S. military or the CIA carried out the strike, Trump declined to confirm it was the CIA.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was.”
Trump had authorized CIA operations inside Venezuela earlier this year, an unusual public acknowledgement of U.S. covert action. The president told White House reporters in October he took the action because Venezuela “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and because of narcotics trafficking.
The strike represents a significant escalation in the administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has compared drug traffickers to al Qaeda.
“These narcoterrorists are the al Qaeda of our hemisphere,” Hegseth said earlier this month. “And we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al Qaeda.”