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central intelligence agency
Trump Admin Reportedly OKs CIA Action in Venezuela Amid Growing Alarm Over Bombed Boats
The reporting came as rights groups sought the legal memo on the president's deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean.
Oct 15, 2025
As outrage over US President Donald Trump's deadly boat bombings mounts, The New York Times reported Wednesday that his administration secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency "to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela and conduct a range of operations in the Caribbean," with the ultimate aim of ousting the country's leader, Nicolás Maduro.
"The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation," according to the Times, which cited unnamed US officials. "It is not known whether the CIA is planning any operations in Venezuela or if the authorities are meant as a contingency."
"But the development comes as the US military is planning its own possible escalation, drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela," the newspaper noted. The administration's Venezuela strategy was "developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the CIA director."
The White House and CIA declined to comment on record, though some observers speculated it was "an authorized leak." The reporting comes as Democrats in Congress, human rights groups, and legal scholars sound the alarm of Trump's five known strikes on boats he claims were smuggling drugs, which have killed at least 27 people.
Critics highlighted the United States' long history of covert action in Latin America, as well as how the reported CIA authorization contrasts with Trump's so-called "America First" claims.
"This is absolutely insane," said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama administration official who went on to co-found Crooked Media. "America First was not sold as CIA regime change operations in Venezuela."
Critics also noted Trump's mission to secure the Nobel Peace Prize; this year, it went to María Corina Machado, a right-wing Venezuelan who dedicated the award to not only the people in her country, but also the US president.
"Now that Trump has delegated his preposterous politicking for a Nobel Peace Prize to sycophants, he can finally get around to declaring unilateral war on Venezuela, a war crime, as he murders Colombian civilians at sea, another war crime, and endorses collective punishment in Gaza, another war crime," journalist Seth Abramson said Wednesday.
As Senate Democrats last week unsuccessfully fought to stop Trump's boat strikes of the Venezuelan coast, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on social media that one of the bombed vessels appeared to be carrying citizens of his country.
"A new war zone has opened: the Caribbean," he said at the time. "Evidence shows that the last boat bombed was Colombian, with Colombian citizens inside. I hope their families come forward and file complaints. There isn't a war against smuggling; it's a war for oil, and the world must stop it. The aggression is against all of Latin America and the Caribbean."
The Trump administration recently claimed in a confidential notice to Congress intended to justify the deadly bombings that the president decided drug cartels "are nonstate armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States."
While that notice leaked to the press, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on Wednesday filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the Office of Legal Counsel's guidance and other related documents regarding the strikes.
"All available evidence suggests that President Trump's lethal strikes in the Caribbean constitute murder, pure and simple," said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. "The public deserves to know how our government is justifying these attacks as lawful, and, given the stakes, immediate public scrutiny of its apparently radical theories is imperative."
CCR legal director Baher Azmy stressed that "in a constitutional system, no president can arbitrarily choose to assassinate individuals from the sky based on his whim or say-so."
"The Trump administration is taking its indiscriminate pattern of lawlessness to a lethal level," Azmy added. "The public understanding of any rationale supporting such unprecedented and shocking conduct is essential for transparency and accountability."
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Trump Follows the Grand US Tradition of Ignoring Intelligence to Go to War
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear.
Jun 28, 2025
I’ll never forget the day I was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. What does that have to do with President Donald Trump bombing Iran? I’ll get there, so indulge me.
It was the spring of 1983, and I was sitting in an auditorium at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia with my fellow classmates. We were a select group of Columbia University graduate students in the school’s International Fellows Program, and we were in Washington, D.C. for dog and pony shows sponsored by the CIA, State Department, and other federal agencies looking for fresh young talent. I was in the journalism program. Everyone else was studying law, business, or international relations.
After two CIA officers droned on interminably about China, which was not making much news at the time, an over-caffeinated HR officer took the stage. “We need people like you,” she said. “We can’t have good policy without good intelligence, so we’d like you to consider applying here.” She then mentioned that five of the fellows had interned at the agency the previous summer and asked them to hold up their hands, which they did reluctantly. Given the CIA’s terrible reputation at the time, it was understandable why they didn’t want to acknowledge that they had worked there.
Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
The HR lady then asked if there were any questions. My hand shot up, and she called on me first.
Earlier that morning I picked up a copy of The Washington Post, which ran a story on its front page reporting that the CIA, under President Ronald Reagan’s direction, had dedicated millions of dollars to undermine the fledgling Nicaraguan government, which had overthrown a corrupt dictator four years before. I thanked her for her presentation and then said: “I’m really interested in applying to work at the CIA, but I’m not interested in doing intelligence work. I’m interested in covert action. I’m interested in destabilizing sovereign nations like Nicaragua. How do I apply?”
There was dead silence, and then students began to snicker. The HR lady, meanwhile, was speechless, but she quickly regained her composure and said, “I don’t know anything about that, but the application procedure is the same.”
After a few other, more serious, questions, the session was over. But before I could get up from my seat, I felt the steely grip of the man who ran the program, the extremely conservative dean of Columbia’s graduate school of international affairs. He was not happy. He squeezed my shoulder as hard as he could and said, “Mr. Negin.” (He never addressed us by our first names.) “I want you to know that everything that was said here today is off the record.”
I’m proud to say that, until today, I have honored his off-the-record request. There was nothing newsworthy to report, anyway. But given the incident happened more than 40 years ago, I’m not too worried about recounting it now, especially since it will help make a point.
I Don’t Care What She Said!
Of course, that CIA recruiter was absolutely right. To have good policy, government officials need good intelligence. What she didn’t say, however, is what we learned yet again this past week: Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
On June 17, when a reporter on Air Force One reminded President Trump that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified before Congress in March that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, his reply was: “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.”
In response, Gabbard backtracked, posting on X on June 20 that “dishonest media” took her testimony out of context and Iran could produce nuclear weapons “within weeks to months.”
But that does not mean that Iran is building a bomb.
A handful of officials told The Wall Street Journal last week that the intelligence Israel provided the United States to make its case for attacking Iran did not convince them that Tehran is intent on building a nuclear bomb. “The [Israeli] intelligence only showed Iran was still researching nuclear weapons,” two officials told the paper, “including revisiting work it had done before its nuclear weapons program shut down in 2003.” Although the United States estimates that it would likely take Iran one to two weeks to produce enough enriched uranium for a weapon, “the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies,” the Journal reported, “is Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb.”
Nevertheless, on June 21, the U.S. Air Force flattened three Iranian nuclear sites, and it remains to be seen if the attack will lead to any unfortunate, unforeseen consequences. Two days later, Iran lobbed missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, which said its air defenses intercepted. Then, later that day, Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cease-fire, but as of the next morning, they both violated it.
Damn the Intelligence, Full-Speed Ahead!
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear. One obvious example is when President Lyndon Johnson paid no heed to warnings about a potential quagmire in Vietnam. Another is when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses.
In early 1963, the CIA cautioned Johnson about intensifying U.S. intervention in Vietnam nearly a year before the now-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. The agency suggested that bombing Vietnam would “provoke heavier troop intervention” rather than ensuring a victory. Three days after the incident, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, essentially giving Johnson a blank check to escalate U.S involvement.
We all know how that turned out. From 1961 through 1973, the United States spent more than $141 billion on the war, more than $1 trillion in today’s dollars, and as many as 3.4 million people died, including more than 58,300 U.S. servicemembers, between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In October 2002, a month after al Qaeda stunned the United States by attacking New York and Washington, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al Qaeda and topple the Taliban government. Two years later, the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), neither of which was true.
There is a mountain of evidence that the Bush administration cooked the books to justify invading Iraq, much too much to post here. Suffice it to say that senior U.S. intelligence officials and analysts have testified that Bush and his administration disregarded intelligence that didn’t support their goal of removing Hussein.
In an essay in the March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, for example, former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar accused the White House of manipulating intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD. He said the administration ignored any intelligence that did not align with its intention to invade. “It went to war without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq,” he wrote. The “broadly held” intelligence assessment, he added, was that the best way to address the Iraqi weapons issue was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place.
In late April 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who revealed that the agency had received credible intelligence from Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, that there were no active WMD programs. “We continued to validate [Sabri] the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Finally, a September 2007 article in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal confirmed Drumheller’s account. Two former senior CIA officers told Blumenthal that in September 2002, then CIA Director George Tenet briefed Bush on top-secret intelligence from Sabri that Hussein did not have WMD. Bush rejected the information, which turned out to be completely accurate, as worthless. The former CIA officers added that Tenet did not share that intelligence with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell nor with senior military officers planning the invasion. “Instead,” Blumenthal wrote, “…the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs.”
The Iraqi war’s toll was considerable. From 2003 through 2011, when the U.S. military officially withdrew, the United States spent $728 billion (in 2022 dollars) directly on the war, according to a Pentagon estimate. Nearly 4,500 U.S. servicemembers died, while nearly 32,300 were wounded, and some 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
A Bookend to My CIA Recruitment Caper
A few years after the Bush-Cheney Iraq debacle, I bumped into one of my classmates who had interned at the CIA before we met at the International Fellows Program. He showed up at my weekly yoga class, of all places. I hadn’t seen him since we were at Columbia. After exchanging pleasantries, I asked him if he wound up working for the CIA. Indeed, he had. “So, do you like working there?” I asked. “It’s less than inspiring,” he replied. Why? Because, he said, policymakers reject the agency’s findings if they don’t support their preconceived notion of what to do.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In retrospect, I’m glad I turned down that offer to apply to work at the CIA. I obviously made the right choice. No way I would ever be happy there, even with a job destabilizing sovereign nations.
]This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.
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What to Know About the Coming Fight in Congress Over Mass Surveillance
Lawmakers should not renew Section 702 without fundamental reforms to protect Americans' privacy.
Apr 16, 2023
One of the most sweeping surveillance statutes ever enacted by Congress is set to expire at the end of this year—creating an important opportunity to rein in America's sprawling surveillance state.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the U.S. government to engage in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, including phone calls, texts, emails, social media messages, and web browsing. The government claims to be pursuing vaguely defined foreign intelligence "targets," but its targets need not be spies, terrorists, or criminals. They can be virtually any foreigner abroad: journalists, academic researchers, scientists, or businesspeople. And in the course of this surveillance, the government casts a wide net that ensnares the communications of ordinary Americans on a massive scale—in violation of our constitutional rights.
As Congress debates the reauthorization of Section 702, it's vital that we tell our representatives in Congress that we want an end to warrantless mass surveillance. Here's what you need to know to follow the debate and speak up for your right to privacy.
1. The NSA uses Section 702 to conduct at least two large-scale surveillance programs.
The government conducts at least two kinds of surveillance under Section 702:
PRISM: The NSA obtains communications—such as international messages, emails, and internet calls—directly from U.S. tech and social media companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The government identifies non-U.S. person accounts it wishes to monitor, and then orders the company to disclose all communications and data to and from those accounts, including communications with U.S. persons.
Upstream: Working with companies like AT&T and Verizon, the NSA intercepts and copies Americans' international internet communications in bulk as they flow into and out of the United States. The NSA then searches for key terms, such as email addresses or phone numbers, that are associated with its hundreds of thousands of foreign targets. Communications determined to be to and from those targets—as well as those that happen to be bundled with them in transit—are retained in NSA databases for further use and analysis.
Critically, while Section 702 does not allow the NSA to target Americans at the outset, vast quantities of our communications are still searched and amassed in government databases simply because we are in touch with people abroad. And this is the bait-and-switch: Although the law allows surveillance of foreigners abroad for "foreign intelligence" purposes, the FBI routinely exploit this rich source of our information by searching those databases to find and examine the communications of individual Americans for use in domestic investigations.
2. Section 702 surveillance is expanding.
The scale of Section 702 has been growing significantly over time, meaning more and more Americans are caught in this net.
When the government first began releasing statistics, after the Snowden revelations in 2013, it reported having 89,138 targets. By 2021, the government was targeting the communications of a staggering 232,432 individuals, groups, and organizations. Although the government often seeks to portray the surveillance as "targeted" and narrow, the reality is that it takes place on a massive scale.
Indeed, the government reported that in 2011, Section 702 surveillance resulted in the retention of more than 250 million internet communications (a number that does not reflect the far larger quantity of communications whose contents the NSA searched before discarding them). Given the rate at which the number of Section 702 targets is growing, it's likely that the government today collects over a billion communications under Section 702 each year. But these statistics tell only part of the story. The government has never provided data on the number of Americans who are surveilled under PRISM and Upstream, a number that is surely also increasing. That is a glaring gap in its transparency reports.
3. Section 702 has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool.
Although Congress intended Section 702 to be used for counterterrorism purposes, it's frequently used today to pursue domestic investigations of all kinds. Both the FBI and CIA have access to some of the raw data produced by this surveillance, and they increasingly use that access to examine the private communications of Americans they are investigating—all without a warrant.
FBI agents routinely run searches looking for information about Americans as part of criminal investigations, including those that have nothing to do with national security. Based on the most recent reporting, agents conduct millions of these U.S. person queries—also known as "backdoor searches"—each year. The only limitation on backdoor searches is that they must be "reasonably likely" to retrieve foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime.
The standard for conducting backdoor searches is so low that, without any showing of suspicion, an FBI agent can type in an American's name, email address, or phone number, and pull up whatever communications the FBI's Section 702 collection has vacuumed into its databases over the past five years. These searches are a free pass for accessing constitutionally protected communications that would otherwise be off-limits to the FBI, unless it got a warrant.
Evidence that agents have refused to comply with this low bar for conducting searches has piled up. Agents have violated the FBI's own rules over and over, accessing Americans' private communications without any legitimate purpose. They have dipped into Section 702 data for information about relatives, potential witnesses and informants, journalists, political commentators, and government officials, including a member of Congress.
4. Section 702 violates our constitutional rights, but the courts have failed to intervene.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Government agents are required to obtain a warrant to access our emails, online messages, and chats. Large-scale, warrantless surveillance of Americans' private communications is at odds with this basic constitutional principle.
Section 702 also violates the Constitution by inhibiting freedom of speech and association. The reasonable fear that the U.S. government is spying on communications may deter journalists, lawyers, activists, and others from communicating freely on the Internet. We all have a right to exchange messages with our friends, family, colleagues, and clients abroad without worrying that the government is reading over our shoulder.
Because Section 702 is unconstitutional, the ACLU and others have attempted to challenge it in court. But the courts have failed to protect our constitutional rights. Instead, courts have repeatedly dismissed civil cases challenging Section 702—citing government claims of secrecy—and have declined to rule on claims in criminal cases that the government's backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment. This year, we brought one of these cases to the Supreme Court, but it refused to consider it.
5. Congress has the power to stop Section 702 surveillance.
Given the courts' inaction, it is up to Congress to stand up for our rights. Fifteen years ago, Congress enacted Section 702. Members of Congress should not vote to renew this law without fundamental reforms to protect Americans' privacy.
These reforms should include:
- Putting an end to rampant backdoor searches of Americans by requiring agents to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 databases for an American's private information.
- Narrowing the scope of Section 702 surveillance by imposing stricter rules on who the government can "target," thereby limiting the number of Americans whose communications are swept up in the course of this spying.
- Limiting how long the government can retain information collected under Section 702 and how the NSA shares that information with other agencies.
- Ensuring that the government notifies individuals when Section 702 information is used against them in court and provides those individuals with sufficient information to obtain full and fair court review.
- Increasing transparency about the number of Americans' communications searched and collected through Section 702 surveillance.
Beyond reforming Section 702 itself, Congress should also adopt broader safeguards that protect Americans in the face of bulk surveillance and strengthen court oversight when the government engages in spying for intelligence purposes.
Over the next year, the ACLU will be seizing on this moment to press Congress to reclaim our privacy rights. We invite you to join us by sending a message to your representatives now.
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