The CIA is "quietly working" to establish a permanent footprint inside Venezuela to shape the country's post-Maduro trajectory, according to a CNN report Tuesday - or rather it's not-so-quietly, with sources saying Washington intends to run Caracas much the way it penetrated Ukraine after 2014.
While the State Department is planning an eventual reopening of a formal US embassy, setting up a CIA annex has been elevated to "priority number one," an unnamed US official told CNN - though there are serious questions as to why the agency would want to advertise this all over CNN.
From that base, agency operatives would engage with the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez, cultivate opposition factions, and "target third parties who may be threats," according to the source.
A former US official described the annex as a workaround to traditional diplomacy:
"Before diplomatic channels the annex can help set up liaison channels… that will allow conversations that diplomats cannot have."
In other words, the intelligence apparatus moves first, with formal diplomacy to follow. According to the unnamed official:
"State plants the flag but CIA is really the influence," one source familiar with the planning process told CNN, noting the agency’s near-term objectives include setting the stage for diplomatic efforts – including relationship building with locals – and providing security.
Of course, no thinking person was entertaining any illusions that it would be anything less than a Langley outpost in Latin America. This is par for the South American course.
CNN notes, "The US has routinely sent CIA directors or top intelligence officials to have sensitive meetings with world leaders to discuss sensitive matters that are based on US intelligence collection."
However, President Rodríguez (former VP, now US-backed) has publicly pushed back against Washington this week in a rare first since the US military invasion and overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, asserting she has had "enough" of US directives.
While President Trump has declared that Washington would effectively "run" Venezuela, he later endorsed Rodríguez as a temporary caretaker during the transition, despite her being as hardcore a Leftist pro-Maduro figure as anyone.
"Enough already of Washington’s orders regarding politicians in Venezuela," she had said days ago.
Among the first US actions has been to cut off Venezuela's oil supply to nearby ally Cuba, which threatens to sink the island-nation's economy further, after it has endured many decades of Washington sanctions.
Despite this big talk of distancing herself from American interests, Rodríguez warmly greeted CIA Director John Ratcliffe this month, and there was even a photo op. Ratcliffe, as the first top US official to meet with her in the wake of the Jan.3rd military operation, reportedly delivering Trump's conditions for resetting relations.
The fact that she has even remained in power this long suggests that she is playing ball behind the scenes, and that any anti-American public declarations are primarily for Venezuelan domestic consumption.