At a moment that hawkish US lawmakers are already saying "Maduro's days are numbered" - some of US intelligence's dirty tricks toward accomplishing regime change in Venezuela have been revealed.

According to a fresh and detailed Associated Press report, a US federal agent covertly tried to recruit Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's personal pilot in a scheme to nab the Venezuelan leader and bring him to the United States, where he would face drug smuggling charges and even potential 'terrorism'-related charges.

Three current and former US officials, as well as a Venezuelan opposition figure, said that Homeland Security agent Edwin Lopez met Maduro's pilot, General Bitner Villegas, in the Dominican Republic in 2024. 

"In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine meeting, the aviator would be made a very rich man," the AP says, and there was exchange of contact information.

The pilot was offered money and protection for what would be a very daring and risky operation if he were to agree to it.  "All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president’s plane to a place where U.S. authorities could nab the strongman," the report says.

Gen. Villegas was encouraged to "be Venezuela’s hero", and at one point could have possibly received up to $50 million - which is the amount of a published DOJ reward for Maduro's capture - if he had gone though with accomplishing the scheme.

The AP notes that the story has been revealed soon on the heels of President Trump recently approving the return of CIA covert operations to Venezuela, to seek to undermine Caracas.

However, the saga illustrates the "slapdash fashion" in which such intel operations have been carried out, the report explains:

The untold, intrigue-filled saga of how Lopez tried to flip the pilot has all the elements of a Cold War spy thriller — luxury private jets, a secret meeting at an airport hangar, high-stakes diplomacy and the delicate wooing of a key Maduro lieutenant. There was even a final machination aimed at rattling the Venezuelan president about the pilot’s true loyalties.

More broadly, the scheme reveals the extent — and often slapdash fashion — to which the U.S. has for years sought to topple Maduro, who it blames for destroying the oil-rich nation’s democracy while providing a lifeline to drug traffickers, terrorist groups and communist-run Cuba.

In the end Villegas rejected cooperating with the US covert plot to fly Maduro into the hands of US federal agents. The reality is he may have been found out before agreeing, or else could have been caught in the very act of seeking to fly to an unauthorized place with the Venezuelan president. Drastically changing a flight path while the president was aboard would have certainly raised deep suspicion among Maduro's security detail.

Watch a narrative of events on the daring covert plot which ultimately never materialized:

"We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth," Villegas was quoted in the AP report as saying. "The last thing we are is traitors."