President Donald Trump's administration held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the past year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro, according to U.S. officials and a former Venezuelan military commander who participated in the talks.
U.S. officials eventually decided not to help the plotters, and the coup plans stalled.
The operation was small and closely held, according to one senior official, who described the meetings as "all listening. We listen to anyone who wants to talk to us."
Establishing a clandestine channel with coup plotters in Venezuela was a gamble for the U.S. government, given its long history of covert intervention across Latin America. Many in the region still resent the United States for backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War.
The White House, which declined to answer detailed questions about the talks, said in a statement that it was important to engage in "dialogue with all Venezuelans who demonstrate a desire for democracy" in order to "bring positive change to a country that has suffered so much under Maduro."
Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela's foreign minister, responded Saturday to the New York Times article detailing such meetings. "We denounce before the world the United States' intervention plans and help to military conspirators against Venezuela," he said on Twitter, adding that the article had "brought to light new and crude evidence" of such a plot.
A Venezuelan spokesman said that Maduro or other officials would comment "at the right moment, if they consider it necessary."
One of the Venezuelan military commanders involved in the secret talks was hardly an ideal figure to help restore democracy: He is on the U.S. government's own sanctions list of corrupt officials in Venezuela.
He and other members of the Venezuelan security apparatus have been accused by the U.S. government of a wide range of serious crimes, including torturing critics, jailing hundreds of political prisoners, wounding thousands of civilians, trafficking drugs and collaborating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.
Most Latin American leaders agree that Venezuela's president, Maduro, is an increasingly authoritarian ruler who has ruined his country's economy, leading to shortages of food and medicine. The collapse has set off an exodus of desperate Venezuelans who are spilling over borders, overwhelming their neighbors.
Even so, Maduro has long justified his grip on Venezuela by claiming that imperialists in the United States are actively trying to depose him, and the secret talks could provide him with ammunition to chip away at the region's nearly united stance against him.
"This is going to land like a bomb" in the region, said Mari Carmen Aponte, who served as the top diplomat overseeing Latin American affairs in the final months of President Barack Obama's administration.
Beyond the coup plot, Maduro's government has already fended off several small-scale attacks, including salvos from a helicopter last year and exploding drones as he gave a speech in August. The attacks have added to the sense that the president is vulnerable.
A 'MILITARY OPTION'
Venezuelan military officials sought direct access to the U.S. government during Obama's presidency, only to be rebuffed, officials said.
Then in August of last year, Trump declared that the United States had a "military option" for Venezuela -- a declaration that drew condemnation from U.S. allies in the region but encouraged rebellious Venezuelan military officers to reach out to the U.S. once again.
"It was the commander in chief saying this now," the former Venezuelan commander on the sanctions list said in an interview, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals by the Venezuelan government. "I'm not going to doubt it when this was the messenger."
In a series of covert meetings abroad, which began last fall and continued this year, the military officers told the U.S. government that they represented a few hundred members of the armed forces who had soured on Maduro's authoritarianism.
The officers asked the United States to supply them with encrypted radios, citing the need to communicate securely, as they developed a plan to install a transitional government until elections could be held.
U.S. officials did not provide material support, and the plans unraveled after a recent crackdown that led to the arrest of dozens of the plotters.
The account of the clandestine meetings and the policy debates preceding them is drawn from interviews with 11 current and former U.S. officials, as well as the former Venezuelan commander. He said at least three distinct groups within the Venezuelan military had been plotting against the Maduro government.
One established contact with the U.S. government by approaching the U.S. Embassy in a European capital. When this was reported back to Washington, officials at the White House were intrigued but apprehensive. They worried that the meeting request could be a ploy to surreptitiously record a U.S. official appearing to conspire against the Venezuelan government, officials said.
But as the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela worsened last year, U.S. officials felt that having a clearer picture of the plans and the men who aspired to oust Maduro was worth the risk.
"After a lot of discussion, we agreed we should listen to what they had to say," said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak about the secret talks.
The outreach by the officers "highlighted the level of desperation" in Venezuela, and the Trump administration was eager to understand what was going on inside the armed forces, according to another person familiar with meetings.
But "we had very little confidence in the ability of these people to do anything, no idea at all about who they represented, and to what extent they had not exposed themselves already," the person said.
The former Venezuelan commander said the rebellious officers never asked for a U.S. military intervention. "I never agreed, nor did they propose, to do a joint operation," he said.
He claimed that he and his comrades considered striking last summer, when the government suspended the powers of the legislature and installed a new national assembly loyal to Maduro. But he said they aborted the plan, fearing it would lead to bloodshed.
They later planned to take power in March, the former officer said, but that plan leaked. Finally, the dissidents looked to the May 20 election, during which Maduro was re-elected, as a new target date. But again, word got out and the plotters held their fire.
It is unclear how many of these details the coup planners shared with the Americans. But there is no indication that Maduro knew the mutinous officers were talking to the Americans at all.
For any of the plots to have worked, the former commander said, he and his comrades believed they needed to detain Maduro and other top government figures simultaneously. To do that, he added, the rebel officers needed a way to communicate securely. They made their request during their second meeting with the U.S. diplomat, which took place last year.
The U.S. diplomat relayed the request to Washington, where senior officials turned it down, U.S. officials said.
The U.S. diplomat then met the coup plotters a third time early this year, but the discussions did not result in a promise of material aid or even a clear signal that Washington endorsed the rebels' plans, according to the Venezuelan commander and several U.S. officials.
PROS AND CONS
In its statement, the White House called the situation in Venezuela "a threat to regional security and democracy" and said that the Trump administration would continue to strengthen a coalition of "like-minded, and right-minded, partners from Europe to Asia to the Americas to pressure the Maduro regime to restore democracy in Venezuela."
White House National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said in a statement that "the United States government hears daily the concerns of Venezuelans from all walks of life -- be they members of the ruling party, the security services, elements of civil society or from among the millions of citizens forced by the regime to flee abroad."
"U.S. policy preference for a peaceful, orderly return to democracy in Venezuela remains unchanged," the statement said.
Roberta Jacobson, a former ambassador to Mexico who preceded Aponte as the top State Department official for Latin America policy, said that while Washington has long regarded the Venezuelan military as "widely corrupt, deeply involved in narcotics trafficking and very unsavory," she saw merit in establishing a back channel with some of them.
"Given the broader breakdown in institutions in Venezuela, there was a feeling that -- while they were not necessarily the answer -- any kind of democratic resolution would have had to have the military on board," said Jacobson, who retired from the State Department this year. "The idea of hearing from actors in those places, no matter how unsavory they may be, is integral to diplomacy."
Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, said few U.S. administrations would pass up the opportunity to meet with alleged coup plotters at least once, given the opacity of the Venezuelan military.
"You're trying to glean an understanding of a part of Venezuelan society, the military, that none of us knows very much about," although the decision to meet several times posed a risk of becoming exposed and sparking a backlash in the hemisphere, he sad.
"It makes no sense to support a military coup in Latin America. They always end badly, but it's worth listening to these people," Isacson said. "What is their level of discontent? Do they have broad-based support among the population or are they just a bunch of renegades? Do they have an honest plan to start elections? The military is a black box."
But whatever the rationale, holding discussions with coup plotters risks setting off alarms in a region with a list of infamous interventions: the CIA's failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro as leader of Cuba in 1961; the U.S.-supported coup in Chile in 1973, which led to the long military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; and President Ronald Reagan's covert support of right-wing rebels known as the contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Information for this article was contributed by Ernesto Londono and Nicholas Casey of The New York Times; and by Karen DeYoung, Greg Jaffe, John Hudson and Rachelle Krygier of The Washington Post.
A Section on 09/09/2018