U.S. denies involvement in alleged Venezuela invasion attempt as details remain murky
By
Karen DeYoung,
Anthony Faiola and
Alex Horton
May 6, 2020 at 11:44 a.m. EDTSecretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that “there was no United States government direct involvement” in an apparent attempt to invade Venezuela early this week.
“If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” Pompeo said.
Two Americans, both former U.S. Special Operations soldiers, were arrested by Venezuelan forces in the alleged operation, and a number of Venezuelan military defectors were reported killed.
But details remained scarce as the two countries traded accusations but offered little new information about the mysterious mission.
The incident added to more than a year of growing tensions as the administration, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of human rights abuses, corruption and narcotics trafficking, has tried to force him from office with economic sanctions and criminal indictments.
Asked what the Trump administration was doing to free the two men, Pompeo said that “if in fact, these are Americans that are there … we’ll use every tool that we have available to try to get them back.”
Earlier, President Trump said the incident “has nothing to do with our government,” and the State Department cited privacy considerations in declining to comment on the reported arrests.
Venezuela’s foreign minister said Tuesday that the two men were “confessing without any reservations.” He did not describe what the men had told authorities about the operation, which Maduro described as an assassination plot.
“There is a major disinformation campaign underway by the Maduro regime, making it difficult to separate facts from propaganda,” the State Department responded in a statement.
A U.S. Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Emmanuel Ortiz, said service records confirm that the two captured Americans, Airan Berry and Luke Denman, are Special Forces veterans, as is Jordan Goudreau, the head of a Florida security services company who first announced the operation in a video Sunday morning.
Goudreau, in an interview with The Washington Post, said Berry and Denman were “supervisors” of a force he said numbered about 60 Venezuelans. Most, if not all of them, were believed to be military and police defectors living in camps in Colombia, near the Venezuelan border.
Juan Guaidó, the Venezuelan legislator and opposition leader recognized as interim president by the United States and more than 50 other countries, lashed out Tuesday at Maduro for staging what he called a “massacre.”
“They knew about this and were waiting to massacre them,” Guaidó said in a virtual session of the opposition-controlled National Assembly. “Nicolás Maduro, you are responsible. The regime knew about that operation, you infiltrated it and waited to massacre them.”
The CIA declined to comment.
The State Department statement, which described the unfolding situation as a “melodrama,” said officials would be “looking closely into the role of the Maduro regime . . . and especially of the very large Cuban intelligence apparatus in Venezuela.”
“The record of falsehoods and manipulation by Maduro and his accomplices, as well as their highly questionable representation of the details, argues that nothing should be taken at face value when we see the distorting of facts,” the statement said.
“What is clear is that the former regime is using the event to justify an increased level of repression,” the statement said. Noting “the timing of these events,” the statement said that 46 prisoners were killed, and 74 injured, in a “massacre” by government forces at Los Llanos prison in Venezuela over the weekend.
Maduro’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, told The Post that the U.S. government had yet to make contact with the Venezuelan government after Maduro’s Monday evening announcement of the arrest of the two Americans.
“They have already had many hours to develop their ‘it wasn’t me’ strategy,” Arreaza said in a text-message exchange. He said the two were being questioned by Venezuelan authorities and were “confessing without any reservations.”
Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro’s communications chief, alleged at a news conference in Caracas that Goudreau and Trump are connected.
“How is it that the Secret Service of the United States hired Silvercorp to handle Trump’s security and that Silvercorp publishes that on its website?” he asked.
The alleged connection appeared to refer to a relationship between Goudreau — who operates a Florida company, Silvercorp, that says it offers paid strategic security services — and former Trump security chief Keith Schiller.
In his Sunday video, Goudreau and former Venezuelan National Guard officer Javier Nieto Quintero said what they called “Operation Gideon” was designed to capture senior members of Maduro’s government. They called on Venezuelan military forces to rise up and join the invaders.
Goudreau later told The Post he had known Berry and Denman for years. Goudreau and Denman deployed together in Iraq in 2010, said a former Special Forces soldier who served with all three of them. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Berry was a capable leader but dealt with personal family issues, said two men who served with him. Denman is an “artistic hipster” type, a former soldier said, with a lighter, carefree personality that was respected and rare in the community.
Goudreau, Denman and Berry deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan eight times combined, said Ortiz, the Army spokesman.
Goudreau, he said, left the service in February 2016 as a sergeant first class after serving first as an indirect fire infantryman and then a medical sergeant. Berry was a Special Forces engineer sergeant who served in the Army from 1996 until October 2013. Denman served on active duty as a Special Forces communications sergeant from October 2006 to December 2011 and in the Army Reserve through September 2014.
David Maxwell, a retired Army officer with 22 years of experience in Special Forces, said the Venezuela operation appeared to be poorly planned and executed.
Operators would typically favor sterile uniforms and forgo anything connected to their identities, Maxwell said. But Maduro waved Berry and Denman’s expired military IDs, Veterans Affairs cards and passports in a televised address Monday following their capture.
“I don’t know what their thinking was. It’s embarrassing for the regiment and the U.S.,” said Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington. “Did they think it was going to be a ‘get out of jail free’ card?”
A core competency of Special Operations is working with indigenous forces to incite rebellion or overthrow a regime, Maxwell said, tasks that require a measured approach and long-standing ties.
“It doesn’t seem like this contractor did any of that,” he said of Goudreau.
A family member of Berry in Texas declined to comment Tuesday. Efforts to reach Denman’s family were unsuccessful.
Faiola reported from Miami. Ana Vanessa Herrero in Caracas and Dan Lamothe, Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett in Washington contributed to this report.
i dont know what to make of this, other than the large price tag on this bad guy. I feel for their families should they broadcast a public execution.
Trumps Bay of Pigs 2020.
It does sound like something Trump or Kushner might've thought up. I do have confidence in the intelligence agencies and active duty and career military personnel that they would've come up with a better plan if they actually wanted to pull this off.
American Says Failed Venezuelan Invasion Was to Arrest Maduro
Maduro shows video of imprisoned American who says the mission of weekend raid was to topple the president and bring him to the U.S.
By
and
May 6, 2020 9:06 pm ETSave
TextLuke Alexander Denman, an American, was hired to lead a ragtag group of insurgents to seize the Caracas airport, overthrow President Nicolás Maduro and fly him to the U.S., the imprisoned Iraq war veteran explained in a video released by Venezuela Wednesday.
Instead, Mr. Denman, 34, from Austin, Texas, and another American, Airan Berry, 42, who has addresses in Florida and Texas, were among the 13 “terrorists” whom the Venezuelan government said were captured in a thwarted weekend incursion.
Mr. Denman wasn’t the mastermind; that credit goes to Jordan Goudreau, another American and former U.S. Army Green Beret soldier, and Cliver Alcalá, a retired Venezuelan general who broke with the Maduro regime. But, in the video, Mr. Denman said he led the armed group, which had been trained in neighboring Colombia, into the country on two boats for what they hoped would be an audacious rebellion.
The plan failed spectacularly, said the Venezuelan regime, which on Wednesday went on a propaganda offensive to characterize the action on its beaches Sunday and Monday as a glorious victory over imperialist forces.
In the video, Mr. Denman said he was hired to train and lead the mercenary force by Mr. Goudreau, a former Special Forces soldier, and had expected to be paid between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Goudreau runs a Melbourne, Fla.-based private contractor called SilverCorp USA.
“I thought I was helping the Venezuelans take back control of their country,” Mr. Denman said in the 10-minute edited video that Mr. Maduro played twice during a televised news conference before posting on social media. Mr. Denman held up what he said contained a contract signed by Mr. Goudreau and Juan Guaidó, the U.S.-backed opposition leader, in Venezuela, showing support for the operation. Mr. Guaidó in a statement called the contract a fake, denied any ties to Mr. Goudreau’s company and warned that the regime was using the incident as a smokescreen to justify political persecution.
In the video, a mustachioed and scruffy-looking Mr. Denman could be seen only from the torso up in front of a white wall in an undisclosed location. Looking straight into the camera and wearing a loose gray T-shirt, he answered questions posed in broken English by an off-camera interrogator. It was unclear what kind of pressure the Venezuelans had exerted on him, and his assertions couldn’t be independently verified.
Mr. Maduro had said he would broadcast videos of both American men but has made only Mr. Denman’s interrogation public. Eight members of their raiding party were killed in a shootout, his regime said.
“They confessed and were caught red-handed,” Mr. Maduro said, blaming the Trump administration for the raid, an assertion the U.S. president denied. “Here in Venezuela they will be tried, respecting all of their rights.”
The arrests have set up the latest showdown between Caracas and Washington, which has deemed Mr. Maduro illegitimate since a 2018 presidential election that various governments say was marred by fraud. The U.S. and dozens of its allies back Mr. Guaidó as the nation’s legitimate president, though Mr. Maduro maintains control of the armed forces and the courts.
In March, the U.S. State Department offered a $15 million reward for Mr. Maduro’s arrest after he was indicted by U.S. prosecutors on drug-trafficking charges, which he has denied.
Speaking Wednesday to reporters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied any direct U.S. government role in the operation.
“If we’d have been involved, it would’ve gone differently,” he told reporters.
The Trump administration, though, has openly expressed its wish that Mr. Maduro and his lieutenants vacate Venezuela and has leveled a range of sanctions, including those designed to choke off oil production, to destabilize the regime. Mr. Pompeo said the U.S. would use “every tool that we have available” to get the two Americans back.
That effort is likely to be complicated by the U.S. decision to close its embassy in Caracas last year. The mission is run from Colombia, and any negotiation would have to be handled through a third party. The State Department is already seeking the release of six detained oil executives, including five U.S. citizens and a legal permanent resident.
Juan Cruz, a former top adviser to Mr. Trump on Venezuela policy, said the U.S. could consider a range of military options to increase pressure on Caracas without putting troops on the ground. Last month, the U.S. said it was moving Navy warships to Venezuela to counter drug trafficking.
“We have old warehouses full of Tomahawks that are in excess in our inventory,” he said in an interview. The standoff between the two countries “could absolutely escalate no matter who’s to blame.”
Ephraim Mattos, a former Navy SEAL who runs a nonprofit and provided medical training to a group of Venezuelans involved in the operation, said Mr. Denman appears to signal duress in the video by looking off camera while talking about U.S. government involvement.
“He looks off screen real quick,” Mr. Mattos said. “That’s him clearly signaling that he’s lying. It’s something that Special Forces guys are trained to do.”
Mr. Mattos said he tried to intervene to stop the operation in February after suspecting that Mr. Goudreau was misleading the Venezuelans who had signed on for the mission about possible U.S. government support for the operation.
“I was like, all right, something’s way off. I need to talk to this Jordan guy, ’cause he’s going to get them killed. Something’s clearly wrong here,” he told The Wall Street Journal. He reached out to Mr. Goudreau on Instagram to set up a meeting, but he never responded after an initial exchange.
Mr. Goudreau, who couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, on Sunday took responsibility for what he characterized as a struggle to restore freedom to the South American country. The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he may face charges for arms trafficking or supporting a foreign militia seeking to overthrow a government.
In the video, Mr. Denman said he had met Mr. Goudreau about a decade ago during active service in Germany and received a call from him in December with scant details on the mission. By Jan. 16, Mr. Denman said he was taking his first ever trip to Colombia and traveling by car to an arid and remote region along the country’s border with Venezuela. He and Mr. Berry joined some 60 volunteer fighters who trained for the incursion in small camps, which had been set up by the former general, Mr. Alcalá. Mr. Alcalá, who had moved to Colombia in 2018 as an exile, surrendered to U.S. authorities in late March on drug charges and was extradited to New York.
Hernán Alemán, a Venezuelan lawmaker and Maduro detractor who said he was involved in the planning of the mission, lauded the Americans’ role.
“The attachment and work of these North American compatriots in this operation is an honor,” he said. “I feel they’re more patriotic than most Venezuelans.”
Sounds like a few guys trying to get rich from the reward. Pretty big miscalculation on their part. Goudreau has some explaining to do.
